Founders at Work.pdf

172 Founders at Work
Livingston: What advice would you give someone who was working at a big
technology company (that wasn’t like Google in terms of encouraging new
ideas) if they had a great idea that they thought could help the company?
Buchheit: It depends on your situation. It depends how risk-averse you are.
You should consider going to work at Google, start a startup, or go to another
place where you are going to have that opportunity. For someone who’s pretty
far down in a company, if they are going to try to change the whole culture of
the company, I’m skeptical. When I was leaving Intel, one of my managers
there was trying to convince me, “You don’t have to leave to do the startup
thing. There are startup opportunities inside of Intel.”
Livingston: When you were working on it, were you working startup hours?
Did it feel like a startup?
Buchheit: Oh yeah. We had a pretty tight little team. We have really smart people
and they are fun to work with. I’m not a morning person, so I’m always here
at night. My normal hours were something like noon until 3:00 a.m. It’s hard to
go home at night, because you get working and you say, “I’m just going to make
this one last improvement.” Then, the next thing you know, it’s 3:00 a.m.
Livingston: Did it affect your relationship with your wife?
Buchheit: No, it was nothing new. I’ve always been like this, so she was used to
it. It’s actually a much bigger change now, because I see her every day. But, as I
say, for these people, it depends on their situation if they can take that risk of
joining a startup or moving to a new city if they don’t live in the right place. For
me, I was actually single at the time, I didn’t have a mortgage, so the idea of
joining a little startup that may well be destroyed was just like, “That will be
fun.” Because I kind of thought, “Even if Google doesn’t make it, it will be educational
and I’ll learn something.” Honestly, I was pretty sure AltaVista was
going to destroy Google.
Repairing the disk electronics on an early Gmail prototype.