Gmail

“Cause I do think agent of commerce and Gmail is going to happen.”

“So we tried that, and this was one of the things we're like, yeah, not that Google sign up. Let's make them type in, and then, like, say, you know, type your business. And we didn't cut them off if they tried Gmail, but we just, and we had a, like, I don't kno…”

“They should have the single best place to do any sort of agentic email workflow, whether it's sending emails or searching emails or doing anything with email, they should own that. And they don't own that right now.”

“The success state of the future of email in AI is that we're not going to have to use it all the time, obviously. And instead it becomes like our agents basically emailing each other and us getting these like to do list app, right?”

“I still think that I write better emails than these tools do, but it usually does a good enough draft that I can just tweak a few things and be like, great, you know, send it for me.”

“In some weeks, a single research team at DeepMind Might gobble up more computational resources than Google's worldwide Gmail network, which had nine hundred million users.”

“Today around 70% of kids have access to a smartphone by the age of 10, right? This is like seven and 10. And of those, actually, around three quarters are using Gmail.”

“And why did Google go so quickly into email? The reason is because they figured out in order to get all your information and correlate it to a single profile, they need you to be logged in. And the one thing that you're always logged into all the time online i…”

“Like, I've connected up Gmail Google Drive, Calendar, Granola for my meeting notes, Stripe for payments, Notion for project management, and I don't even enter these tools anymore. I just sit and call code as one central place,”

“You know, like when you are a company, you want to access Gmail, the amount of red tape is so large that, that startups buy other startups that have the license for Gmail, because going through the process yourself is, is a huge pit.”

“Maybe this is Google's entry point into consumer, like, true consumer agentic.”

“If you're a newer entrant to the market, like, making sure you have a reputation of, like, a certain level of quality is often important. You know, like, Gmail can get away with that because it's Gmail. But like, Your new app that's trying to be viewed as cred…”

“But if you think about it, a problem like this is an informational one. So it should be solved by like within Gmail itself or with the Gmail API or with model context protocol and not a browser kind of clicking through robotically your Gmail. And so it's still…”

“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”

“In tiny now for Gmail, as well as for outlook, you can actually connect your accounts and we have millions of accounts that people have actually connected.”

“At the time, Hotmail, which as you said, Microsoft owns, Had two megabytes of free storage, and Yahoo Mail had four megabytes.”

“When they launch it on April first, 2004, they send out 1000 seed invites to Gmail.”

“They were trading on eBay for average price of a 150 bucks in the early days.”

“Web-based email from Google with one gigabyte of free storage for every single user. Now to put that in context, Yahoo and Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail at the time had like two megabytes of free storage per user.”

“And so the thing that led to AdSense Was actually part of the prototyping process of Gmail.”

“Google is extremely well positioned to pivot that to price per token. And I think that they have some emergent classes of physical AI, but they have the largest pool of people where they can generate a price per token value framework through YouTube, through G…”

“I mean, if you think back to last year's event, we were promised effectively a contextually aware assistant, Apple intelligence that could combine signals from your apps and make your life easier by doing things like searching your Gmail and telling you when y…”

“Gemini within Gmail still is not good at searching through your Gmail, so the data problem of taking a massive data set like your entire email history is a lot harder than maybe we should give it credit for”

“If you've used Gemini in Gmail, it still can't answer basic questions. So there's still, but yet Gemini standalone has gotten pretty damn good. So I still feel there's a disconnect in them tying together the personal data and context layer with the actual prod…”

“Gemini is amazing. The model itself is absolutely incredible. We've been using it a lot at YC to automate our own work. I'm so impressed with what they built. But a lot of that power I think is hidden behind a UI that makes it really frustrating to use.”

“There's two big problems with this. The first problem is like you're pointing out that doesn't sound anything like me, right? If you got this email, you wouldn't, you would assume somebody else wrote this. My account got hacked. I got phished. And then the sec…”

“My contention is that A lot of AI app developers, including the Gmail team in this case, are treating the system prompt the same way they've been treating code for decades.”

“And it was a bug in iOS four. This is a long time ago, which caused every single user to pull the entire Gmail inbox, resync the whole inbox. So the bug on the Apple side is going to take two, three weeks to fix. And it was causing like a thousand X load to ou…”

“I think Google is actually the closest to ByteDance of America. If you think about it, they have so many different apps in one umbrella, but they don't share lessons. Like the YouTube team is so different from the Gmail team, sort of from the Chrome team, and …”

“Outlook users expect their email app to also be a fully featured calendar app. Whereas Gmail users are happy with those two things being entirely different.”

