Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

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Today is September 14, 2009, and my guest is Paul Buhite, creator and lead developer of Gmail,

and founder of Friend Feed, which was recently acquired by Facebook. Paul, welcome to Econ Talk.

Hi Russ. Tell us how Gmail got started.

Well, basically, they just gave me the task of working on some kind of email or personal information

system, and it was very much a wide open kind of request. There was a feeling that there was a

tremendous amount of useful information that was locked away inside of email, and that there's

a lot of room for innovation. But there wasn't necessarily a clear idea of what we were building

from the start, and so I essentially just got started by building a system to index and search my

own email, and then we iterated from there and just continually added new features, tried new things

out, and after actually using and iterating on the product for a couple of years, we got to

the point where it was something that we felt was ready to launch. How long did that take?

Roughly. Say a couple of years, was it? Yeah, it was actually a relatively long process.

I, to start with, it was just myself working on it, and that was late 2001 that I started

work on it, and so it was a little bit slow from the start, and we explored a lot of different ideas

that we never launched in the product, and some of the things did launch, but much later, so for

example, we prototyped the IAM integration that eventually didn't make it out into the initial

release, but then was eventually added about maybe a year later after the initial launch.

...