Founders at Work.pdf

Paul Buchheit 163
Buchheit: It’s the same concept. What I wrote was just a throwaway prototype,
but it got people thinking because it proved that it was possible, and that it
wasn’t too hard because I was able to do it in less than a day. After that, other
people took over and did all the hard work of making it into a real product.
Livingston: You have done two groundbreaking things at Google.
Buchheit: Probably. I’ve done a lot of random things. Mostly what I do doesn’t
turn into anything, because I like to just try out ideas and a lot of them don’t go
anywhere.
Livingston: So you work on Gmail for a day, you can see you’re on to something—then
what happened?
Buchheit: For quite a while, it was just myself; and then another person,
Sanjeev Singh, started working on it. But switching projects here, especially
back then, wasn’t easy. It wasn’t like one day, you’re suddenly on a new project.
So he still ended up spending a lot of his time on enterprise search, which he
was working on at the time. It was quite a while before Sanjeev could really
spend most of his time on Gmail. So it was pretty slow for a long time.
It was mostly just me; then me and Sanjeev; then later on another person,
Jing Lim, started. It was a very slow kind of progression. And people were still a
little bit uncertain about the whole idea of doing something as different as
email.
Livingston: When was the moment when you said, “This is big and we’re going
to launch this”?
Buchheit: Several days after launch! It was a big project. Sometimes it seemed
as though we weren’t ever going to make it out.
Livingston: Tell me about some of the most challenging parts.
Buchheit: There’s a lot that was challenging about it, just because it’s very big,
for one thing. We gave everyone a gigabyte of storage to start with. At the time,
the standard was around 2 or 4 megabytes.
A lot of people actually didn’t think that was real. They thought it was a
joke—partially because we launched on April 1.
They also thought it wasn’t possible. It can be a little bit tricky, because it’s
a lot of data if you actually do the math: you have millions of users and they all
have a lot of data, and then, to make the system really reliable, you need to keep
several copies of the data, backups and everything like that. It requires a lot of
research. It’s a lot of machines and a lot of systems to make that all work without
requiring an army of people to maintain the system and keep it running.
There’s a very complicated system problem there.
We were also doing a lot of things that were new to Google. And I guess this
is one difference between a regular startup and starting within Google—I think
it’s a little bit different now, but at that time there was still this vision that, “We
only do web search.” Now we do lots of neat products that go beyond that, but
at the time, a lot of people inside the company were sort of unsure. The idea of
doing this product that was receiving all the email—and we had to store the
email, which is a different systems problem, really, from web search, because