The creator of Gmail's questions to founders
Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, has a great question that he asks founders:
Imagine you have traveled 10 years into the future:
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What is the big exponential change that pertains to your startup?
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Why is your startup going to be the one who captures it?
I think every business at the moment has the blank slate to create something new and exciting particularly around AI. Espeically given that in this video from Logan Kilpatrick of Open AI he talks about the fact that OpenAI isn't really going to target specific verticals and is instead going to focus on creating general AI that can be applied to any industry.
Paul's background
He stayed at Google for 7 years and created Gmail from the idea that people didn’t need to go into their room to check their email, but it should be available online from anywhere. In 2001, following a company re-org, he proposed to Google that he wanted to work on something related to emails.
Taken from the video below.
This sentiment reminds me of the blog post by Sam Altman where he talks about the importance of thinking big and having big scary ideas. Rather than 10 years into the future, he suggests projecting yourself 20 years into the future and then thinking backwards from there.
