Founders at Work.pdf

166 Founders at Work
Livingston: How big was your group by the time it launched? Only three
of you?
Buchheit: There were a lot more people at that point. It depends which people
you count, but it was about a dozen.
Livingston: Was there a time then when you said, “We need more programmers
to get this going”?
Buchheit: I was always asking for more people. We still ask for more people.
There’s so much more we could do. The product is nice, but every day there are
things that I find that I want to change. But when you’re operating a big service,
it also takes a lot of work just to deal with growth and improvements. A lot of
the improvements are invisible. For example, I think we added 43 new languages.
You don’t necessarily notice that as an English user, but for most of the
world, it’s a big deal. There’s just so much work as the product becomes big and
needs to support millions of users.
Livingston: When you launched, had you already had users?
Buchheit: Literally from day one, we had users internally. One nice thing about
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 couldn’t do this. And tell me about one of the most euphoric days.
Buchheit: There are a variety of dimensions to the darkest days. Like I said, a
lot of times it was sort of controversial, especially in the very early days, because
people weren’t sure if we should even be doing this. So the general attitude
would swing, and when it would swing against us, that was very hard to deal
with. Later on, not as much.
We would have some system problems internally. In a previous generation,
it wasn’t as redundant as what we finally released, and the hard disk in one of
our machines that had everyone’s email stopped working. I came in and everyone
I walked past would ask me, “When is Caribou going to be back up?” I was
walking into the machine room with screwdrivers, and people saw me and were
like, “Oh no!”
I managed to take apart the hard drive and transplant the electronics from
another drive, so nothing was lost. Through the whole thing, we’ve never lost
any data, which is kind of unbelievable considering everything that happened.
A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for
them—they’re regular PCs and so they’re not always the most reliable.
The most fun was, of course, launching. Nothing is more exciting than
finally getting it out there for the world and seeing that people like it.