In the first part of this post, we saw how Google engineer Paul Buchheit’s 20% side project which led to the creation of Gmail had its origins in his itch to fix the buggy Web emails available in the market.

He wanted to add a then unheard of 1 gigabyte of storage space so that users would never have to spend hours to sort and delete their mails. Ryan Tate’s book The 20% Doctrine says this was roughly five hundred times the storage space offered by competitors Hotmail.com and Yahoo! Mail.

The question then was how to finance the expenses for this free extra storage space. Tate says Buchheit’s manager Marissa Mayer wanted him to charge users for the extra storage. But instead, Buchheit started looking at contextual advertisements like in the case of AdWords. AdWorks shows web searchers in Google, advertisements based on their search terms on the right hand side as well as on top of the search results page. For instance, if someone searched for ‘hotel’, advertisements for hotels would turn up.

Buchheit wondered if the same logic could be extended to email. What if ads were shown on the side of emails based on the contents of the mail, he thought. It was brilliant on the face of it, but equally sounded creepy, says Tate. Mayer expressed her misgivings bluntly. “People are going to think there are people here reading their emails and picking out the ads, and it’s going to be terrible,” she recalled thinking in a Stanford University podcast done later.

The podcast also recounted how Buchheit actually broke his promise to Mayer on not to work on combining advertisements with email. “I remember leaving, and when I walked out the door I stopped for a minute, and I remember I leaned back and I said, ‘So Paul, we agreed we are not exploring the whole ad thing now, right?’ And he was like, ‘Yup, right’.”

Tate says Buchheit broke his word almost immediately. “Over the next few hours, he hacked together a prototype of the ‘ad thing’, a system that would read your email and automatically find a related ad to display next to it.”

HE USED A PORN FILTER TO CREATE ADSENSE

Tate also gives the details about how Buchheit went about creating the AdSense building blocks. Just as he adapted the Usenet search experience to create Gmail, he started working with another tool, a porn filter no less, to create AdSense. This was basically a code editor he had created to screen for adult content. Probably it was used to switch on and switch off Safe Search filters in Google Search Settings. “Normally, the filter examined a batch of known porn pages and listed words that occurred disproportionately within those pages. Other pages containing those words were then assumed to be porn. Buchheit instead turned the filter on Gmail messages, using the resulting keywords to select advertisements from Google’s AdWords database.”

Tate advises youngsters who are following side projects to copy Buchheit’s method of adapting old work. “As tempting as it is start from a clean slate, always look for opportunities to use something old to create something fresh,” Tate advises.

HOW BUCHHEIT WON OVER THE DECISION MAKERS

Although Buchheit directly rebelled against his boss in putting together the delivery mechanism of what turned out to be AdSense, Tate says it helped that Google had a culture where results prevail over preconceptions.

When the next day Marissa Mayer opened her Gmail account, only to see ads running on the side of mails, her immediate instinct was to summon Buchheit for an explanation. But she delayed action, thinking he deserved the mercy of sleeping for a few more hours after having worked the whole night. Tate writes, “While she waited, Mayer checked her Gmail. There was an email from a friend who invited her to go hiking — and next to it, an ad for hiking boots. Another email was about Al Gore coming to speak at Stanford University — and next to it was an ad for books about Al Gore. Just a couple of hours after the system had been invented, Mayer grudgingly admitted to herself, AdWords was already useful, entertaining, and relevant.”

Tate writes that like Mayer, Larry Page and Sergei Brin loved AdSense. “In short order, the Google high command decided AdSense would be a top priority. It was a no-brainer: Google’s main revenue source, AdWords, placed contextual ads alongside search results. But search results were just 95% of Web views; AdSense promised to open up the other 95 percent to ads, since it could go inside any Web page,” Tate writes.

According to Tate, it took just six months for AdSense to launch. In June 2003, it was made available to the public as a widget that any publisher could attach to any Web page. It generates more than $10 billion per year for Google. Gmail itself, for which AdSense was first developed by Buchheit, launched to the public on April 1, 2004, in what was initially thought of as an April Fool’s Day practical joke. Today it’s probably the world’s largest free Webmail service, as well as the pivot around which the Google Apps for Business suite functions.

So what are the lessons which we can take from Buchheit’s innovations in the development of Gmail and AdSense for people who run 20% projects:

• First of all your product should solve an existing itch.
• Then you should have the smartness to secure the backing of powerful decision-makers. So sponsorship is important, especially if you want the company to commit its best resources to what may well turn out to be a long project.
• Also, be ready to back your ideas with data. Buchheit was ready show through his prototypes that his email was actually an improvement over existing ones in the market and also that his advertisement system worked.
• Be ready to adapt old work. Buchheit adapted his learnings from fixing search in Google Groups to create Gmail. He used his code editor to filter porn sites to filter email text to select relevant ads.
• Leverage access to system administrators and computer systems. Buchheit had special access to the databases powering Google AdWords. Without dipping into them, he could never have got the ads to run alongside his Gmail texts and develop AdSense.
• Try snatching resources under the cover of a more established project. Buchheit was supposedly working on the high profile email project. But to make it stand on its feet and fund it, he developed AdSense on the side.
• Finally, you can get away with a little bit of defiance of authority so long as there are results to show for it. Buchheit gave his then boss Marissa Mayer an explicit promise that he would not work on developing AdSense. But he went ahead and did it anyway. But she herself became a backer of AdSense when she realized that it worked.

e.o.m.

