How Gmail Happened (2014)

The first true landmark service to emerge from Google since its search engine debuted in 1998, Gmail didn’t just blow away Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the dominant free webmail services of the day. With Gmail–which was originally code-named Caribou, borrowing the name of a mysterious corporate project occasionally alluded to in Dilbert–the first useful thing Buchheit built was a search engine for his own email. Gmail’s first product manager, Brian Rakowski, learned about the service from his boss, Marissa Mayer, on his first day at Google in 2002, fresh out of college.

Source: time.com