Google Docs

“Even if somebody has a like two X better AI powered, you know, doc editor, you're going to move all your stuff up. Maybe, probably not.”

“So many people were trying to sign the petition at once, it actually crashed Google Docs. And so you had to have certain people who were designated as the person you go to actually put your name on the document so you don't have too many editors at once.”

“We built so much tech around Claude leaving useful comments inside a Google Doc, and now it just does it, just like leaves a comment in your Google Doc and that's how you interact with it.”

“Most people give it access to email. They give it access to their Google Docs, or SharePoint, or Box, Dropbox folders. Most people don't want to start out by giving access to all Zoom calls. Or phones.”

“I don't think we need to build all those things. You know, it, you know, my thought would be, you know, we're gonna, it's gonna be a mixture of things we make ourselves and integrating into others, right?”

“As agents start to do work that is not writing code, but more general work, again, for software engineers or beyond for any builder, they're gonna need to start interfacing with other systems. Right? So as they start, maybe your agent is talking to Sentry, rig…”

“We're doing performance reviews right now, and it's actually really easy to use ChatGPT with internal knowledge, hooked up to GitHub and like our Notion docs and Google docs. To give a, get a really good sense of what this person has done over the last 12, 12 …”

“Another one that I have really loved is Monologue. So Monologue is a voice to text app. So, you know, kind of like Super Whisper or some of these others but Monologue in particular, I really like because they've done some really nice design touches where anyti…”

“And the business that we decided on was like, there's probably like an analogous business to like Figma or notion or Google docs, where you build a collaboration platform around these workflows that developers are doing from the command line. And so that busin…”

“If you're familiar with something like notion or Google docs, it has an abstraction for just a literal doc there, but that's not good enough when you're dealing with technical abstractions like APIs. APIs have a very specific language and one character is off.…”

“I think if you look at users of docs or sheets or slides, it's in the billion-ish, five hundred million, billion range for each of those. Office, I think, has a couple hundred million users worldwide.”

“He would go on to manage all of Docs and Sheets, and I think he actually managed Maps at some point, too. He is now the deputy CTO of Microsoft.”

“I think back then the best of the, Of that first way were Google Docs and then surprisingly Microsoft Outlook Web Access. So, so that, that was kind of a true app living in there, in the browser, irregardless of what you thought about Microsoft and Outlook and…”

“I'd never used a Google doc back then when I joined Airbnb.”

“Google Docs makes it impossible, but Notion, literally every single action you could take in Notion is now programmable through this MCP. So an AI agent can just do those things directly if it has access to the Notion MCP server with all of those different too…”

“If you look at the other productivity apps that have really worked on the web, they've all had this compute model, right? Figma, when you open a Figma document, there's not like some cloud VM that gets spun up for you to render the documents you're dragging th…”

“There is a very long running doc that has had to be chopped and purged because it was breaking Google Docs and Chrome at various points in time. It's sort of like a note taking doc. It's really where we coordinate what we're doing.”

“My memory of it is that it spent, you spent more time in the meeting grooming a backlog of irrelevant stuff than actually, you know, talking about the proper priorities. So I think it's nice in the Google doc that if something becomes irrelevant, it can kind o…”

“It's basically an inversion of what Google Docs is, wants to do with Gemini. It's like Google Docs on the main screen and then Gemini on the side. And right, whatnot, what ChatGPT has done is Do the chat thing first, and then the docs on the side. But it's kin…”

“The thing that most writers and most people who want to write don't realize is that many of the decisions get made before you start writing. So if you start, if you come up with an idea, and your first thought is I should open a Google Doc and I should start w…”

“Once you get more structured, it's like you're spending more time organizing than you are actually thinking.”

“We have like a Lindy PR reviewer. And it's really handy because anytime any bug happens, so the Lindy reads our guidelines on Google Docs. By now the guidelines are like 40 pages long or something. And so every time any new kind of bug happens, we just go to t…”

“This is not what I do, but I think it's the easiest place to start. Spin up a Google doc or a notion page, just call it daily log and then bullet point out like the date of today. And then as you're going through your day, you have a meeting, just type in the …”

“There's like more than a billion people use gdocs today.”

