own ideas about...
own ideas about what’s possible than what really is possible. So they just get
uncomfortable, and they kind of tend to attack it for whatever reason.
But for me, I am more interested in things that are new, and so I’m always
excited just to see what will happen. That was actually one of the biggest reasons
I joined Google in the first place. It wasn’t so much that I was convinced
that it was a good business; I just thought it was interesting and I was excited to
see what would happen.
Likewise, with Gmail, part of the excitement was just seeing how the world
would respond. I kind of like uncertainty to some extent, because it’s a little bit
of suspense and excitement and adventure, almost, right? And you can learn a
lot even if things don’t work out. But not everyone likes adventure. A lot of
people seem to be against uncertainty, actually. In all areas of life.
I’m suddenly reminded that, for a while, I asked people, if they were playing
Russian roulette with a gun with a billion barrels (or some huge number, so
in other words, some low probability that they would actually be killed), how
much would they have to be paid to play one round? A lot of people were
almost offended by the question and they’d say, “I wouldn’t do it at any price.”
But, of course, we do that every day. They drive to work in cars to earn money
and they are taking risks all the time, but they don’t like to acknowledge that
they are taking risks. They want to pretend that everything is risk-free.
Livingston:Wasn’t it controversial when you tried to test out the AdSense idea?
Buchheit: Yes, absolutely. Everyone hated it. Many people were kind of mad at
me because they didn’t really go for the whole concept. It was something that
had been talked about, and people agreed that it was not workable, it was not a
good idea. So, to some extent, they were agitated that I wasted my time.
Livingston: But you did it in one day?
Buchheit: Yeah, pretty much.
Livingston: And they were still annoyed?
Buchheit: Different people to different degrees. There were only a few people
who were sort of upset about my distracting from the main task. Other people
just didn’t like the concept, because it’s obviously something that’s very controversial
and it isn’t immediately obvious when you just hear about the idea and
you haven’t really used it.
At first, it kind of seems a little bit wrong, right? Just because it’s very unfamiliar.
So it takes some getting used to. But people got used to it and then they
were OK with it.
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