Paul Buchheit
28 statements across 12 episodes · 13 bullish · 1 bearish · 9 people on the record · first statement Dec 26, 2016 by Paul Buchheit · said 65 times in 29 episodes since 2016 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Paul Buchheit's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Michael Seibel (13), Harj Taggar (8), Sam Altman (7), Geoff Ralston (7), Mathilde Collin (5), Dalton Caldwell (4), Vivek Ravisankar (3), Kalam Dennis (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 9 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT's Origins, and Building AI Hardware · Y Combinator
- DoorDash CEO: Customer Obsession, Surviving Startup Death & Creating A New Market · Y Combinator
- How to Spend Your 20s in the AI Era · Y Combinator
- How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
2024 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 16 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
- Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- Should You Start A Startup? | Startup School · Y Combinator
- Why Investors Can’t Fix Your Company – Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel · Y Combinator
- How To Talk To Users | Startup School · Y Combinator
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2018 28 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- Mathilde Collin on Feature Prioritization and Employee Retention at Front · Y Combinator
- A Conversation with Paul Graham - Moderated by Geoff Ralston · Y Combinator
- Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar · Y Combinator
- Elad Gil and Pejman Nozad - Startup Investor School Day 3 · Y Combinator
- Michael Seibel - Startup Investor School Day 2 · Y Combinator
- After PMF: People, Customers, Sales by Mathilde Collin · Y Combinator
- David Rusenko - How To Find Product Market Fit · Y Combinator
- Sam Altman - How to Succeed with a Startup · Y Combinator
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
2016 2 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Paul Buchheit, oldest first
Dec 26, 2016 neutral
Buchheit: YC startups usually take a month to clarify their one-liner
“Like, it takes the companies in YC usually about a month to get it right, so every time we meet with them, ah, in regular office hours, or especially we have a thing called group office hours, the very first thing that each company has to do is give me their o…”
Dec 26, 2016
Mar 6, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018
Caldwell: Successful Angel Investments Demand a Ten-Year Liquidity Horizon
“Even the companies that go really well, we are talking about a 10 year time horizon. PB's about to talk, and like, you know, a lot of the investments that he made in 2008, 2007 are still hanging out there. He's getting no liquidity from it.”
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Buchheit: Kyle Vogt built Justin.tv's streaming server in a single weekend
“It turns out it took him maybe like a whole weekend, but he did in fact write their own streaming media server, and this is actually the reason that Justin TV survived it all. Right? Because they, there was no way the business was viable if they were paying so…”
Mar 7, 2018
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 bullish
Mar 7, 2018
Buchheit: Great startup ideas must initially appear bad to big companies
“Oftentimes the bad ideas, I mean, the good ideas look bad. And the reason for this is that if the idea were obviously good, like, the opportunity wouldn't exist. Big companies are not that dumb. They're capable of executing. They have lots of resources. They h…”
Mar 7, 2018
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Buchheit funded DoorDash mainly so they would deliver to his house
“When they interviewed here, ah, like actually in the room right over there, I, my like one question for them was like, will you deliver to my house? Because at the time, when they went through YC, there was no food delivery where I lived, and I get hungry. And…”
Mar 7, 2018 positive
Mar 7, 2018
Buchheit: Investors should probe founder conviction, not substitute their own domain judgment
“My belief is that if the founders are actually better than me, then they're gonna have better insights. They're gonna know more than me. So I can kind of outsource that part of the thinking to the founder. And then I just have to figure out, like, does the fou…”
Mar 7, 2018
Buchheit: Acquirers rejected Justin.tv because they believed the team lacked talent
“So this company, they actually even tried to do an acquihire several years in, but no one would acquihire them because they thought they didn't have any talent. They couldn't do a talent acquisition because the acquirers thought there was no talent.”
Aug 29, 2018 positive
Altman: Best startup founders embody frugality, focus, obsession, and love
“Paul Buhite once spent a bunch of time looking, one of the YC partners spent a bunch of time looking at the traits of our best founders and tried to distill down what they were. And he came up with frugality, focus, obsession, and love. I actually, I think tha…”
Sep 1, 2018 neutral
Ralston: Buchheit Built Gmail Solo While RocketMail Had a Team
“Paul Buchheit, who actually has more of a claim on actually writing Gmail than I do have a claim on writing Yahoo Mail. I wrote some important parts of Yahoo Mail, but Paul was kind of by himself doing Gmail almost, and we had, we were a little more intentiona…”
Oct 3, 2018 positive
Paul Buchheit's 'follow your growth' advice was the best guidance for Front
“Ah, but at the end of the day, that's the best advice you could give us because, you know, he has some insights on like what prime Gmail was trying to solve, but that's very different from what France is trying to solve, and that's, like, a different time in, …”
Oct 24, 2018
Buchheit: Startups must build useful products today rather than multi-step plans
“I think you have to have some notion of the big picture, and it doesn't mean you have, like, a detailed step-by-step plan. Like, occasionally I'll run into a startup where they're like, here's our five-step plan for how we become whatever, and, like, It isn't …”
Oct 24, 2018 positive
Oct 24, 2018 positive
Mar 6, 2019
Feb 16, 2022 neutral
Feb 16, 2022 neutral
Caldwell: Gmail almost wasn't released due to hardware concerns at Google
“It was hard for him to get Google to release it because they were afraid it was going to take up too much hardware, and so there was all these issues where there's a good, there was a decent chance I think it never would have been released.”
Dec 1, 2022
Early Gmail users requested split-pane views because emails loaded too slowly
“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 …”
Feb 8, 2024 negative
Taggar: Malicious AI agents will require consumers to deploy defensive AI agents
“He's worried about there's going to be a world of just sort of like all these AI agents that are out trying to do malicious things, and that we're going to need like our own like good defensive AI agents out there making sure we don't get scammed out of all of…”