paul buchheit on the advent of gmail, insurgents vs. gatekeepers, the future of san francisco, ai,

An insurgent is never going to be successful working for gatekeepers, because from the gatekeeper perspective, the person just lacks maturity. They're doing these things that are obviously risky. That's the nature of throwing bombs: you don't exactly know what's going to happen.

Famously, we had one line of JavaScript in the entire product, which was when you go to the homepage, there was one snippet of JavaScript that would put the focus in the search box. That was the only JavaScript at Google. So Google had this kind of anti-JavaScript thing, that was also partially technical snobbery. One of the senior technical people said, “You can never scale anything in JavaScript, it’s basically just shit, the project will just turn to garbage.” And actually Eric Schmidt even said, “Oh yeah, my friend at some other big company tried this, it doesn't work.” There was a lot of ‘This has been done before, you just don't know why it can't work.’

Gatekeepers are one hundred percent anchored to stopping bad things from happening, and they have no concept that when you stop bad things from happening, you are inherently stopping good things from happening as well. You can't ever deliver something that's 100 percent good. If you deliver 80 percent good, that's pretty good. But if you try to go for 100% — if you try to be perfect — what you get is nothing. Innovation is inherently not clean.