“To be honest, like, I'm a little bit sad at the state of Gdocs these days because I think they're losing sight of the idea that, you know, they're kind of turning it into Office and like making it very complicated to use again. And I find lots of things broken…”

“There's an entrepreneur I know, and I don't know if he wants people to know this, so I'm not going to say who it is, who built a popular direct to consumer company, sold this company, and he has found a way, he has manually built his stack. So he created a Goo…”

“We started off, in, in C Sharp, which is little known, in, you know, our own, there's, like, pre-cloud, so we, like, 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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“When we did rightly at the 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 a…”

“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, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. …”

“And like, the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident. Like, they're 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, like you can edit these t…”

“Because if we understood 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 gonna be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a, you know, useful absence.”

“If I had just been, like, a random Google employee with this idea, and no legal protection, and the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like, there's no way it would have made it through that, that negativity, and that pessimism”

“The reason I ask is not to get to the answer, it's because I just want to see how people react when I give them something that seems impossible and unreasonable. And some people just like back off and, you know, refuse to engage with it. And some people are ju…”

“The challenge when you put a language model into an existing product is there's going to be a natural constraint of that. If all of a sudden I'm in Google Docs, and I want to ask for vacation ideas that I want to explore, or I'm trying to figure out what are s…”

“Probably something will Come and destroy Notion and Google Docs and all of them with a totally new paradigm that is made possible by AI.”

“It probably something will come and destroy Notion and Google Docs and all of them with a totally new paradigm that is made possible by AI, and certainly these incumbents won't do it.”

“If you only write threads about Google docs and, you know, Chrome extensions, you're not building any kind of personal relationship, but it's okay if you choose to play that game.”

“If you have to go to another place to start writing your thing, but you actually like writing in Google Docs, like that's already a change of scenery for you, and it might already disrupt your flow, and you've got like your templates, you've got things that yo…”

“I really like it when they send, not slide decks, because they can just be used as like crutches, but like a doc, and then I say send it in a Word doc, not a Google doc, because if you send it in a Word doc, you write in isolation, because if, you know, you're…”

“It was Evernote to organize and to kind of track the research, and then I would move it into Google Docs to do the writing. And then once it was pretty close to final, I would move it into Word because Word has more advanced kind of features and formatting and…”

“So the way I do it is I send out actually a Word doc, not a Google doc, because that's obviously collaborative. I sent out a Word doc the night before. So it's all in isolation. No one sees what other people put. And then they have this kind of free space to r…”

“Google Docs never unseated office or word for financial analysts or lawyers who actually needed those very, very specific sets of features.”

“This is clearly an existential question because this thing is going to grow. You know, it is going to grow, expand and take over all of Photoshop and all of Illustrator. It's going to be the better way of doing that in a way that Google docs never really did f…”

“And it's not like a product requirements document that's 20 pages. It's like a two pager just explaining what we're doing and why. And that context we usually throw into Google docs or a wiki or something like that, link them all together so that you can go fr…”

“Once, you know, we are talking about a new asset in investment committee, the subsequent six or seven minutes are silent. It's everyone having a bunch of Google doc comment conversations concurrently.”

“Turning spreadsheets into SaaS apps has been a good idea forever. Turning glorified Google Docs into SaaS apps, I think, has never been a good idea.”

“I make people comment on Word docs, not on Google docs, because then they send them back to me the night before, and then I can pick on them in the meeting and say, hey, in the Word doc you said this, and their opinion is unencumbered by others, where it would…”

“So what we did is we developed cloud browsers. Those are essential elements that allow you to bring any tool that you already use, things like Google Docs and Figma and Trello and Jira, and they become immediately collaborative. Even the regular website become…”

“We do everything in Google Docs. If you and I have a conversation and make a decision about something, we document it in Google Docs”

“One of them is that you go from sort of horizontal model of I've got files stored in some way, and they may be files in a folder on There may be an Excel file, or there may be a Google Sheet document, but it's still a file, basically, and email, and links to e…”

“Google Docs is a joke.”

“Google docs or seeing what people are doing in sheets. It's just so much faster and smoother that I tend to lean to using those tools over notion, even though notion has those things built in.”

“You could have a room full of people with laptops open on Slack or on a Google Doc, and they can't work together because their supercomputers, which again, like, let's be clear here, like, these computers are more powerful than, like, all of the computers on t…”

“Really pen and paper Excel files and, you know, Google Docs are the primary competitor”

“Yeah, so it's similar to DocuSign in the sense that we have e-signatures, but we like to consider ourselves more like a Google Docs for PDFs. So we take any existing PDF and we turn it into an online smart version, and then we also have tools to take that and …”