The Path to $100B by Paul Buchheit

It is now my great pleasure to introduce my longtime colleague at Y Combinator, Paul Buchheit. Paul is known for a lot of things, not the least of which is his wisdom in all things when it comes to startups. But he's also, of course, the creator of Gmail, the inventor—this is true—of "Don't be evil," and has had an incredible career. So I just thought I'd turn it over to Paul for a couple of minutes for him to describe his journey from somewhere to into YC, and what's happened then. We're gonna have an interesting conversation, I hope, on what it means to build an epic company.

Paul: Wow! All right, thank you. How far back do you want me to go?

Interviewer: Exactly. Where were you born?

Paul: Upstate New York.

Interviewer: Me too!

Paul: Yeah, so I grew up in the Midwest, and I went to college in Ohio. In the 90s, it was just different from now—probably everything in the 90s—yes, everything from now was different. So yeah, I was always interested in startups, and like, you know, even as a kid, like this idea. I think I just didn't like the idea of working for someone else. And also, I liked the idea that you could make a lot of money and create cool new inventions, basically, right? Like you need to read about inventors like Tesla or someone like that. Like, wow, if only that guy were like smarter at business, right? Like, he invented so much and he made—like, he died penniless. Like, he wasn't smart.

Interviewer: Didn't he start that car company?

Paul: Yeah, I don't know if he actually—I'm not sure if he actually got any equity. I don't think he did that. So, yeah, I was always covering the back of my mind. But, you know, as I'm coming up to graduate college, which was in 1998, I was very interested in startups, but there really was—you know, there was obviously no startup school, there was no Y Combinator, there was virtually very little. The web was relatively tiny at the time; there were not a lot of resources. I didn't really have any connections. I didn't know anyone who worked at a startup, but I suspected they were like in California.

So just always doing kind of like the simplest thing first.

Interviewer: What made you think of California?

Paul: I mean, like eBay, Netscape, like that first generation—Yahoo—all of that first generation of Internet companies. They had already—you know, those companies were IPO by the time I graduated, and they were all located here, you know, with the exception of Amazon up in Seattle. So you know, it was pretty obvious. I didn't have to be that Silicon Valley to figure out where Silicon Valley is.

So, I took a job out here at Intel, kind of with the hope that I would just like, you know, there’d be startups everywhere. I'll just like find one or something.

Interviewer: So you went to work for the man?

Paul: Yeah, I went to work at Intel, and that was—you know, Intel's a big company. It wasn't awesome, it wasn't terrible. It wasn't like a bad job, you know? I don't want to like— but it wasn't something I looked forward to like continuing to do year after year.

Interviewer: You used to call working at HP, where I first worked, the fur line rut.

Paul: Yeah, it's comfortable, but it's a rut.

Paul: Yeah, I actually have a specific memory, like hanging out with a couple of other friends who worked at Intel. You know, I'm like 21, 22 years old, something like that, and they're talking about like, oh yeah, they've got this really great retirement plan where, you know, if you work there until— for however many years—like your age plus your number of years of service—like you could retire at like 55 or something. I'm like, "Ah!" Like, it's like, "Oh yeah, why don't I just take the next 30 years of my life and stick it in a box and bury it?"

Interviewer: Yeah, I mean, it's worse—there are people there when you're sitting there at 22 who have been there for 30 years, who are just kind of doing time.

Paul: Yeah, so I wasn't really into doing time, but I was really into Linux. So that was kind of my obsession. I'd gotten interested in Linux like actually really early, like '93, like when it wasn't actually very good. So I was kind of like an early kind of Linux elitist who...