Andrew Warner is an Internet entrepreneur and the founder of Mixergy. He interviews successful people to learn how they did it.

I asked Paul Buchheit for advice on launching startups because he fathered two of this decade’s most successful online products: Gmail and FriendFeed. As part of his work on Gmail, he also developed the first prototype of AdSense, Google’s ad program. And he’s known as the engineer who suggested Google’s now famous motto: "Don’t be evil."

Here’s some of what he had to say (also, see the video below):

You can find a simple, scaled-down way of launching anything. "Tesla [the financially struggling electric car startup] spent a lot of money making these cars, but there are people making electric cars in their garages. So it’s always possible to do a scaled-back version of what you have in mind."