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Paul Buchheit

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20
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2017-11-01
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2017-11-01
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  1. “That society is becoming very polarized and everyone is 100% certain that their side is right and that the other side is wrong, which is obviously very dangerous.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'm not going to think about it in those terms maybe. And actually, to be clear, it was my co founder, Brett Taylor, who really did the work on that. I think it's more just the overall evolution of the networks. The incentive structures are a little bit wrong. If you think about Twitter, you can score a lot of points by attacking someone, calling someone out, starting a war essentially. But if you put something kind of insightful or kind up, you're not going to get a lot of points. And so if you think about it just from an incentive standpoint, I actually think it makes people into worse people when they're on these networks. And so I'm very interested. I still believe in the potential of social networks to be a force for good as well. And so I'm still interested in ideas for how we can actually make this into something that helps people treat each other with greater compassion and understanding instead of just this warfare that you see on Twitter where it's, man, it's spilled over into our everyday life, right?”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Quite a cool Yeah, well, so now I'm not so sure when you see kind of the reality of Facebook and Twitter, I'm not convinced that I find that I'm happier and healthier if I don't spend a lot of time there.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Okay, so I don't know that it's publicly announced, but I don't think it's secret. I think the most recent one is a company called GRIO in its very early stage. So you probably haven't heard of it. But my description of it, which probably isn't their description, but by the way I think about it, is as a non-toxic social network. So I've been very early on some of those social networking things. Friend feed actually created the like button. We launched that 10 years ago this month.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “There's a lot of say no, and that's a little bit hard, at least for me, because when you're interacting with so many different people's dreams and they believe so strongly in what they're doing, and you really want to help them out, but the reality of the business is that you mostly say no, I can't fund every company that comes along. We fund at YC. It's less than 2% of the companies that apply. There's a lot of raining on people's dreams.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Sometimes, but not. I think that's more a personality type. There is a personality type that's just maybe a little bit too glib or something. But I don't find that to be the main problem.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And so you could have everyone in the world say, like, no, you're wrong. And they'll be like, no, I don't think I am. Most of us are so susceptible to social pressure. There's a famous psychological experiment in social psychology where they had a group of people around a table and they had four lines and they say which of the lines is the longest and the trick is that the first like five people are actually in on the experiment but the sixth person doesn't know that. They think it's just a subject. And so the first five all choose not the longest but the second longest line. And it gets to like the sixth person. Almost everyone will go with the group even though you can look right at it and it's clearly not.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “They believe in their view of the world to an almost unrealistic extent. And this is clearly the case for someone like Elon Musk too, right? He might be like the most extreme.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I'm going to say it's really hard. That's the one thing I've learned as I've been doing the seed investing for 11 years now, close to 12 years and as full-time partner at YC for seven years. It really is not an easy thing. There is no simple test, but I can tell you one of the things that really stands out to me, having worked, I didn't mention earlier after Google, I didn't go straight to YC. I started a social network called FriendFeed, which we ran for a couple of years and then sold to Facebook 2009. And so I was at Facebook for a year as well and got to really work with Mark Zuckerberg and kind of see how that company was both similar and different from Google. And one of the things that really strikes me about both Larry Page and Mark and a lot of the YC founders like Patrick Hollison or founders of Airbnb is they just have a level of conviction that I think ordinary humans just don't have.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I don't see it as a dichotomy. Inventing is a lot of times hacking. You're doing something that is maybe impossible. It's always hard, especially with hindsight, things seem so easy. But I can tell you at the time when you're building something, I wasn't sure that we could even build the product. But, you know, a lot of times you just run into certain constraints like Gmail early on, one of the most internally controversial decisions that we had made was to build the whole thing in JavaScript. And I had lots and lots of people tell me that it was never going to work, that had been tried before that, you know, it'll just crash the browsers, which was sort of true. We had a lot of trouble with crashing browsers, but just with enough hacking and enough experimentation, I figured out how to not crash the browser. And that coupled with the browsers were just maturing at the time, they were becoming a more stable platform. So what we did was actually not really possible really even several years before we did it, just because”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Love it. There's nothing more powerful than that, right? No advertising or anything like that is going to have the same impact. And again, that comes from building that depth of appeal, right? If people are like, oh yeah, this product, it seems like it's maybe 5% better than the other competitor. Like you're just not going to get that enthusiasm”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That was actually sort of our goal for launch. We just had to get 100 people who were happy. So that was kind of like the milestone for when the product we thought was good enough to take out to the broader world. Inevitably, there's always, there's kind of the core of people who are really happy. And there's the people whose needs are so far away from what you're doing that they're never going to be happy. But there's always people at the margin. And so generally, you just kind of look at those people on the margin. And my approach is always one of just kind of looking for low-hanging fruit, because a lot of times, again, it might be something simple that brings them over. And sometimes it's just a matter of time. There's also obviously early adopters who are just excited to try something new out. And then other people who are just going to wait. But if they hear from their friends, wow, you've got to try this thing out. That's the best. At least for consumer products, is if people are excitedly telling their friends, you've got to try this thing out. Because if you've got three different friends telling you, oh man, you've got to try this new product.