How Gmail happened: The inside story, as revealed by creator Paul Buchheit

The following is an interview from Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston. The excerpt was provided by Apress Publishing. You can buy a copy of the book here.

Jessica Livingston: Take me back to how things got started. Was Gmail a side project or commissioned by Google?

Paul Buchheit: A little bit of both, actually. I started working on email software a long time ago. I think it was maybe 1996, but it was just a little project. I had all these ideas that never really went anywhere. Oddly enough, I think I was calling it Gmail at the time, for some other reason. It was just a random project – not necessarily the predecessor to Gmail – but it was something that I’d been thinking about because I’d been sort of unhappy with email for a long time. It was before Hotmail and I was in college at the time. If you wanted to check your email, you’d have to go back to your dorm room.

I thought, “That’s so stupid. I should be able to just check it anywhere.” So I wanted to make some kind of web-based email. But I really didn’t know what I was doing, so it didn’t go anywhere. I wrote something, but it was never useful and never got off the ground. So fast-forward to much later: I was here at Google and I had worked on Google Groups, which is not exactly the same, but it’s related.

After the first generation of Google Groups had mostly wrapped up, they asked me if I wanted to build some type of email or personalization product. It was a pretty non-specific project charter. They just said, “We think this is an interesting area.” Of course, I was excited to work on that.

Livingston: So they didn’t ask for an email product?

Buchheit: They were very general – just kind of saying, “Yeah, we think there’s something interesting to do here,” but it wasn’t like they gave me a list of features. People really weren’t sure what it was. And this was when Google was still pretty much thought of as exclusively search, so even the idea of doing something like email was strange. A lot of people were kind of unsure. At this point, it wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but at the time it was a little bit controversial.

For quite a while I was just working on it by myself. I actually started out with some of the Groups code, just because I was familiar with it. I built the first version of Gmail in 1 day, just using the Groups code, but it only searched my email. I released that to some Googlers and people said it was useful, so it progressed from there.

Livingston: When you built this first version, was your vision to create a better email program or was it to build something that would allow you to search through your emails?

Buchheit: Both. Search is obviously very important. It was central to what we were doing at the time and it’s really useful for managing your email. I had ambitions of doing more than that, but search seemed like the natural first step – it was one of the things that was most obviously a problem. Everyone here had lots of email. This company is a little bit email crazy. I get 500 emails a day. So there was a very big need for search.

That was the most obvious thing that I could do, and it was also one of the easiest. So I built this first version and it only searched my email, but even that was useful for other people, because we had a lot of the same email. So then they said, “It would be even better if I could search my own email.”

Livingston: You could search for keywords, senders, etc?

Buchheit: Yes, it was free text, just like Google is, but for email.