Google’s ‘20 percent policy’ has been much celebrated. Although people are skeptical about the company’s commitment to the policy now, it still remains in force, though it was never a written-down document.

This unwritten policy allows employees to spend up to one day a week or four days a month or 75 days a year on side projects which they want to pursue, using the company’s own resources. Many such projects later went on to become part of Google’s core offerings, including Gmail, AdSense, and Google News.

Google engineer Paul Buchheit was the person responsible for the creation of both AdSense and Gmail. Both began as side projects by Buchheit. Today, AdSense is Google’s second biggest revenue earner after AdWords. Gmail is probably the biggest web-based email in the world. It was revolutionary when it was introduced. It still leads from the front, and is the pivot around which Google Apps for Business suite on the cloud is offered by the company.

So successful and threatening did Google Apps for Business become for Microsoft’s core bread and butter Office suite that it was forced to offer a cloud version of the same in Office 365. This meant the Outlook email client had to be made available as a Web offering. So Microsoft ended up renaming Hotmail as Outlook. Look how a 20% project started by an engineer at Google ended up affecting even the company’s competitors!

Much of what I am going to write here is taken from Ryan Tate’s book, The 20% Doctrine, where the first chapter chronicles Buchheit’s Operation Gmail and AdSense.

BEGIN BY SOLVING A PERSONAL ITCH

Tate says 20% side projects usually begin as an attempt to satisfy some personal itch. In the early years of the aughts, Buchheit’s itch was clearly email. Most of the popular Web-based offerings majorly sucked for him. For one, their storage capacity was minimal and users had to constantly work at trimming and deleting mails. Also, search capabilities were sadly lacking in email. Most providers didn’t have the knowhow to search mails for keywords appearing in the body of the text.

Buchheit was conveniently placed. He had just finished fixing Google Groups, which was an archive of online conversations earlier known as Usenet. Buchheit’s fix involved making the archive searchable. He realized that email messages were fairly identical to messages in a  board like Google Groups. The ‘To:’, ‘From:’, ‘Date:’, and ‘Subject:’ fields were shared, and the formatting rules were common as well.

So Buchheit had an itch to solve, and he knew what to do. And it took him just a few hours to release the first version of Gmail. He shared it with a few colleagues, with code supporting only his own account. It would be good if the code supported our accounts too, they replied. And so, Gmail 2.0 was soon released, which supported search for users’ own email accounts.

He followed the ‘release early and release often principle’ which is today the defining theme of the agile software development school. An early innovation was ‘Conversation View’, which displayed all replies to an email message as a unified thread. This prevented colleagues from talking past one another as was the practice before. “They would have to read all prior replies to an email before they could send one of their own,” says Tate. Very early, Gmail distinguished itself by its search capabilities. As mentioned before, this was an area where other email providers sucked. But Gmail quickly nailed comprehensive email searches.

Another innovation by Buchheit was in the extensive use of JavaScript. It made Gmail feel like a desktop email client like Outlook, in contrast to other then Web emails like Hotmail.com. “For example, writing a message on Hotmail.com could easily require four page loads: one for ‘new message’, one to open your address book, one to search it, and one to pick a recipient. On Gmail, you clicked just once, and JavaScript generated the blank message form rightaway. If you started to type a friend’s name, Gmail would offer to autocomplete his email address. This felt like magic,” Tate writes in his book.

HOW TO SUCCEED WITH A 20% PROJECT, THE BUCCHEIT WAY

Tate writes that to succeed with a 20% project, “the trick is to find a way to make a small initial prototype and then take small steps forward”. Tech start-ups refer to this as the Minimum Viable Product, notes Tate. “The sooner you release, the sooner you get information from your users about where the product should go,” writes Tate. For instance, the Gmail churn was so intense that the front-end was rewritten about six times and the back-end about three times.

The next concern for a 20% project developer is to know when to stop. As in, when do you consider your project sufficiently developed that you are ready to ship? Buchheit took to heart the advice from then Google CEO Eric Schmidt that he should launch only after getting 100 happy users for Gmail inside Google. Buchheit later said that he and his team would approach people directly for their feedback, and if the bar was set too high, they would abandon that user saying they were unlikely to ever satisfy him. But in short order, they won over 100 happy users by making small tweaks to the code based on user feedback.

Humility is an important quality to have for such a project developer. Tate quotes Chris Wetherell, the lead developer of another 20% project called Google Reader (now shut down) as saying about the Gmail project, “Can you imagine working on it for two years? No daylight. Very little feeback. Many iterations, many. Some so bad that people thought, ‘This will never launch. This is the worst thing ever.’ I remember being in a meeting, and a founding member of Google said, ‘This is brand destroying. This will destroy our brand. This will crush our company’.”

But Buchheit never gave up even after such withering criticism from within the company. In the next part, we will take up how he created AdSense as a way of monetizing Gmail since it came with a till-then unheard of one gig of free storage for users. There are many lessons to be learned for innovators and entrepreneurs from understanding the strategies used by Paul Buchheit in getting the buy-in from the company’s top leadership to invest its best resources in both Gmail and AdSense.

 eo.m.