History of Famous Startups. Gmail

say, for these

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

say, for these people, it depends on their situation if they can take that risk of
joining a startup or moving to a new city if they don’t live in the right place. For
me, I was actually single at the time, I didn’t have a mortgage, so the idea of
joining a little startup that may well be destroyed was just like, “That will be
fun.” Because I kind of thought, “Even if Google doesn’t make it, it will be educational
and I’ll learn something.” Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was
going to destroy Google.

Livingston: Most startup

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

Livingston: Most startup founders have investors, but you had Larry and
Sergey to answer to. What’s it like having them as your investors, in a way?
Buchheit: I think it’s probably reasonable. I’ve never had other investors so I
don’t have a lot of perspective, but they are very open to crazy ideas—more so
than almost anyone I’ve ever met. I used to tell people my ideas, and then
they’d explain to me that I just didn’t understand how the world worked and
why I was wrong about whatever. One of the exceptional things for me, coming
to Google, was…

own ideas about

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

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…

you give me

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

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
Paul Buchheit 169
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…

a machine that’s

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

a machine that’s down, what do you do? You have to be able to respond to
everything that goes wrong very quickly, so that’s challenging.
I was actually surprised to some extent at how positively some of the things
we did were received. We were pretty nervous about some of our features. The
idea of doing the whole thing in JavaScript—internally a lot of people were very
unsure about that, but I think that our users loved it. It actually worked better
than we expected it to. We were pretty nervous about it, because there are so
many browsers out…

little latency. If

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

little latency. If a document doesn’t get added for a few minutes, it’s not a big
deal. So at a system design level, that actually makes a huge difference, even
though it’s a seemingly small difference when you describe it.
Livingston: It seems like one advantage of having a startup-like project within a
big company is that you have access to all its resources. Tell me about some
other valuable things.
Buchheit: I think the people are the biggest resource. There are really smart
people around, so you could just go talk to them and say, “How are we going…

ever a point

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

ever a point where you worried that your project would get canned?
Buchheit: All the time. Again, it was sort of a much earlier time than now
where it fits in nicely. It was really kind of the first thing that diverged from the
simple idea of web search. Even Groups is still basically search—it’s just search
over public usenet posts.
So it took a while for people to get used to the idea of something different.
You have to remember that the situation between Google and Yahoo was different
at that time. It was sort of a different company…

Google is that

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

Google is that we can just release things internally and have this great population
of testers, essentially. So people inside have been using Gmail for a long
time. The code name was Caribou. Initially, I called it Gmail, and then we realized
that was not really very subtle, so we changed it to Caribou.
Livingston: Did you choose Caribou?
Buchheit: Yeah. There’s a Dilbert cartoon where he’s talking about “Project
Caribou,” and I thought it was a funny name, so I used it.
Livingston: Tell me about one of the darkest days of the project, when you felt
that you…

They’d put them

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

They’d put them all in the same folder—or they would forget and put them in
the wrong folder and then the conversation would get split and they could
never find the reply to this message.
There were all these little tools and tricks that people had for reassembling
the conversations. Why not just put them all together to start with? At some
point, we said, “Let’s hide the quoted text too.” Because that way you can just
read it much faster without having to read the same content over and over. We
were also looking forward to integrating chat/IM. We…

don’t really even

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 03:08:05 -0700

don’t really even think about it, but it makes a big difference. You can send
email so fast and you don’t have to remember the addresses. To my knowledge,
we were the first web mail provider to do it. Desktop products would have
things like that sometimes, but no web mail was doing that at the time.
Livingston:Was it always your plan to archive everything and not delete emails
and have the massive storage needs?
Buchheit: You can delete email. The idea was that there’s valuable information
in email and we thought, “Why would you perform these actions?” For deleting,...