Founders at Work.pdf

Paul Buchheit 169
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 there and they all have plug-ins and some of these plug-ins
will cause problems for you. It’s really worked out better than we thought it
would.
Livingston: Earlier, you said “it worked out” for you. Most founders take the
risk of starting a startup for the potential reward of a liquidity event. Did you
get a bonus or something similar?
Buchheit: There are lots of bonuses inside of Google and I don’t know what the
average is, but the bonuses in general can be very significant—much more so
than at other companies. For me personally, I’ve been here long enough that
there’s only one bonus that matters, right? Which is part of why, for newer
employees, things like the Founders Grants are much more important, because
they’re not going to get stock at a nickel a share or whatever. So something like
a Founders Award isn’t necessarily that important to me, but would be for
newer employees.
Livingston: What number employee were you?
Buchheit: 23.
Livingston: How did you join Google?
Buchheit: I was working at Intel in the area and was kind of bored. I was looking
around for something more interesting and I emailed Google my résumé.
Interestingly enough, the first time I emailed my résumé, it bounced because
their mail server was down. But I emailed it again the next day and it got
through and they called me up. I came in and took a job.
It worked out well, but it wasn’t like I saw this company and said, “Oh wow,
this is going to succeed!” I just thought it would be fun. It looked like there
were some smart people and it was kind of interesting work—that it would be
more fun than my old job.
Livingston: Did you get any compensation for doing this project that was such
a big success within the company?
Buchheit: It’s hard for me to know even, because, even after the initial stock
grants, throughout the history of the company they’ve given follow-on grants.
So I don’t know what mine would have been if I wasn’t working on Gmail.
Livingston: I heard you came up with the famous “Don’t be evil” principle. Can
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