Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail, says dominant tech companies ride exponential shifts: Microsoft had microcomputers, Google had the internet, Facebook had social networking. He asks founders two questions: what's fundamentally different in your space ten years from now, and how will you be the one to own that position?
Chapters
So I thought a lot about what is it that makes these companies that are Google, Netflix, Amazon, what is the.
Thing that gets you there?
I don't think it's that you're smarter necessarily. It helps to be smart. It isn't that you're harder working. 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 in the world.
So like, you know, intel and Microsoft.
In the early days, Apple were kind.
Of sitting on top of this, like.
The rise of microcomputers, right? What made Microsoft a big company is that they got in early on microcomputers and then they kind of owned that space. If it weren't for microcomputers, like they wouldn't have been able to do that.
And likewise, you know, Google obviously was.
Sitting on the growth of the Internet.
Part of the reason other people got.
It wrong was, was they weren't thinking about the fact that the amount of information online was increasing exponentially. And so we were gonna have to get a lot better at organizing it. Right? Like Google's mission from the beginning is to like organize and make useful all the world's information.
So what I try to have the founders, I kind of give them a two part question. And so the first part is like, let's say I hop in my time.
Machine, which is hopefully a DeLorean, and.
I like travel 10 years into the future.
So I get out, it's the year 2028, I take a look around. What about the world of 2028 is fundamentally different from 2018?
And this should be as it pertains to their startup. Cause obviously there's gonna be a bunch of changes, but as it pertains to your startup, but factoring out your startup. Because 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 that position.
And hold on to it. But if it wasn't them, I guarantee.
Someone else would be. In that ecological space, there's an evidence, there's inevitability, these companies will exist in some form.
And maybe you're making it a little bit faster or a little bit better.
Or something like that, but that position is going to exist.
And then the second part of the question is simply like, how are you.
