
Gmail Creator Paul Buchheit Leaves Facebook for Y Combinator - hornokplease
http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/12/y-combinator-paul-graham-harj-taggar/
======
qeorge
Wow. This changes my opinion of Facebook's webmail offering significantly.

Congrats to Mr. Buchheit and YC, you're both making out like bandits.

~~~
louismg
Paul 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
I 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
Well, he was at FB at least 1 year, so there was some vesting I assume? Not
entirely incidental, is it?

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indrax
So now hacker news will get a Project-Titan-killing email service?

~~~
logicalmoron
I would LOVE to see that

~~~
markbao
logicalmoron@news.ycombinator.com

~~~
palish
Question --- 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
A 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.

~~~
mkramlich
Sometimes it's interesting to think about how much better the world could be
if we could design things without worrying about griefers.

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harscoat
At a time where Google, FB fight w/ $M to get best people, that's one of the
greatest talent win one can imagine.

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tmsh
Great, clarifying talk at Startup School 2009:

[http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/24/startup-school-gmail-
frien...](http://venturebeat.com/2009/10/24/startup-school-gmail-friendfeed-
creator-paul-buchheit-on-winging-it/)

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.

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Jun8
Forget 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!

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swah
Is Y Combinator a full-time job? How long did Paul stayed on Facebook, a
couple months? This is odd no?

~~~
cliffchang
[http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-
friendfee...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/)

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.

~~~
jayp
rtm and trevor blackwell have other fulltime commitments.

~~~
pg
PB is going to work full-time though, at least in the spiky sense that Harj
and Jessica and I do.

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brandnewlow
"Y Combinator, the increasingly famous Silicon Valley incubator.."

What an odd modifier.

~~~
devinj
Not 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
Increasingly 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
Yep, 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.

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bigbang
Congrats Paul. Great news for startups in general.

~~~
MaysonL
Actually, that should be "Congrats Paul _s_ ". Great move for both of them (as
well as the startup world).

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jey
"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"?

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radioactive21
Wow, 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.

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iuguy
So after setting up Project Titan does that mean that news.yc is going to get
a brand new messaging system?

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andrewhillman
facebook 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.

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mkramlich
PG, Robert Morris and Paul Buchheit all at one company. Talk about hacktastic
overload. In a good way. :)

