YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Schillace

lines on the record: 98
first: 2024-01-11
most recent: 2024-01-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Mattered. And so I wound up like checking it in, broken, got the readability badge, and immediately fixed it. It's like, that was another one of our little hacks to get this working.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's also funny too, because I'll talk to young front end developers these days. I'm like, I don't want to scare you too much, but like jQuery didn't even exist when I wrote this thing. This is like bare metal in the DOM and there were bugs. When I went to Google, I had to write this little network stack at the bottom of the JavaScript that in theory XML HTTP, you could interrupt, you could have multiple requests in flight and you can interrupt them and discard them and stuff. But the stack at the time was really buggy in, I think it was IE. And so I wrote this little like network queue that would keep track of whether there were requests in flight and kill them in a way that didn't break everything. And it was hard to do because it's this weird asynchronous programming. And that piece of code, when I went to Google, they made me reformat it for the JavaScript readability standards. And I could not get it to work with their formatting. Like there was some bug in the JavaScript compiler of the time that white space.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's like it's going to feel anachronistic. It's going to feel really weird. There's like that scene in one of the early Star Trek movies where Scotty tries to talk to the mouse, right? He's like, computer, like, make the transput. Like, we're all going to be like that in like five years, I think, about it. And it's going to seem really weird that we have these applications that I can't collaborate with the application. Like, why can't I collaborate with the applications? It's like the application's locked on a file server, just like the pre-Gdoc days. Like, why can't I just interact with it and have it configure itself the way I want it to configure itself and like show me the data the way I want to see this and let me build the workflow the way I want it and remember it for me and bring it back later and you know all that stuff so that was a long digression but I would just like you know you're kind of asking about features and functionality and I feel like where we are now with these like feature wars it's just silly like it's just it's not the point at all like I think documents are going to change radically in the next few years”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is this if I change this? What if I change that? Summarize this part of it. So you can start to interact with it. That's still like accreting stuff at the bottom of this linear artifact. But the next step that we're working on now is just making that dynamic where you just come to something and you talk to it and interact with it. I think one of the things that's going to happen is just like it seems in the early days of GDOX, like people would say, like, well, what if I don't, what if I'm not connected? And one of the things I would say is in three or five years, if you get handed a device that's not connected to the internet, your word for it is going to be broken, which is true, right? Like it's anachronistic and weird if something's not connected. I think we're going to feel the same way about intention and interactivity in our products very soon. If I can't tell something what my intent is and have it configure itself in an intelligent way, have it converse with me, whether that's a device or a piece of GUI UX somewhere.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of funny now that we're spending billions of dollars on GPUs to emulate wind pulp and ink pressed by metal type. We're building linear documents that are fixed, that are static. So one of the things we've been doing with these chatbot things is they're also, they also serve as documents. I say bots or docs all the time. And so you'll do these things where like you, I do this all the time. We're like, we'll interview, have one, we'll create a new one. you know separate identity as a separate document and then you tell it like i'm going to write a technical document here's roughly what it's about why don't you interview me so it interviews you for an hour and now you've got this nice like linear artifact which you can read it's very readable because it's conversational but at the same time you've been building all these like semantically encoded virtual synthetic memories in this in the specter database so you can come in and say like show me a diagram of this draw this diagram for me change it in the following way like what is what is”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of cool, like that's an interesting quasi app, but it's like a weird kind of app. It's like serialized. You can't really interact with it that much. And then you see this as another point on the curve and you're like, oh, that's a real app. Like, oh crap. Like, I wonder, you know, is there anything stopping us from doing the rest of office? Oh, probably not. Like, how far is this going to go? So like I think we were that second point that showed that there was actually this totally different paradigm. And so we just got like this enormous amount of tension pretty quickly. And then the rest of it was like feeling our way through like, what does it actually mean? Like how much of it, how much of the functionality do we need to build? What's the really important part about it? How much of its collaboration? Well, you get spent a bunch of energy on offline, which was miserable, which never turned out to matter that much. You know, now that team has spent a long time replicating all these features that we abandoned by the wayside, which I think I'm not that interested in. I think the future of documents looks very different than what we have now.