Startups succeed by quickly identifying and fixing what's broken, then repeating the process.

• 💡
  00:00

  Paul Buchheit's 9010 solution encourages quick hacks to get 90% of the benefit for 10% of the work, as seen with Gmail's success.

  • Software companies use hacks to make their product work when they don't have time to build the right thing.
  • Paul Buhit's 9010 solution encourages people to get 90% of the benefit for 10% of the work, although founders don't always appreciate it.
  • PB invented Gmail as a side project, building features that users wanted and eventually it spread throughout Google.
• 🔧
  03:38

  PB's quick fix of a corrupted hard drive showed the importance of email and Gmail's invite system was a necessity, not a genius growth hack.

  • People were shocked to see PB grab a screwdriver and go to the server room to fix a corrupted hard drive, realizing how important email is and how it must always work perfectly.
  • Gmail's invite system was a necessity due to lack of server space, not a genius growth hack.
• 🤖
  05:46

  Facebook overcame the challenge of scaling from a single user's table to hundreds of millions of people by writing code to bounce between schools and building a global user's table.

  • Startup founders used to have to physically drive to data centers to reboot servers when their sites crashed.
  • The new neighbor in the data center was Facebook, with janky servers labeled with the names of universities, one of which was Stanford.
  • Facebook scaled by having a separate php instance, my sequel server, and memcache instance for each school.
  • Facebook overcame the challenge of scaling from a single user's table to hundreds of millions of people by writing code to bounce between schools and building a global user's table.
• 💻
  09:51

  Kyle and Emmitt developed an algorithm to propagate a stream across multiple video servers to handle high traffic, resulting in a few seconds delay for viewers.

  • Engineering a live video product to handle 20x more traffic than normal is difficult, but can be done with the right hacks.
  • Kyle and Emmitt worked together to figure out how to cache parts of the page, making some parts dynamic and others static, to handle high traffic.
  • Friendster was trying to hire engineers to run MySQL threads, while MySpace used a "do things that don't scale" solution to show users their extended network.
  • We developed an algorithm to propagate a stream across multiple video servers to serve all viewers, and to spin up more video servers as the stream's traffic grows.
  • A website communicated the number of viewers to the video system, allowing it to pre-populate the stream to the necessary video servers, resulting in a delay of a few seconds for viewers.
• 💻
  15:06

  We hacked existing open source tools to create a music streaming site & figured out how to stream live video for free.

  • Imeem hacked existing open source video tools to create a music streaming site with no video, transcoding audio uploads into video files.
  • We figured out how to stream live video for free by establishing free peering relationships with ISPs around the world.
• 🤝
  17:52

  Create a free peering relationship with ISPs to save money, and use a website to get free translations from your community.

  • You can connect to servers and save money by creating a free peering relationship with some ISPs.
  • An ISP was blocking free video streaming, so a website in San Francisco put up a message blocking the video and providing a phone number and email address, which worked quickly.
  • We got translations for our product for free by creating a website where our community could volunteer to translate strings into their local language.
• 🤔
  20:31

  Google created MapReduce to address the issue of their index becoming stale due to the web growing too quickly.

  • Google's original algorithm worked well, but as the internet grew, they struggled to keep up with the increasing number of web pages.
  • The batch process to index the web failed and took several months to fix.
  • Google created MapReduce under duress when their index became stale due to the web growing too fast and users not realizing it.
• 🔧
  23:36

  Startups succeed by quickly identifying and fixing what's broken, then repeating.

  • Turning on the water is the best way to quickly identify and fix any broken pipes in a house.
  • Startups succeed by turning on the water, fixing what's broken, and repeating, rather than having a plan and writing it all down.