Best Buds: Gmail Creator Joins Facebook Co-Founder, Donates 100K To Legalize Marijuana
It's pretty easy being green if you're a Silicon Valley notable apparently. We just got word that Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail, Friendfeed and now a Facebook employee, has surpassed Facebook co …
Context & Ripple Effects
Paul Buchheit has been building a public identity at Facebook all year. He joined after selling FriendFeed to the company, spent February batting down rumors he was building a rival email platform (he said he was not working on a new email product), then in May publicly defended Facebook's case for more openness and less privacy, and by September he was arguing Facebook had the potential to be worth more than Google.
The donation places him, alongside a Facebook co-founder, among the named backers of marijuana legalization — a rare step into direct political spending for an engineer whose public profile until now has been product and platform commentary rather than campaign finance.
First-order effects
- Buchheit converts his post-Google and FriendFeed windfall into $100K of campaign funding, putting a current Facebook employee on the record financially in a contentious social-policy fight.
- The joint gift ties two Facebook-affiliated names together as donors, extending the company's alumni network beyond hiring and acquisitions into political causes.
Second-order effects
- With Facebook already absorbing a wave of ex-Google talent since at least its aggressive Googler recruiting run in 2007, each high-profile hire now carries a personal political footprint that sits alongside the company's own lobbying positions.
- Other wealthy Valley engineers face a soft expectation to declare where they stand on similar measures, as peer donations become the visible benchmark.
Third-order effects
- If founder wealth keeps flowing into ballot-measure campaigns, individual technologists emerge as a recurring funding base for social-policy initiatives, operating independently of corporate PACs and trade associations.
- Personal donor activity by employees of a single fast-scaling company blurs the line between the firm's public brand and its executives' private politics.
The trend: Silicon Valley founder wealth is beginning to flow directly into social-policy ballot campaigns, with individual executives rather than companies writing the checks.