Paul Buchheit
General Partner, Standard Capital · 3 appearances on the record.
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engineerfounderinvestor@paultoo ↗paulbuchheit.blogspot.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
As Google's 23rd employee, he created Gmail, built the initial prototype for Google AdSense, and coined the motto "Don't be evil." He later co-founded FriendFeed, served as a partner at Y Combinator, and co-founded venture firm Standard Capital.
47statements → 16claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 3.81/5average certainty → 2.13/5average debate potential → 75said about them ↓
4 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 10 not checkable as stated how the 16 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 predictions · 14 assertions · 4 opinions · 23 insights · 3 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 16 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 10 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Paul argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything Paul Buchheit said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Buchheit: There is literally no such thing as value investing in startups
“There really literally is no such thing as value investing in startups.”
Buchheit: Vast majority of ICOs are scams and going to zero
“As far as I can tell, the vast majority of the ICOs are scams. Or just like, these are companies that, if they were trying to raise from the people in the room, here, maybe they'd be able to raise half a million dollars, but instead they go do an ICO, and they…”
Buchheit: Social networks succeed by serving the network over individual users
“It's almost like the, it's not the end user who you have to please, it's the network. Because they understood that the most important feature of a social network is that your friends are there. And so sometimes there's actually a tension between like what's go…”
Buchheit: Raising massive capital before product-market fit kills startups
“If they get a huge round of funding before they have product market fit, it kills the company. Like it because it's just too hard for the founders to resist That, because actually going out and dealing with the fact that you don't have product market fit is re…”
Buchheit: Building mega-scale companies requires riding exponential shifts, not just working harder
“It, I don't think it's that you're smarter necessarily. It helps to be smart. It isn't that you're harder working. Like there's a limit to how hard you can work. What I think necessarily to get to that point, you're sitting on top of a big exponential change i…”
Buchheit: A giant social network was inevitable even if Facebook never existed
“Even if like Facebook didn't exist, I guarantee someone would have built a giant social network, right? Like Facebook was sitting on top of that exponential change, and they were the ones who were most able to like capture it, that position and hold on to it. …”
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…”
Buchheit: If dissuaded by a startup's high valuation, invest more
“Any time I've been, like, excited about something, but then it's like, ah, the price is so high, eh, you know, I'll invest in something else. I've always regretted it. Like, so now, actually, in my head, I kind of turn around the rule. I'm like, if I'm dissuad…”
Buchheit: Great startup ideas are either implausibly ambitious or look frivolous
“Implausibly ambitious or frivolous ideas, and the reason that we're kind of at these two extremes is that if the idea is in the middle, as I mentioned at the start, probably there's like a big company somewhere working on it, or a hundred other startups, and s…”
Buchheit: Founders with perfect resumes often sell early out of fear
“I'm very nervous about people who've always gotten perfect grades. They got into all the right things. They did all the right clubs. The people who have the perfect resume. The people who didn't fuck up. Because these are people who've never failed. And startu…”
Buchheit: Startup success can be predicted by iteration speed
“You can almost define, predict the, I think success of a startup just based on how quickly they're able to iterate. And the really great companies just like iterate really quickly. The ones who, you know, do a release every two years fail. Do zero.”
Buchheit: Early search rivals failed because they did not know what they were doing
“When we started really just like pushing all, just crushing all of the other search engines, and then there was like a feeling of inevitability. Like it was pretty clear we were just gonna win because no one else, Like, they just didn't even know what they wer…”
Buchheit: Startups should build deep appeal for a few rather than broad mediocrity
“And so there's like all this history, so it's pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and make a thing that appeals to everyone. And if you try to do that, what you end up making is just like a mediocre product that nobody really loves. And so my phi…”
Buchheit: FriendFeed created the first Like button before Facebook
“We actually created the like button, so like, the very first like button was on friend feed, and then mysteriously appeared on Facebook a number of months later.”
Buchheit: Focus is a startup's ultimate weapon against tech incumbents
“Focus is one of the most important things, because, like, as a startup, it's actually, I think, your most powerful weapon, right? Like, the reason that you're able to take on, like, these big companies or whatever is because they're doing a thousand different …”
Buchheit: Early enterprise startups must target desperate customers
“Like, right, right, like that's the kind of customer you want is like someone who's like desperate, right?
And because they're desperate, they're willing to put up with kind of a shitty product.
Maybe they're willing to spend a lot of time working with you, ri…”
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…”
Buchheit: Startup Founders Always Sell Their Companies Too Early
“Founders always sell too early, because you're like, wow, a billion dollars. I make the same mistake. I sell too early.”
Buchheit: Commercial supersonic flights will reach Tokyo in six hours by 2028
“In 10 years, when you wanna go to Tokyo, you're gonna get there in, like, six hours.”
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…”
Buchheit: Too much capital is a huge liability for startups
“Too much money is a huge liability, because when you have a lot of money, you start doing things the right way... Having a giant mountain of money enables the founders to insulate themselves from reality to an unhealthy extent.”
Buchheit: U.S. Healthcare Model Fundamentally Incentivizes Driving Costs Higher
“I mean, I think there's, like, no underlying economic model other than driving the costs higher, fundamentally, right? Make more money by driving costs up.”
Buchheit: Smart Interview Questions Are a Strong Indicator of Startup Caliber
“I was really impressed when I was interviewing with them that they asked, actually, like, really smart questions, which I think is a pretty good indication.”
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 …”
The other half of the tape: Paul Buchheit's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 65 times in 29 episodes on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. 10 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Michael Seibel 13Harj Taggar 8Sam Altman 7Geoff Ralston 7Mathilde Collin 5Dalton Caldwell 4Vivek Ravisankar 3Kalam Dennis 3
Statements about Paul Buchheit, by other people (10)
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…”
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.”
Hale: Wufoo raised only $118,000 total from YC and two angels
“18,000 dollars. YC was 18,000 dollars then, and we raised money from two angels, PB and PG, and it was 50,000 dollars each. And that was it.”
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, …”
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…”
Altman: Buchheit's Four Founder Traits Are Obsession, Focus, Frugality, Love
“Paul Buhite, one of our partners, made a list of the four traits that he thought founders that go on to create giant companies have, and they are obsession, focus, frugality, and love.”
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 …”
Seibel: First version of Gmail was built inside Google Groups UI
“The first version of Gmail, he basically figured out how to put his email into this Google Groups UI.”
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…”
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.”
Every mention by year
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
Appearances (3)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit · Y Combinator | Oct 24, 2018 | 38m |
| Paul Buchheit - Startup Investor School Day 2 · Y Combinator | Mar 7, 2018 | 42m |
| Pitch Practice with Paul Buchheit and Sam Altman at Startup School SV 2016 · Y Combinator | Dec 26, 2016 | 9m |