Founders at Work.pdf

168 Founders at Work
That took us a while to figure out. You don’t want to ignore all of those lessons,
because that would be a big mistake, but at the same time, sometimes you
really are just solving a different problem. For example, the update issue: we
needed to be able to update instantly. Something like search, you can have a
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 to
do this?” and brainstorm solutions. You can just go talk to people, whether it’s
the engineers . . . and Larry and Sergey are actually really smart.
Yesterday, I heard someone making a comment like, “These guys get lucky
and now they think they’re smart.” But in fact, they really are smart and have
good ideas. Sometimes people think that these guys just got lucky, and luck is
always a factor in everything, but it isn’t sufficient. It takes more than luck to
build something that successful.
So there are lots of good resources, in the people and also systems. We get
machines—we don’t have to build the machines ourselves—so it’s nice to have
that infrastructure.
Storage turns out to be a surprisingly difficult problem. It’s not solved.
There are network attached storage (NAS) appliances, but they tend to be
expensive and they have some other problems. Then you have what we do with
PCs, and that’s technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of
machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.
We’re getting a lot closer, but it probably isn’t something that some startup
could pull off the shelf, at least not without paying for it.
Livingston: Was there anyone else at Google commissioned to work on an
email program at the same time?
Buchheit: No. It’s possible someone else was doing something on the side, but
I don’t know of any.
Livingston: Did you get a Google’s Founders Award?
Buchheit: No, most of what we did predated the Founders Awards. But things
mostly worked out for us anyway.
Livingston: What surprised you most looking back on the whole process? Was
it about 2 years?
Buchheit: It depends where you draw the line, but it was a couple of years. I
think some of the systems problems were a little bit harder than we realized to
start with. I keep mentioning this idea of updating data quickly. It really soaks in
at a lot of levels when you have to make your latencies be very low. If you have