Things That Don't Scale, The Software Edition

**Michael Seibel** (0:00)
We'll get a founder that's like, oh, how do I like test my product before I launch to make sure it's gonna work? And I always come back and tell the founders the same thing, like, if you have a house and it's got full of pipes, and you know some of the pipes are broken and they're gonna leak, you can spend a lot of time trying to check every pipe, guess whether it's broken or not and repair it, or you can turn the water on. And like, you'll know, like you'll know exactly the work to be done. Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today, we're gonna talk about what does it mean to do things that don't scale, the software edition. In this episode, we're gonna go through a number of great software and product hacks that software companies used to figure out how to make their product work when perhaps they didn't have time to really build the right thing.
Now, Dalton, probably the master of this is the person we work with, the guy named Paul Buhite, who in front of this term, the 90-10 solution.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:00)
He always says something like, how can you get 90% of the benefit for 10% of the work? Always. This is what he always puts on to people when they tell them it's really hard to build something or it'll take too long to code it. He'll just always push on this point. And, you know, founders don't love it.
Right, would you say that's a fair assessment, Michael?

**Michael Seibel** (1:22)
That's a fair assessment, yes, founders hate it.

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:26)
But tell the audience why it's worth listening to the guy. Like, why does he have the credibility to say that to people?

**Michael Seibel** (1:32)
Well, PB is the inventor of Gmail, and as kind of a side project at Google, he invented something that 1.5 billion people on earth actively use.
And he literally did it doing things that don't scale. So I'll start the story and then please take it over. So as I remember it, PB was pissed about the Gmail product, the Google product he was using, sorry, the email product he was using. And so Google had this newsletter product. The first version of Gmail, he basically figured out how to put his email into this Google Groups UI.
And as he tells the story, he kind of, his eureka moment was when he could start reading his own email in this UI. And then from that point on, he stopped using his old email client. And what I loved about this is that as he tells the story, every email feature that any human would want to use, he just started building from that point. And so he would talk to YC Batch and he's like, and then I wanted to write an email. And so I built writing emails. And if you know PB, he could have got a couple of days reading emails without replying at all. So he didn't need writing emails to start.
I remember him telling the first time he got his coworker, literally his deskmate or something to try to use it. And his deskmate is like, this thing's pretty good. It loads really fast. It's really great. The only problem is PB, it has your email in it. And I want it to have my email.
And he was like, oh shit, okay, I got to build that.
And so then it started spreading throughout Google. And do you remember when it broke?

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:29)
No, what happened?

**Michael Seibel** (3:30)
Oh, so he told this story where like one day PB came in late to work, which is, you know, knowing PB every day, you know, and everyone was looking at him really weird.
And they're all like a little pissed. And he got to his desk, and someone came over to him and was like, don't you realize that Gmail has been down like all morning? And PB was like, no, I just got to work, I didn't know.
And so he's like trying to fix it, trying to fix it. And then his co-workers see him like grab a screwdriver and go to the server room. And it was like, they were like, oh, God, why do we trust PB with our email? Like, we're totally screwed. And I think he figured out like there was a corrupted hard drive. And I remember at that point of story, he was like, he says, and that day I learned that people really think email is important, and it's got to always work.

**Dalton Caldwell** (4:21)
It's like, perfect, that is definitely the reason. I think the reason he did it, man, is because he liked to run Linux on the desktop, and he didn't want to run Outlook. Like the Google suits were trying to get him to run Outlook on Windows. And he was like, I don't really want to run Windows.