Buchheit: Early Gmail launch invites sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars
Paul Buchheit · 20VC: Y Combinator's Paul Buchheit on Creating Gmail Version 1.0 & Leadership Lessons from Working With Zuckerberg and Larry Paige · Nov 1, 2017 · at 10:06
Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, describes the market excitement during Gmail's early invite-only launch.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.2s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Paul Buchheit
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”