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that just got us noticed, like, that got us noticed by Google, it got us noticed we were like, I think one of the first 10 articles at TechCrunch, like Michael Errington, like there's another funny Brightley story is that we had, I ended up breakfast with Mike Larrington at Bucks in that era where he was trying to decide he had this like spreadsheet idea he wanted to work on. And he was trying to decide he should go do that and like maybe join forces with us because we were cool or if he should like continue to work on this blog thing he had going called TechCrunch. I'm like, so I might be partially responsible for TechCrunch because we turned him down and said they should go to TechCrunch instead. Every time I would bump into him, I would laugh about that one. But like when that, when we got noticed, like we really got noticed. There was just this period where we were like the hot thing for a couple months where every VC wanted to talk to us and everyone's trying to figure it out. Because I think we were like, you know, when you see one point on the line, like Gmail, which came before us, you're like, oh, that's.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on what market we're talking about. I've been continually surprised at the adoption of GDOCs. I think we knew there was something there pretty quickly, like probably in the first couple months. There was a lot of energy around it. We wound up, that is a weird ride because we built this thing kind of on a whim. And as an experiment, we liked it. We decided to go just advertise on Google. At the time, 37 signals was kind of like the cool company. And we're like, that looks cool. Like, we'll just be some engineers and we'll have like a little.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunch of it. And so, like, you have to like blend these two things together somehow. Like, you know, it's like a samurai sword that's like hard on the back, but softer on the edge so it doesn't break. Other way around. But like, you know, it's like there's this hard thing you have to do as an entrepreneur. And I think it's like the real core of building really great products is like finding that balance and really listening to those signals being open to it.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really innovative good product is this kind of mindset. Like you're just not seeing the opportunities. There's a lot of hard work for sure. There's a lot of stuff that you can read about and best practices of doing iteration and user testing and user interviews and really listening and all the engineering best practices. That stuff is pretty mechanical. Like once you know where you're going, you can do that. It's not that hard to learn and to master it. I think the hard stuff is this mindset of like being open in the right ways and understanding that some kinds of pushback are good pushback. Some are bad. I always think that like product builders and entrepreneurs, you have this really hard problem of like you have to be very rigid about your mission. I know where I'm going. I know what my mission is and like I'm going to go there because the world doesn't care. It's going to push back. But you also have to be really flexible about feedback. Like you might not be, you probably aren't going to be right about.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I had just been a random Google employee with this idea and no legal protection and the CEO wasn't a fan of the project, it would have died. There's no way it would have made it through that negativity and that pessimism and that person being either challenged or afraid of the idea or just not able to imagine it or what. I'm not sure what. Keep coming back to this idea of optimism. Like I have this very strong feeling about that like most of the reason people don't do”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah I've spent a lot of time, it's kind of funny like GDOCs. I keep expecting people to just be like, all right, Grandpa, stop talking about GDOX. It's been a long time. So it has been a long time. It's been 17 years and like, but it's still very relevant. It's got a couple billion users now, I think. It's a big thing. But I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years just thinking about why did that work? What worked about that? Like what lessons can I draw from it? There was a lot of energy around it, positive and negative. The first week I was at Google, like an executive there refused to give me hardware because he thought that Google was an app company, not it was a search company, not an app company. And like literally like the guy in charge of hardware at the time refused to give me hardware for this service. And I had to threaten to either sue him or hal him in front of Eric Schmidt because I had a contract and I contracted earnouts and like, you know, so like that was like another one of these like interesting lessons of like sometimes the opposition is enormous.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How hard the collaboration piece would have been first without understanding that value might have been like, eh, it's not worth it. Like it's going to be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a useful absence. I think it's a good little counter example of that optimistic, pessimistic perspective we were talking about. We could easily have missed that idea, easily have missed that idea. And we just got lucky, I think, in the order it got presented to us.