Founders at Work.pdf

162 Founders at Work
generation of Google Groups had mostly wrapped up, they asked me if I
wanted to build some type of email or personalization product. It was a pretty
non-specific project charter. They just said, “We think this is an interesting
area.” Of course, I was excited to work on that.
Livingston: So they didn’t ask for an email product?
Buchheit: They were very general—just kind of saying, “Yeah, we think there’s
something interesting to do here,” but it wasn’t like they gave me a list of features.
People really weren’t sure what it was. And this was when Google was still
pretty much thought of as exclusively search, so even the idea of doing something
like email was strange. A lot of people were kind of unsure. At this point,
it wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but at the time it was a little bit controversial.
For quite a while I was just working on it by myself. I actually started out
with some of the Groups code, just because I was familiar with it. I built the
first version of Gmail in 1 day, just using the Groups code, but it only searched
my email. I released that to some Googlers and people said it was useful, so it
progressed from there.
Livingston: When you built this first version, was your vision to create a better
email program or was it to build something that would allow you to search
through your emails?
Buchheit: Both. Search is obviously very important. It was central to what we
were doing at the time and it’s really useful for managing your email. I had
ambitions of doing more than that, but search seemed like the natural first
step—it was one of the things that was most obviously a problem.
Everyone here had lots of email. This company is a little bit email crazy. I
get 500 emails a day. So there was a very big need for search. That was the most
obvious thing that I could do, and it was also one of the easiest. So I built this
first version and it only searched my email, but even that was useful for other
people, because we had a lot of the same email. So then they said, “It would be
even better if I could search my own email.”
Livingston: You could search for keywords, senders, etc.?
Buchheit: Yes, it was free text, just like Google is, but for email.
Livingston: Was it supposed to be your full-time gig or was it part of your
20-percent-of-your-time projects?
Buchheit: Nothing’s totally full-time, but it was mostly full-time. I still had
some other projects that I would have to spend some time on, and inevitably I
end up with side projects just because something catches my eye and I go off
and work on it for a little bit. I think I may have something to do with 20 percent
projects as well because I’ve created a few things on the side. AdSense, the
content-targeted ads, was actually something that, if I recall, I did on a Friday.
It was an idea that we had talked about for a long time, but there was this
belief that somehow it wouldn’t work. But it seemed like an interesting problem,
so one evening I implemented this content-targeting system, just as sort of
a side project, not because I was supposed to. And it turned out to work.
Livingston: This is Google’s AdSense now?