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Well, again, I mean, you really want to first establish that you have something that someone wants. First, you have to have the depth of appeal before you go for breath.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “How does that sound? Sure. So naturally, like all good interviewers, I did my homework and I spoke to Aaron Harris, your colleague at YC, and Aaron told me that we should discuss the theme of product and customer. So tell me about your feelings surrounding making users happy and what you mean by creating deep appeal as you call it. Yeah, so the challenge when you're coming up with a new product, especially if it's in a space where people already have solutions, is that the incumbents have been working on it for sometimes 10, 20 years. And so there's essentially the product surface area is just too much to bite off.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Microsoft's first product was Alter Basic, which was a little basic interpreter for our compiler for this computer called the Altair that had probably several hundred or maybe thousand possible customers. So just tiny niche product. But of course, what they were really doing was getting in early on microcomputer software, which turned out to be pretty lucrative. And so that ability to really see the potential 10 years down the line is amazing. Not many people have that. It's hard to see past just kind of like the state of what it is right now because most startups at that very early stage are just not impressive. I'm going to adopt the Haltair Basic comparison, but I do want to break the interview state into three different parts of your career and personality. So starting with your approach and feelings to product and customer, then discussing a little bit on your investing life, and then finishing on the more personal element of productivity that was personal.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Leaders and kind of visionaries of the space. You know, that's a good question. They've always had, I think, a very clear idea of what they wanted to do in terms of just like the values of why Combinator being very much just focused on doing the right thing for the founders. And that's been there from the start. So sometimes it's almost surprising degree to which they just automatically will say, okay, let's do this thing because it's clearly right for the founders, even if it's very much maybe not in our own self-interest. And I think that's really the magic or part of the magic of YC is that attitude. And PG, I think one of the things that's most remarkable is just the level of enthusiasm that he can have for other people's ideas. I still struggle to reach that level. Someone will have what seems like a very small idea, and he kind of thinks about it. He says, wow, this is huge. This is the analogy he always uses as the Altair basic. So I don't know if you know about Mike.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “since that time When was it two thousand eight or two thousand seven? two thousand five is when I first so how have you seen them?”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Give a little bit background about my work at Google and was just offered, hey, can I help out? And so we met up and then Jessica Livingston, who's the other YC founder, was working on a book called Founders at Work. So she ended up interviewing me for that about my work on Gmail. And I just started investing in some of the startups. I would just hang out at YC. So it kind of goes back to the second batch. I missed the first batch because it was in Boston. But the second batch was out here in Mountain View. And actually my first angel investment was in a company called Wufu, which was in the Winter 06 batch founded by Kevin Hale, who was a YC partner for many years. That was a great investment. Great first investment. I do have to ask, going back to the early days.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Immediately felt the difference when I was working there. It suddenly became something where I was excited to go to work and I could actually make a difference. But I remained interested in startups, especially as Google grew larger. I was sort of interested in getting involved in earlier stage companies. So again, I just kind of randomly happened upon Paul Graham's essays. He was starting a thing called The Summer Founders Program, and I thought that sounded really cool because I really liked the idea, especially opening up startups to people who are kind of outsiders. I know if you're a Stanford student or whatever, your roommate has a startup and the person down the hall has a startup and whatever, right? It's just natural. But for people who are outside of Silicon Valley, you may not have any connection. And so I was really excited about the idea that he was just opening it up to anyone. And so for the second batch that they were bringing it out to California to Mountain View. And so I just kind of cold emailed, introduced myself.”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Well, I guess the backstory is I've had an interest in startups, I guess, my whole life, but I went to school in Ohio in the 90s, so there really was no startups back then. So all I knew to do was to move to California and take a job out here. And after I graduated from college, I moved out, worked for Intel for a year, and that wasn't really a great fit for me, very much a big company. And it just so happens that I had been reading about a little startup that was using Linux, which I was really into at the time. They based their whole system on Linux. So I applied there, got a job in 99, and that startup turned out to be Google, which was good. I was at Google for about seven years. Employee number E? 23. Started back when we were in Palo Alto, University Avenue, just in a little office there. So that was obviously an amazing experience. And you got me more interested in startups because coming from a big company,”

    2017-11-01 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source