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The logical document of a document can be rendered differently in HTML. There's not a canonical representation. And so you're doing merges where alphabetization can change the order of attributes can change, the tree structure can change like Firefox would do a blank paragraph with a singleton BR tag and i.e. you would do it with an open closed paragraph tag. And so like, you know, even the tree doesn't match. So it's a really hard merge problem. So that turned out to be like a gnarly hard problem to solve. Once we had seen the value of like working together, we were motivated to do that. Kind of the interesting thing too with that is like, I think if we gotten it in the other order, we might not have done it. It's a good another good example of why not and what if, right? We're like, we got really lucky that we saw the what if part, that we saw how cool a document in a browser that you could collaborate on would be. Because if we understand.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like you can edit these two things, which we have, you know, A immediately realized was really cool. Like we could both work in the same document at the same time. And then B, realized like, oh crap, we're colliding with each other because there's no presence or anything like that and there's no collision detection or anything like that. So pretty quickly, we're like, oh, that's kind of cool. Like that feels good as a development team to have like these shared documents and not to send stuff around and not like, so that's cool. So let's build that out. But like, oh, bummer like collaboration is a problem. Like we'll have to go fix that. And like naively figured out that's a problem. It took forever to get that working. I was really, really hard in the time because we didn't have, we didn't do operational transform. I don't think that technique had been quite invented yet. And so we did three-way merge, which doesn't work that well for the browsers.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost immediately, honestly, like it was weird, the process of it was I had this idea, we set this thing up, we started working together. We're like, ah, that's actually pretty. So basically like the history is like I noticed content editable. So like the browser would do some editing for you. And then I noticed JavaScript. I had never realized JavaScript is out there. And like we had done word processors in the past, this team and like for a long time. In fact, like my co-founder, Steve, the other person on that document wrote this thing called Fulbright way back in like 1987 or something like that. That was like a direct competitor. 85, I think, even that was like a direct competitor to word one. So like we knew word processors. And so we decided to just like try it. Like, what's it like to build a word processor? And like the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident. Like they were just like these things on the server. We hadn't built the thing that would lock somebody out yet. So there was just like, here's a document.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Model, right? Like we took this incumbent that was asymptotically approaching useful as they're adding stuff whenever they added stuff it wasn't really that much more valuable. And then we were this like small thing that came In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google. So they survived it. They survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. We have all the users now, but they have all the money. We have all the money, I guess, now”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're easy to use. We're zero install. You don't have to ever deal with it. It's super convenient. Plus you get this one new feature that's really, really useful, which is collaborating with each other and not having to send attachments around deal file system. We're going to take away most of the features because we don't care about them that much. And we took away a little bit more than we should have. In the early days, we get all these complaints about people who want to want word count, which I felt was a really weird. I thought that was going to be like way at the end of the list. I thought like we didn't have rulers, like we didn't have any kind of formatting at that point, any kind of real pagination. We just had like these basic documents, but word count came in. And of course it was students. It was one of our early adopters. So they really wanted to know if they were at the word count for the essay that they had just had assigned to them. So there was this dance with Microsoft that we deliberately made this trade-off. And I think it's kind of, it's almost like a classic innovators dilemma.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a really funny place to be. And it's funny to be at Microsoft because I'm kind of the enemy. I'm the guy who messed them up a little bit. So there's some friction around that. Yeah. I mean, I think there are similar trade-offs to be made right now, by the way, with AI. I think there's a similar opportunities. But we made this choice with, so it's a little hard to remember, right? Because it's like 18 years, 17 years ago now, 18 years ago almost. Like, you know, in that era, like office was impregnable, right? Like, software had to be distributed physically, had to be shipped around. It had to be bought and installed. It was like hard to use. And so there's a very high transactional cost because there's a very high transactional cost. The buyers would always make this decision like, do I want the thing with a thousand features or the thing with 995 features? I don't know what those last five are, but I might as well have all of them. And so that was just like the lock-in for Microsoft, right? So we made this trade-off where like, look.