“We actually had, at some point, an inbox as well, and the inbox was allowing buyers to see their entire buyer's journey and see who at the company emailed, what they did, and so forth. We killed it because we realized that it's going to be so hard to get peopl…”

“I did a survey of my readers and asked them what tools to use every day in your work and most use. And ChatGPT was Number one above Gmail, above Slack, above anything else. 90% of people said they use ChatGPT regularly.”

“I think this is actually a real hole in the market because that's not something I can go out and purchase today.”

“I use fixer F Y X E R. It's this British startup. It basically reads every single email that comes into your Gmail. It sorts it based on whether you need to respond to it or not. And then it drafts responses.”

“One of my favorite interview questions is to ask, tell me about a product that you recently discovered that you were super passionate about. You say, I worked for Google, but it's an instant failure. You say Google Maps or Gmail or Facebook. It just tells me y…”

“Look, you're gonna wake up tomorrow and Gmail and Apple mail and everything is just gonna have these swipes and snoozes and it's just gonna be part of the UI is not a good, or it's not a durable source of advantage.”

“So I'd say about 60, 70% of customers typically would be able to see the AMP interactivity”

“Never is the AI able to predict the next couple words in that sentence. I've always found that very interesting. And it's a reminder to me that still the act of creative genius of doing Not any sentence, but like the right sentence, the right way with the righ…”

“I've since moved to just the Gmail spam button because if you hit that, it blocks the sender and it also sends the message to the Google algorithm that like this company sucks, which I like.”

“We invented the snooze button you now see in Gmail, Outlook, Superhuman, even Slack.”

“When I think about the personal assistant side, having the assets of Gmail Docs, spreadsheets, and Android, you know, and I actually ran into Samir Samadhi runs Android the other day, and I had this discussion with him. It's the best set of assets. Like, if yo…”

“Smart replies, which is anytime you're text messaging or writing an email, the keyboard automatically suggests like entire sentences for you to include into what you're doing. And the first time it started doing it really kind of shocked me. Like I was taken a…”

“Studies are done how Google in particular, but essentially big tech, Has been proven to divert the vast majority of, you know, if you're a Republican running for office and you're sending out a, you know, a bulk email, most of those emails for conservatives Re…”

“No, it cost me 48 dollars. I got, a guy named Muhammad who I still talk to this day, 15 years later he helped me put the PayPal button on the website. And it was 12 dollars for the domain, that's part of the 48 dollars. And then I used Gmail as my back-end.”

“If you were to go and create a new Gmail account and look at YouTube today, I guarantee you it's a completely different and significantly worse experience, right?”

“Training runs can be paused, right? You can actually like, you can shut a training run off for two weeks and then start it up again. Which, you know, you can't do if you're running a Gmail service or a search engine or something.”

“I personally am very bullish on the company. They have an amazing team. They have incredible talent, particularly in the AI space and the data they have in Gmail in order to understand who you are, what you like, who you communicate, how you communicate.”

“Basically every enterprise software company for the sake of argument is unbundling Oracle, Gmail, or Excel.”

“Yeah, no, I think longterm Gmail is a huge risk in the country.”

“You could imagine some of the incumbent productivity providers, you know, Gmail for email, for example, they're going to build a lot of the obvious features AI features for those apps and experiences, but it's less obvious that they would prioritize something …”

“Like splitting promotions and social to the side sounds like the stupidest idea, but there's about 85% of the population, 85 to 88% that absolutely love it. And today Gmail has about 1.8 billion active users, according to Gmail. Most of these users are using t…”

“We used a lot of those in the tabbed inbox, by the way, one of the first early versions was actually, we showed the tabbed inbox working. To people, but it wasn't really Gmail. It was just a facade of HTML and behind the scenes. And according to the permission…”

“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…”

“If it's an obvious idea and a huge competitive market with large incumbents, you know what? Those guys are going to take that. That's they're going to own that piece. And so like building your startups around that and thinking like, oh, I'm smarter. I'm more n…”

“And so if they take BART and they have the confidence now to just integrate it into Gmail or integrate it into these other points where they already have hundreds of millions of users, that's like a really tough distribution barrier to overcome. That's the nex…”

“You may not have heard of the Associate Product Manager program, but it's one of Google's crown jewels alongside Search and Gmail, and I would argue that it sits at the root of Google's success.”

“Marissa found her first APM hire, twenty-two-year-old Brian Rakowski, fresh out of college. What project did Marissa choose to ease him in on? She gave him the whole of Gmail.”

“Early days of Gmail, users were asking Paul Buchheit, the founder of Gmail, to view both the inbox and the actual email that they were reading on the same screen. Now, why would they ask for that? Well, the reason was simply that Gmail was too slow and people …”

“I found a way to download my entire Gmail contact database. And I don't mean like just the people that are like in my contacts. I mean, every single person that I'd ever emailed with ever in my Gmail, you can like find a way to do this in Gmail. And I remember…”

“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, …”