Paul Buchheit

General Partner, Standard Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

engineerfounderinvestor@paultoo ↗paulbuchheit.blogspot.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

As Google's 23rd employee, he created Gmail, built the initial prototype for Google AdSense, and coined the motto "Don't be evil." He later co-founded FriendFeed, served as a partner at Y Combinator, and co-founded venture firm Standard Capital.

12statements → 7claims → 7claims resolved → 86%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 1.75/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 9said about them ↓

6 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

7 assertions · 2 opinions · 1 insight · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 7 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Paul argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: Friendster failed by prioritizing an impossible six-degrees-of-separation feature

“Friendster, but they could have been maybe Facebook, but they got fixated on this idea that when you browse through profiles, it had to show you kind of the six degrees of separation between you and this person, and so that feature, it turns out, is sort of co…”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 17:10 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

100% certainty 3

100% certainty 4

75% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

245 words/min while actually speaking · 1.4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Paul Buchheit: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 15 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 4,242 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Paul Buchheit is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 65%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 16:25“How do you determine between vision and stubbornness?” ▶ 25:13“Are you not proud? Are you not proud of the evolution of your creation of the light button?” ▶ 21:21“What are you not so excited by?”

when Paul pushed back ▶ 12:24“I don't see it as a dichotomy. Inventing is a lot of times hacking.” ▶ 25:17“I don't know. 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.”

What they said12 What others said9 Episodes1

Everything Paul Buchheit said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Buchheit: Top founders like Page and Zuckerberg possess extreme, non-ordinary conviction

“One of the things that really strikes me about both Larry Page and Mark and, you know, a lot of the YC founders like Patrick Collison or founders of Airbnb is they just have a level of conviction that I think ordinary humans just don't have. They believe in th…”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 14:26 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Opinion

Buchheit: Twitter's incentive structure rewards attacking others and makes users worse people

“The incentive structures are a Twitter. You can score a lot of points by attacking someone, calling someone out, you know, 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 yo…”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 25:29 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Disclosure

Buchheit: Building early Gmail entirely in JavaScript was highly controversial at Google

“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…”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 12:42 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: Friendster failed by prioritizing an impossible six-degrees-of-separation feature

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 17:10 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Opinion

Buchheit: Venture investors are not adventurous enough with biotech and hardware

“You know, I think one of the most frustrating things is that the companies that get the most funding aren't the companies I wish got the most funding. I work with a lot of really interesting, like biotech companies, people working on some really interesting pr…”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 20:55 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Partly supported

Buchheit: FriendFeed created and launched the original social media 'like' button

“FriendFeed actually created the like button. We launched that 10 years ago this month.”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 24:51 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: Gmail launched with a core team of only twelve people

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

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 8:28 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: The initial prototype of Gmail was built in a single day

“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 …”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 19:28 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: Early Gmail launch invites sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars

“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.”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 10:06 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Disclosure

Buchheit: Google's internal launch milestone for Gmail was 100 happy users

“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.”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 10:54 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: Y Combinator accepts less than two percent of applicant companies

“We fund at YC. It's less than two percent of the companies that apply.”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 24:17 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

Assertion Supported

Buchheit: Microsoft's first product targeted only a few thousand potential customers

“Microsoft's first product was Altair Basic, which was a little basic interpreter for, or compiler for this computer called the Altair that had probably several hundred or maybe thousand possible customers.”

Paul Buchheit Nov 1, 2017 ▶ 6:31 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige

The other half of the tape: Paul Buchheit's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 9 times in 7 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 4 Noam Shazeer 3 Ted Blosser 1 Brian Armstrong 1