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like that's the other part of it. It's just like, you know, users will only adopt what you're doing if that sum total of energy that they have to expend is less than the resulting ease in their life that they get usually by a factor of at least a couple. So it has to make your life a lot better. Hopefully really a lot better, like 10x better than what you spend to use it”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beginning, we didn't even ask for an email address because it was such a novel thing. We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us anything at all about yourself. And after about two minutes of typing, if you were still there, we'd very gently just say, please give us your email address. No password, no anything. Just give us your email address so we can send you a URL of this document in case you care about it later. Because if you leave, we'll never know we'll never be able to find it again. So we were super focused on that for as little friction as possible. And I think it's well known in the consumer space, you don't have the number of seconds you have is not many, like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, right? To convince somebody that there's some value there. They're not going to like hang out and grind their way through a bunch of high friction stuff to sign up for your thing, like, you know, so.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One thing I like about the users are lazy part of this. And then the other one, I think, is, again, it's almost like physics. I kind of think of this as entropy or people who are confused about entropy will be like, entropy is not real. Like it runs backwards all the time on Earth. Like life gets more complicated. Like what is the deal with entropy? And like, well, no, you have to consider the whole system, right? Like the entire system of the solar system, including the sun, is increasing in entropy all the time. We're just making use of some of it. And I think the same thing is kind of true about user laziness, where like people are like, this tiny thing that I'm focusing on this feature that I added is better. Therefore, users should adopt it. But you forget all the stuff around it. Like the user has to hear about it. The user has to remember it in the moment. The user has to learn how to use it. They have to build the habit. Like, that's all effort, right? Not to mention the fact that the actual use of your feature might have friction on the way in, right? It might be hard to sign up for it. When we did rightly.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you see lots of other AI stuff that people are doing that's just like not bad, but not great. And it's sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and kind of slowly lumbering along or maybe it's going to collapse under its weight. That's kind of the, you know,”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I mean, that is the thing. I think as product builders, you know, it's hard to not love what you're doing. Like you build a product because you love it. You build it because you understand some problem. You know, you build it because you want a paycheck maybe sometimes. But like, you know, we build it for all these reasons that just do not matter to the end user at all. And if there's one thing I've learned about product, particularly in the consumer space, but just kind of in general, people are just lazy about stuff and like don't care about anything other than it making their life. The thing that's complicated with that is there's two things about it that I think are interesting that follow from that principle. One is I think products almost follow these thermodynamic rules where like if you add a little bit of value your adoption goes a slowly and if you add a lot of value your adoption goes really quickly right I think ChatGPT is a great recent example of something that was just like added a ton of new value to the world and like got this explosive growth”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We pick on poor Elon, but like, you know, I feel like with a lot of his products, at least he's got lots of other issues, but like he articulates clear user value even in the beginning when he's hyping things up. Like Teslas, right? Like, okay, so electric cars weren't ready. He did the roadsters, like whatever. But he at least articulated this idea that we're going to put a lot of batteries in these things. They're going to really be real cars. They're going to have real range. We're going to figure out the charging problems. As an end user, I'm like, okay, that's great. Like now I have a car that works like a car that solves some problems. It's way cheaper to operate because the fuel is cheaper. Like he's solving all the end user problems for me. Like that at least makes sense, even if you don't believe that he's going to do it or believe in the way he did it. At least the end user value proposition makes sense, right?”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Making their life easier. We're all cynical at heart at some level. So if you can't point at user value, significant user value, it's not going to work. It's not going to, it doesn't matter. Shove all the marketing dollars into what you want. You can write all the articles you want, but like, you know, it's got to actually solve a problem, a real problem at the end of the day. I just never saw that with crypto.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I spent a lot of time really thinking hard about crypto and whether I was just reacting to it because it threatened some part of my identity or whatever. And I never kind of came down to anything that seemed valuable. I mean, that was always the thing for me is just like there has to be a what if that I can say, well, what if this works? Like, how valuable is it? Crypto, I was always like, well, what if it works? Then I have to run up sec on my personal finances. That sounds dystopian. I don't want that. I can't think of anything as a user that I think actually is valuable here, even in the best case. So I feel like the pessimism is justified. That's like one of my other kind of root principles is just like it's all about user value. Users are lazy, right?”