you give me the background?
Buchheit: I believe that it was sometime in early 2000, and there was a meeting
to decide on the company’s values. They invited a collection of people who had
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been there for a while. I had just come from Intel, so the whole thing with corporate
values seemed a little bit funny to me. I was sitting there trying to think
of something that would be really different and not one of these usual “strive
for excellence” type of statements. I also wanted something that, once you put
it in there, would be hard to take out.
It just sort of occurred to me that “Don’t be evil” is kind of funny. It’s also a
bit of a jab at a lot of the other companies, especially our competitors, who at
the time, in our opinion, were kind of exploiting the users to some extent. They
were tricking them selling search results—which we considered a questionable
thing to do because people didn’t realize that they were ads.
Livingston: The users didn’t know?
Buchheit: Companies would just mix the ads in with the regular search results
so people would think it was a search result. It’s kind of like fake news or something.
In a newspaper, they’re usually pretty good about separating out which
things are advertisements and which aren’t. But the search engines at the time
were all selling search results and mixing them in with the real ones, so it was a
little bit of a differentiator that we always said that we would never do that—
and haven’t.
So it was all those inspirations, and I just thought it was a catchy little
phrase. But the real fun of it was that people get a little uncomfortable with
anything different, so throughout the meeting, the person running it kept trying
to push “Don’t be evil” to the bottom of the list. But this other guy, Amit Patel,
and I kept kind of forcing them to put it up there. And because we wouldn’t let
it fall off the list, it made it onto the final set and took on a life of its own from
there. Amit started writing it down all over the building, on whiteboards everywhere.
It’s the only value that anyone is aware of, right? It’s not the typical
meaningless corporate statement or platitude.
Livingston: You mentioned that Gmail was “controversial” internally. Can you
expand?
Buchheit: I think, in general, people are uncomfortable with things that are
different. Even now when I talk about adding new features to Gmail, if it isn’t
just a small variation or rearranging what’s already there, people don’t like it.
People have a narrow concept of what’s possible, and we’re limited more by our