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Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit Leaves Facebook for Y Combinator
- harscoat 16y agoAt a time where Google, FB fight w/ $M to get best people, that's one of the greatest talent win one can imagine.
- qeorge 16y agoWow. This changes my opinion of Facebook's webmail offering significantly. Congrats to Mr. Buchheit and YC, you're both making out like bandits.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- louismg 16y agoPaul is a very smart guy. He is a tech visionary, and is extremely practical financially. He will be a huge boon for YC even more than he already has been, and a loss for Facebook. He previously stated he was not involved in any e-mail platform for Facebook, but the timing is interesting indeed. Great news.
- pg 16y agoI have no idea what Paul was working on at Facebook, but I believe the timing has to be coincidental, because we drove it. The reason this had to get announced today is that interviews for w2011 start on Monday.
- borism 16y agoWell, he was at FB at least 1 year, so there was some vesting I assume? Not entirely incidental, is it?
- kissickas 16y agoIn this interview he says he didn't work on it. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1900200 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1900200
- indrax 16y agoSo now hacker news will get a Project-Titan-killing email service?
- logicalmoron 16y agoI would LOVE to see that
- markbao 16y agologicalmoron@news.ycombinator.com
- palish 16y agoQuestion --- I haven't done much webdev stuff so this may sound silly, but --- why can't PMs work that way? Like, why can't I send markbao a private message by sending an email to markbao@news.ycombinator.com? And then the site could forward it on to his email address, or if the site wants to get fancy they'd store it in a database and display them as "comments" in the target user's "editing profile" screen (whenever you edit your own profile). More than that though, I'd like to learn about the nitty-gritty of e-mail. As a game developer I do mostly C++ application code, so everyone else probably has way more knowledge than I... But for example I'd like to be able to embed the ability for my programs to send emails (as a debugging mechanism). Or even receive emails! (Imagine taking down some number of your servers, for patching purposes, by sending a "console command" as an email to servers+someadminpassword@yourservice.com. Or running queries on your servers by sending the query as an email, and then they email back the response. How would I write a C++ function like: bool SendEmail( const tchar* destination_email_address, const tchar* subject, const tchar* body );
- mweatherill 16y agoA primary reason why a site wouldn't support PMs to markbao@news.ycombinator.com is that there is no access control. The address would get spammed too easily from senders with no affiliation with Hacker News. The current mechanism of only supporting messaging within the site limits this.
- swah 16y agoIs Y Combinator a full-time job? How long did Paul stayed on Facebook, a couple months? This is odd no?
- cliffchang 16y agohttp://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfee... FF was acquired about 15 months ago, so that's about how long Paul was at Facebook. Also, I imagine being a partner in YC is very much a fulltime job.
- logicalmoron 16y agoHey Swah, I pinged Anthony (the writer of the article) to get his butt in here and answer your questions. You might get a direct answer more quickly if you comment directly on the site or email him, though. In the mean time, thanks for reading!
- swah 16y agoThanks, but I find this a much better place to discuss than in blog comments :)
- anthonyha 16y agoWhat Cliff said. Paul didn't stay at Facebook very long, but it was more than a couple months.
- Harj 16y ago
- chevas 16y agoMake Titan then bail, awesomeness.
- bigbang 16y agoCongrats Paul. Great news for startups in general.
- MaysonL 16y agoActually, that should be "Congrats Pauls". Great move for both of them (as well as the startup world).
- brandnewlow 16y ago"Y Combinator, the increasingly famous Silicon Valley incubator.." What an odd modifier.
- devinj 16y agoNot particularly. What's odd about it? It's slightly more complex than desirable for good writing, but it's certainly well within normal bounds for size, especially for news articles. News articles do that sort of thing a lot.
- brandnewlow 16y agoIncreasingly famous just seems like an odd thing to use to describe YCombinator in the lead of a news story, out of all the things the writer could use to add context. YCombinator is "famous"?
- swombat 16y agoYep, YCombinator is famous. It's been featured in many mainstream publications, it's known around the globe in pretty much every country that has a startup community. I'd call that famous.
- tmsh 16y agoGreat, clarifying talk at Startup School 2009: http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/24/startup-school-gmail-friendfeed-creator-paul-buchheit-on-winging-it/ http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/24/startup-school-gmail-frien... Honestly, a large part of that talk has stayed with me and kept my main outside-of-work project quietly in the background. I'd like to think I had the confidence and motivation before that talk. But somehow that talk just clicked for me. And has encouraged me to keep at it. His approach is sort of what we all, I think, aspire for. A really clear, honest core outlook. And then entrepreneurship as bottom-up programming. It's actually much more difficult than it seems -- because you have to look ahead compared to a lot of people and then insist on relearning things in a bottom-up approach. You see it with all great founders (Zuck, etc.). On the outside, they seem lucky. But if you look more closely, they have a habit of putting themselves in the right position by looking two or three steps ahead (as I think Adam D'Angelo's talk @ Startup School 2010 was partly getting at). But then they insist on revalidating things from the ground up (e.g., Paul B's 'winging it' and deriving the overgeneralized nature of advice without a particular context, etc.). Anyway, they all make it look easy. But if you're smart, I think you look at them as real inspiration in terms of getting things done the right way.
- Jun8 16y agoForget about Facebook, etc, YC is the news. I've been following it (and HN) for close to three years now, it went from a locally cool incubator to a place where people look up for world-class innovation. Someone should write an in-depth story about the rise of YC, would be an excellent read!
- jey 16y ago"YC now has a second partner who’s pretty famous and respected in the tech world." Er, 3 + 1 == 2? Or maybe they mean "web startup world"?
- radioactive21 16y agoWow, very interesting, now there is a whole different angle to FB's Titan killing gmail system. Why would Paul leave just before launch? To me it means Paul either was never involved even though he was told he would be, or it's crap and he's leaving before the shit hits the fan.
- mkramlich 16y agoPG, Robert Morris and Paul Buchheit all at one company. Talk about hacktastic overload. In a good way. :)
- andrewhillman 16y agofacebook should have tied him up with a long term contract. I thought ff was acquired for the talent not the platform. big loss esp if they acquired for talent and not platform.
- iuguy 16y agoSo after setting up Project Titan does that mean that news.yc is going to get a brand new messaging system?