Gmail

“There you have no data set, as in zero, nothing, because there is no agent-human negotiation under a given dialogue model that exists in that data set, and you can't label it in the past, as in, what if the agent said this, what would the human then say?”

“Even by the time we launched core Gmail team was probably only about a dozen people.”

“So the most extreme case of this might be that the very first version of Gmail, arguably, I wrote in a single day. And what I did was I had previously been working on Google Groups, which at the time was a Usenet search product. And I just took the code. So I …”

“Again, with 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 it had been tried before, that, you…”

“People were selling the invites on eBay for hundreds of dollars. It became a real currency because people were so excited about getting an invite to the service.”

“That was actually sort of our goal for launch. We just had to get a hundred 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 news of the world.”

“And I could see Gmail getting worse every single year, becoming more cluttered, using more memory, consuming more CPU, slowing down your machine, still not working properly offline.”

“Most of our users actually end up getting through their email about twice as fast as in comparison to Gmail.”

“So in 2010, I'd started that company, Reportive, and we built the first Gmail plugin to scale to millions of users.”

“And I remember one time we had gone through this big redesign of the label system in Gmail, and we were about to launch it. And actually the night before launch, we held it back because we realized we had unintentionally added about 30 milliseconds or 40 milli…”

“And we grew Gmail to over two hundred million users during my time there.”

“I could see Gmail getting worse every single year, becoming more cluttered, using more memory, consuming more CPU, slowing down your machine, and still not working properly offline.”

“But I have three labels only in Gmail. I have urgent, end of the day, end of the week. It's these three labels and the assistants, they file the emails. And urgent is what I do every single 15 minutes and every hour. End of the day is what I do when I finish m…”

“My advice in those cases is work on your differentiators first. So in the case of say an email client, oh, we have a new take on email. I would say, right here, here's what I believe. I believe you're a competent engineer. I believe you can work out SMTP and I…”

“Yahoo is a very different situation. It legitimately has nine hundred million users a month. And those users are coming, you know, in email, we're number two to Gmail. In Yahoo Finance, we're number one by a mile. Yahoo Sports is number two to ESPN. You know, …”

“Something that we do at Notion that I think generally is tried and true is to ask someone what they're here for. Many businesses will actually cast or assume or segment that a user is a certain kind of user. Maybe they sign up with a Gmail account, and one mig…”

“It's like, it's in Gmail, but it's practically unusable. It's in pretty much every product, and it seems thrown in, kind of, like, half thought through”