Paul Buchheit

I'm very very excited to introduce our next speaker. Paul Buchheit is one of my partners at Y Combinator. He also was one of the very early employees at Google, where he's known as the inventor of Gmail and the creator of the "don't be evil" motto. He also started a startup shortly after leaving Google called FriendFeed, which was acquired by Facebook. My favorite thing about Paul, though, is that he was an early angel investor in Justin.tv and really helped keep us alive in the early days. So please welcome Paul Buchheit to the stage.

Thank you, Justin, and thank all of you. I'm very excited to be here. London is an amazing city. I was eager to come speak here just if for no other reason than to visit, but it's good to talk to all of you.

So, you've heard a lot of great startup advice today, and this is gonna be something else. I often advise startups that it's better to seek deep appeal: create something that a few people love, even if most people don't get it right away. In that spirit, I've decided to share the technology and dreams that matter to me with the hope that it will be very appealing to the right person. This is, after all, the business defined by outliers. Someone in this room is going to create something very important—that's the person I'm hoping to reach.

We talk a lot about technology and its ability to transform and improve the world, but technology is more than just the transistors and algorithms. Those are just patterns on silicon. The technology that really drives the world are the patterns in your head. Those are the patterns that give rise to the patterns in silicon, the patterns in our society, and our whole concept of reality. Change those patterns, and you change your world. Maybe not overnight, but like steering the rudder on a great ship, a small change now makes a big difference later.

We often sweat life's big decisions, where's the little decisions that matter the most? The ones we make thousands of times a day, often without even realizing it. The big decisions are the inevitable result of those small decisions. They steered the ship into port, created the conditions that gave rise to the situation, and then perhaps we feel that our hand has been forced. The big decision must be made, but really, it was made by the thousands of small decisions leading up to it.

We all know the power of defaults. This is about my defaults, the things I try to keep top of mind and return to when I'm stuck, confused, or doubtful. It's an effort to tune and improve my patterns, my technology.

First, I don't know anything. That's a warning. If you take this all on my authority, then you're missing the point. You must own your own programming. Also, it's the first pattern. If I believe that I already know the answer and possess the truth, then I'm not genuinely open to learning larger truths. This is the danger of experience.

We already know better. We already know that an idea or business won't work. This is one reason that naive young founders are often the ones who start the most successful companies—they just don't know any better and they're often too arrogant to listen to those who do. I don't want to downplay the value of experience. This whole event is about sharing and learning from the experiences of others, but don't be limited by our experiences. Just because it didn't work in the past doesn't mean it won't work in the future. Likewise, what worked before may not work again.

This is especially important for startup founders. The best opportunities live in our collective blind spots. Most appear to be bad ideas or simply unimportant. If everyone could see the opportunity, someone else would have already taken it. In 1997, Larry and Sergey tried to sell Google for a million dollars. Fortunately, they were unable to find a buyer. The conventional wisdom of the time was that search was neither important nor valuable.

Of course, experience isn't the only danger; dogma and ideology are even worse. They provide us with the answers and put boundaries around our thinking. Ignoring the dogma invites ridicule or even punishment. I suspect that's why more ideological societies are less...