Paul Buchheit

A Third Solution

The Gift

It's often said that you should live every day as though it's your last. That always seemed a little impractical to me. But when my brothe...

Eight years today

The car in front of me kept hesitating. The driver couldn't seem to decide where to turn. Up ahead I could see that the light was green, but...

I am nothing

On a scale of one to ten, how good of a cog are you? How well do you function in your assigned role? How much of a man or woman are you? How...

Paul Buchheit: Serendipity finds you

Here is an interesting comment from Hacker News, on a story about someone turning down an early Google offer: Similar thing happened t...

Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome

My recent predictions about which Google products will succeed (and which won't) are causing people to think that I'm anti-Google, which mak...

The quest for freedom and safety: Why I donated $100,000 to YesOn19

The common theme uniting most of my efforts is the desire to be free. One of the reasons I'm so interested in startups is that they give peo...

Paul Buchheit: The two paths to success

The recent WSJ article on the supposedly Chinese style of parenting has generated a lot of interesting discussion. The most amusing comment...

What To Do With Your Millions

If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.

By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste t...

My Startup School Europe talk: The Technology

Note: This is the talk I gave at Startup School Europe, which was held last Saturday in London. You've heard a lot of great startup advi...

Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. "Hacking"

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex ...

Paul Buchheit: Angel investing, my first three years

I started investing in startups with the assumption that I don't know what I'm doing (which is always true), but that the only way to actual...

Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa

I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or...

Paul Buchheit: Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step

Is your web server using using gzip encoding ? Surprisingly, many are not. I just wrote a little script to fetch the 30 external links off n...

Paul Buchheit: Communicating with code

Some people can sell their ideas with a brilliant speech or a slick powerpoint presentation. I can't. Maybe that's why I'm skeptical of idea...

So I finally tried Wave...

Last week, TechCrunch published a story about me not yet trying Google Wave (" Gmail Creator Thinks Email Will Last Forever. And Hasn't Trie...

Paul Buchheit: Ideas vs Judgment and Execution: Climbing the Mountain

How much is an idea worth? Many normal people assume that ideas are valuable, and that if only they could think of one, they might be able t...

Paul Buchheit: The Cloud OS

My recent remark about the future of ChromeOS generated a surprisingly passionate response . Some said that my prediction was obvious and b...

Overnight success takes a long time

For some reason, this weekend has seen a lot of talk about what FriendFeed is/isn't/should be doing (see Louis Gray and others ). One pers...

Paul Buchheit: Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)

Our lives are full of decisions that force us to balance risk and opportunity: should you take that new job, buy that house, invest in that ...

The most important thing to understand about new products and startups

First, a quote from Marc Andreessen's " Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters " If you ask entrepreneurs or VCs which of te...

Paul Buchheit: The first thing that you need to understand about humans

Humans aren't rational -- they rationalize. And I don't just mean "some of them" or "other people". I'm talking about everyone. We have a "l...

Paul Buchheit: Tablet thoughts

I don't know anything about Apple's tablet, and I generally don't pay much attention to the speculation about their unannounced products. Ho...

Facebook knows who you are, and that's worth more than you think

It's very fashionable to declare that Facebook is an over-hyped fad and will never make any real money, certainly not enough to justify its ...

Paul Buchheit: Open as in water, the fluid necessary for life

"Open" is a great thing. Everyone likes it. Unfortunately, nobody agrees what open is. There are many meanings, but in general, I think "ope...

Paul Buchheit: Is there more to life than money?

Whenever there is a discussion about joining a startup vs working at regular job, someone will defend the boring 9-5 job by saying, "there i...

Paul Buchheit: Left brain, Right brain, and the other half of the story

In my head, this post and yesterday's post on risk and opportunity are deeply connected, but logically they needed to be split apart. The...

The question is wrong

On "Coding Horror", Jeff Atwood asked this question : Let's say, hypothetically speaking, you met someone who told you they had two childre...