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been working on for a while and with memory, long running memory so that you can have long conversations with it. And they work okay, but they don't work great in some ways. And we were trying to get multiple versions of them working together, like multi-agents working together. And we gave them whiteboard working memory, like as a shared working memory thing to fix this problem. And that turns out to make them much smarter. Don't know why. Like it just makes them smarter. Like that was kind of one of these nice little bits of discovery. Like if you're in a pessimistic frame of mind, you might have said like, well, these don't work that well. Let's like give up on it. More optimistic frame of mind is like, well, let's try to give them a whiteboard just like a person and like see if they cooperate better. And it turns out they really do. So another example of that mindset.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, get to the edges. Only get your tools as sharp as you can get them to be. Make it so that you can try lots of cheap experiments and just mess around and see what happens, see what pops out and just try to be observant. I think the other part of optimism too is there's a receptiveness to it, right? Like if you're very pessimistic, you might miss the surprising result that pops out of an experiment. Like you might force yourself to do a bunch of experiments grudgingly, but you're like, you know, I hate this. I'm doing four experiments today because I have to do it because I want to be an entrepreneur, but it sucks and everything's miserable and black. And then like, you know, you won't notice that like, oh, this thing didn't work, but it didn't work in an interesting way. And, you know, you're more receptive to that kind of surprising thing, I think, when you're in an optimistic frame of mind. Like, oh, let's see how far I can get with this. Like, oh, it's not working, but why isn't it working? Well, that's kind of interesting. Like with Bro here. We've done stuff like that and some of the things, the projects I've got going in Microsoft right now, like we've got a chatbot thing.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We would never have done the first experiment if it had been a long and costly thing to do. So like the fact that our tools were sharp and we could, I could say like, let's do this thing and it only takes a couple of days to get it on its feet and see how it feels. It's like kind of a form of optimism, right? Like, you know, if you're super pessimistic and be like, even that's not worth it. Like two days is a waste of time. So there's like always a little bit of a leap of faith. And then you kind of want to make those as consumable as possible. You want to be able to try things out quickly and learn things and do these experiments. No, lots of people have said that before, but I think all those pieces connect for me in this idea of being optimistic and open to trying stuff because stuff always is different. You're always wrong about products. It's one of my other rules is like you're just always wrong. And so you have to try it. You have to put it in front of people. You have to try it yourself before you'll understand it. Like no one can really design products in their head completely.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of related to doing these disruptive things like GDOCs. I think going back to this idea of all the good ideas look bad at first, right? So that's, okay, so that's a first principle. That's a sort of fundamental thing of you're going to constantly be challenged by the really good ideas. So how do you overcome it? One way you can overcome it is, you know, you want to be able to try things more easily. Well, so part of that is being more optimistic. So being more willing to try stuff. And part of it's also just like making it cheaper to try things. Very early story of Ddux when I had the idea for rightly, like my two co-founders who were both deep domain experts in both app building and word processors were like, the browser's never going to support this. It's a bad idea. Let's not do this. And they were like right and wrong at the same time. Like they were right that it didn't support even what we have today and wouldn't have supported a full experience. But, you know, wrong in that like the world was going to change and evolve.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Choosing to do that, try to do that as a habit, nothing deeper than that. I just think it's a better place to be, particularly it's kind of funny. Like when I came out here, I was pre-med, I dropped out of school. I came out to be a computer scientist sort of with my friend. I didn't think of it that way. I came out to have a job at Ashton Tate with a friend of mine and spent 10 years not understanding that I was actually in a career and thinking that it was a temporary thing where I had to go back and like go back to med school and get my degree and be a doctor or something boring like that. And so like it's like for 35 years of doing this like it hasn't occurred to me that like, oh, actually I'm in this computer industry that's like this technical industry is constantly growing and constantly inventing things and constantly coming up these new ideas and actually the best posture in that world is to be creative and curious and open and optimistic and try things and stuff like that. The other the other thing I'll say about optimism too is”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's funny, like it's a choice. I'm not an optimistic person by nature. All the people in my life, if any of them listen to this, they'll just laugh at the idea that I'm like a proponent for optimism per se. Like it's just a conscious choice. I don't think you get very much for being pessimistic necessarily. You definitely don't get a lot for being careless. Like there's like, you know, you can be optimistic to the point of being careless and causing harm for sure. But like, you know, I think maybe a better way to say it is growth mindset, right? Like you want to look at the possibilities rather than the limitations and like suspend some disbelief and just kind of work on these problems. That's just, I just personally feel like I've missed out on more than I've protected myself from. Like if I kind of sum up both sides of that equation over my career, I wish I had been more open-minded and more optimistic and more willing to try things and more focused on possibilities rather than problems. And so I'm just personally like.