A Conversation with Google Docs Founders Sam Schillace, Steve Newman, and Claudia Carpenter

When Sam Schillace, Steve Newman, and Claudia Carpenter built Writely—their browser-based word processor, which became the basis for Google Docs—they saw a future that most of us didn’t yet appreciate. It’s been 20 years since Sam, Steve, and Claudia launched the Writely beta. To celebrate that achievement, they joined Tim to reflect on the success of their revolutionary product and discuss what it might teach us about the current moment.Sam, Steve, and Claudia solved a problem people had been complaining about for years (version control in shared docs), and did so by putting together available technology in a new way where suddenly everything just clicked. (They also did it quite quickly—as Steve pointed out, it was only a year from Writerly’s inception to its acquisition.) They shared some of that history with Tim, with Sam explaining why fast experimentation and “learning by doing” was so valuable to their project, and remains so in the AI era.They also got into tackling the hard problem of collaboration (which is bigger and more human than a single tool can account for), and what AI might make possible that we couldn’t do before; designing paradigm-shifting products that are still easy to use, and why product designers should always keep laziness top of mind; the new economics of AI software development; and why current AI products may be the equivalent of CD-ROMS. And they had some advice for those looking to build products with AI. As Claudia noted, you can’t just try to “bolt on” AI; you have to find the use cases that you previously “just couldn’t even think about doing that AI lets us do now.”Tim also provided some context in advance of their conversation. Check it out on Radar.