The Exchanges

Q A really fun fact about you is that apparently you have the very first Google doc, uh, file. I don't know what you call it. The very first Google doc document saved somewhere from before even Google docs was a thing. Does it still work in today's Google docs and what is in this, this document?

A Yeah, it does actually still work. It's pretty funny. Actually, if I move my camera for a second, you might, if you're on the, on, on, uh, YouTube, you can see the Rightly thing in the background. Rightly was the company that did Google Docs. Um, yeah, like, it still works. It's kind of funny, though, because it's like the document of Theseus, right? Like, it's been, so 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 that's, like, it started there, like, and then when we moved to Google, we ported everything to Java, we moved all the data over in Bigtable, and we, we didn't lose anything, like, never lost anybody's stuff, so it's still there, and, like, moved across, and then, like, so that's one back-end migration, then there's another one at Spanner, and then, like, the front-end has been rewritten twice as well, so it's, like, is it really the same document? I don't know, like, the front-end, back-end have been rewritten. It's not much, it's just me Saying something to Steve about, is collaboration working? Are we colliding on each other? Because we were trying to figure out, like, typing on one line if that algorithm was working. And then there's a picture of Edna f…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, it does actually still work... It's not much, it's just me Saying something to Steve”

Q Great answer. Sam, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

A I like weird book, like I like, there's this book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which is this very beautiful meditation on the nature of cities and the nature of Venice, and, and I read it the first time I was in Italy right after college, and it just like blew all the circuits in my brain when I went to Venice, so that was pretty cool. The other one I, I recommend to people with some caution is this very intense and disturbing book called The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks, which is, um, probably the creepiest and hardest book I've ever read, but it's a very interesting psychological deep dive. So those are both fiction. I, I, I, if you're looking for like business advice, I think the business advice one is probably where good ideas come from. Steven Johnson. I really liked that book. Um, I think some of his stuff about the adjacent possible, I think it's, it's an old book now, but I think it's pretty, pretty timely. Like still, I think he had some good stuff in there.

AI assessment note: “there's this book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino”

Q Is there another example of you using this? What if approach either on a product you worked on or something you've seen and it working out?

A I'm doing a lot, a lot of it right now, honestly, like, I mean, that's probably the most immediate example, but I could almost point at any product and there's, there's moments like that in there. But I like right now, you know, there, there's a lot of why not stories, right, around generative AI. So it's expensive, uh, it hallucinates, you know, it, you, you can't necessarily try. It's sarcastic. It's random. It doesn't do the same thing twice. Like, those are like, yeah, they're real. They're actual issues to solve. But I think like, you know, I look at it and think, well, what if, like, what if we get, you know, what if we can build software around it? You know, what if we can build more complicated programs than what we've been able to build? What if we actually have a reasoning engine That we can use to do meaningful things. Like, what if this is actually really the second industrial revolution where, in the first one, we had a surplus of physical energy beyond just our bodies and things like water reels, and now we have a surplus of cognitive energy beyond just our brains, right? And like, that's a really transformational idea, and like, I think, so I, you know, I'm, I'm completely in that mode right now, honestly. Like, I think that's just like, The right mindset for something that's obviously this disruptive right or wrong. Tesla is a great example. SpaceX is a great ex…

AI assessment note: “Tesla is a great example. SpaceX is a great example where people are like”

Q And also knowing how long to commit to it versus time to move on to something else. So along those lines, what was the moment where you finally felt product market fit for what became Google Docs? And how long was that from the beginning of starting to work on it?

A It depends on what market we're talking about. Like I I've been continually surprised at the adoption of G Docs. I think we knew there was something there pretty quickly, like probably in the first couple of months, like there was a lot of energy around it. Like we wound up That is a weird ride because, like, we built this thing kind of on a whim, and, you know, as an experiment, we liked it. We decided to go just advertise on Google. At the time, 37 Signals was kind of like the cool company, and we're like, that looks cool. Like, we'll just be some engineers, and we'll have, like, a little subscription SaaS business thing and, like, chill out. So let's see what it costs to acquire customers. So, like, let's go advertise on Google and see how much it costs to, like, get people to sort of show up, and then we'll figure out if we have a subscription business or not. And that just got us noticed. Like, that got us noticed by Google. It got us noticed. We were, like, I think, like, one of the first 10 articles at TechCrunch, like, Michael Errington. Like, there's another funny, rightly stories that, like, we had, I had a breakfast with Michael Errington at Buck's in that era where he was, like, trying to decide. He had this, like, spreadsheet idea he wanted to work on, and he was trying to decide if you should go do that and, like, maybe join forces with us because we were cool, or…

AI assessment note: “we knew there was something there pretty quickly, like probably in the first couple of months”

Q it feels like for you, it was just having, you've done it enough times where you find, okay, it's going to be fine. I launch this thing. No one cares. I email Satya this thing. He ignores it, or he doesn't like, it's going to be okay. Is that maybe the key to this, or is there anything else that you've done to allow you to be okay with failure?

A I think there's this, I feel like you can have a linear. Return on your effort. If you manage things in a, in a linear way, which is, I think that managing, you know, tightly managing. Okay. Nothing's going to be surprising. I'm going to be within this boundary. I'm going to kind of slowly or create value. I'm going to play this game, whatever. I think you can have a nice linear, boring return to your career and you'll climb the ladder. It takes 30 years or whatever. I don't have the patience for that. And I think the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things, right? You, you know, you have to have, you have to take bigger risks and, and, you know, have kind of more, And a more, more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career. I, I, I feel like I always tell people, like, I think, I mean, I, I, I, I pitched this because I've observed myself and thought about, like, what has been successful in my career. It's not ever, it's not a thing everybody can do. Like, I've just kind of liked this. I, I'm, I've never really fully grew up. I'm kind of this weirdo. I still feel I'm 57 now. I feel like I'm about 17. Like, I'm still very mature and like, Like to mess around with stuff and play with things. So not everybody can do it, but I think there's like, you know, at the end of the day, what you get, the reason you get ahead in your …

AI assessment note: “the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things”