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, why nots? There are actually problems you need to pay attention to eventually to build stuff, but once you have the what if, right? Like just to pick on SpaceX for a second, right? Like if you have the what if of like if I could make weight to space.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm completely in that mode right now, honestly. I think that's just the right mindset for something that's obviously this disruptive, right or wrong. Tesla is a great example. SpaceX is a great example where people are like, that doesn't make any sense. You know, and Elon's like, well, what if you could land rockets and reuse them? And they get really cheap. Like, that's pretty amazing. What if I can fix the battery problems and a car is basically a software product, right? Those are pretty amazing. What-if questions, right, of those products?”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm doing a lot of it right now, honestly. That's probably the most immediate example, but I could almost point at any product and there's moments like that in there. But I like right now, there's a lot of Why Not stories around generative AI. So it's expensive. It hallucinates, you can't necessarily try, it's sarcastic. It's random. It doesn't do the same thing twice. Yeah, they're real. They're actual issues to solve. But I think I look at it and think, well, what if? Like, what if we get, you know, what if we can build software around it? What if we can build more complicated programs than what we've been able to build? What if we actually have a reasoning engine that we can use to do meaningful things? What if this is actually really the second industrial revolution where in the first one we hit a surplus of physical energy beyond just our bodies and things like water reels? And now we have a surplus of cognitive energy beyond just our brains. And like that's a really transformational idea. And like I think.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, actually, nearly enough. And like, it doesn't even, you don't even have to add them. It's not voting, right? Like in the early days, like we had like, I don't know, a couple million users, five million users, and there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea and that it should stop and like we shouldn't be doing it. So like, you know, like for a long time, the haters outnumbered the people who were fans. And who cares? Whatever. You know, like it's fine. As long as you don't run out of the people who love it, you know, that's fine.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The more of the bell curve of kind of modern indifference and maybe mild like and mild dislike or whatever like that's sort of an incremental product. That's not really disrupting anything. But if you look at something like chat GPT where like the entire world is like this is amazing or this is terrible and there's like not a whole lot in between that's a very good signifier of it being like truly impactful and disruptive whether it's actually good or bad is a separate question, but like there's no denying that that's a disruptive technology.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we got all this stuff. I mean, and the real interesting thing, like I said at the beginning, like there's this very binary reaction that's possible, right? Like you understand it, in which case you're super excited about it, like cool, the world's going to change in this exciting way, or you don't and you reject it. And to the degree that something is really disruptive, that reaction, that binary reaction gets really strong. And so with something like T-DX, we've got this thing with GDOX that was really confusing in the early days to me where like there was a small group of people that really liked it. Some of them liked it more than we liked it. Like Nate Torkington over O'Reilly was this super huge early booster for it. And like, I did not understand what he saw in it at first. And, you know, but then we had people that just wanted it to die in a fire. And like that, like bifurcation of like, love it, hate it is really how you have an idea of whether you have impact and what you're building. If you get like.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That much smarter than you. One of the other ones that I like to keep in mind is every new idea looks dumb at first. Unfortunately, the dumb ideas also look dumb at first. So it's not a perfect. But the disruptive, the more disruptive they are. Kind of the more dumb you're going to feel they are. You always listen for that stuff like if they say it's a toy or if it's practical or it's stupid or I don't get it or whatever like those are often like toy is a good keyword. Like if you hear people saying something's a toy that's often a really good signifier that it's actually something real and threatening and they can't think of a better criticism for it than it's just a toy right now.