Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it …
Andrew popped a stellar interview with Paul Buchheit (The Father of Gmail) on Mashable and agreed to share it with us, too. Thx Andrew!

5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed

by Andrew Warner, Mixergy

I asked Paul Buchheit for advice on launching startups because he fathered two of this decade’s most successful online products: Gmail and FriendFeed. As part of his work on Gmail, he also developed the first prototype of AdSense, Google’s ad program. And he’s known as the engineer who suggested Google’s now famous motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Here’s some of what he had to say (also, see the video above):

1. Launch a scaled-back version
You can find a simple, scaled-down way of launching anything. “Tesla [the financially struggling electric car startup] spent a lot of money making these cars, but there are people making electric cars in their garages. So it’s always possible to do a scaled-back version of what you have in mind.”

2. Notice sluggish competitors
When he considered building Gmail, he looked at Yahoo! Mail, the leading Web-based email provider and noticed that “they were actively making their products worse. Which I think is a really good indicator of an opportunity. Yahoo! decreased their [email storage capacity] from 6 megabytes to 4 megabytes.”

The free email providers at the time “were trying to push you into their paid accounts. And in general, people had a low opinion of Web mail because they thought it couldn’t be good.”

3. You don’t need virality if your product is good
“I think the best kind of virality,” he said, “is a product that people like so much that they just want to tell people about it.”

“Think about Google search itself. Where’s the virality? There is none. But people just love the product, so they tell their friends, and somehow it just grew to where it is now, with some huge share of the market.”

4. Follow your passion
Instead of setting goals, he said, “I have a different approach. I look to see what things I enjoy doing and just try to figure out how to spend my time doing things that I enjoy.”

“I like writing code. I like building product. I like making things that people like.”

5. Sometimes you have to go off on your own
“Inside of a big company like Google,” he said, “you can do just about anything and a million people will show up just because the Google name is attached. That’s kind of like cheating. What you make doesn’t have to be good.”

“Consequently, of course, Google has to be careful that you’re not just releasing random things. That means that there tends to be a lot more process to prevent you from doing those random things. Because that would harm their brand over time.”

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