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For being customistic and right, particularly in a moment like this, it's much better to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right, I think. So I don't know. And I'm like an impatient person. I'm a creative person. I'm a messy person. I just like to create and explore and find stuff. So like disruptive innovation just seems natural to me. But I think it's not an exaggeration to say literally that wheat you had in your bread this morning if you eat bread is like some weirdo like was messing around with plants a thousand years ago and everybody thought he was a nut. She was a nut. And like, you know. We had wheat, you know, because somebody just, you know, everything, right? Everything is like that.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Browser wasn't ready. People wouldn't, you know, the whole model of the cloud was like people aren't going to trust you to store your files. That's really weird. What if there's no connectivity? I heard no connectivity on an airplane story like 100 times from journalists. Like, what if I'm on an airplane and I write stuff? I'm like, I don't know. There'll be connectivity on airplanes soon, like, you know, which there is. And those are all just why not questions. I think the more interesting ones are the what if questions, like what if this does work? Just like use your imagination, think about what how far can I extend the curve? What are the implications of that? I'm an engineer and engineers are like fundamentally pessimistic people. You know, we kind of, somebody once told me like engineers come into the world broken. They just like look at everything as a problem to be solved. I think there's something to that. But I feel like I've missed out more by being pessimistic than I have by being too optimistic too early. So I have this kind of mantra now that like it's, you know, there's just like not that much of a problem.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An interesting question why it's important part, I don't know, it just is like everything you're wearing, eating, using, listening to, sitting on was a disruptive innovation at some point. That's how everything happens, right? Like, I think there's this really interesting thing where everything new is threatening at some level at the beginning. I mean, probably literally like the first guy who invented chairs, like got shit from his tribe mates for making chair. You know, it's like, but like, and they're all like obvious in retrospect, right? Like everything is obvious in retrospect. But there's, I think there's this really deep thing that people have where, you know, if something is disruptive of your worldview, it feels threatening. And you kind of have this very”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'll tell you a quick Google story. Like when we migrated in to Google, we were very sneaky about it. And we put the site into, quote, maintenance mode for eight hours on a Sunday where everything was just read-only. And then we migrated all the data and moved everything and brought the new system up. And three days after that, Sergei was in a meeting with me. And he's like, so when are you guys going to move over to Google Infrastructure? And I got to tell him like, oh, yeah, we did it this weekend. No one noticed. Some blogger in Germany noticed the IP address changed and that was it. Like nobody noticed it at all. So we were really good about it.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Computer History Museum wants to curate it. Like, I talk to these guys and they were like, We'd like, oh, that's so cool! We'll take that. I'm like, how? Like, I can make you a PDF. Now it's not the document. I can share you into it, but please don't edit it. How do you curate this?”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The front and back end have been written. It's not much, it's just me saying something to Steve about is collaboration working? Are we colliding on each other? Because we were trying to figure out like typing on one line if that algorithm was working. And then there's a picture of Edna from the Incredibles pasted into it. I don't know why. I think that came after. So I might have gone back and pasted that in. I'm not sure when. We must have been testing pictures or something. I don't unfortunately have the version history anymore. So I don't know what was original original, but it is the oldest Google Doc from like October of 2005 or something like that.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does actually still work. It's pretty funny. Actually, if I move my camera for a second, you might, if you're on YouTube, you can see the rightly thing in the background. That Brightley was the company that did Google Docs. Yeah, it still works. It's kind of funny, though, because it's like the document of Theseus, right? Like it's been, so we started off 2005, wrote this thing in C-sharp, which is little known. In our own, there's like pre-cloud. So we had three file servers that we rented that were Windows machines in a data center in Texas with a sysadmin in the Philippines running them. So that's like, it started there. And then when we moved to Google, we ported everything to Java. We moved all the data over in a big table. And we didn't lose anything. We never lost anybody's stuff. So it's still there and like moved across. And then like, so that's one back-end migration. And there's another one. It's Spanner. And then like the front end has been rewritten twice as well. So it's like, is it really the same document? I don't know.”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for if there's a thing like that and do the hell out of it, right? Like do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, do the hell out of that. Like that work doesn't necessarily have to be hard”
2024-01-11 · Lenny's Podcast · How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source