Buchheit’s lucky streak as an angel (and a founder)

Gmail creator, FriendFeed co-founder and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit has not only has had a stellar career as an entrepreneur and engineer. He’s also proving to be a savvy angel investor with four acquisitions of his portfolio companies in six months.

Yesterday’s acquisition of mobile e-mail startup reMail by Google marked yet another home run for Buchheit, who came up with the search giant’s “Don’t be evil” slogan. He was also an early investor in both Appjet, which was also acquired by Google in December, and Mint, which was bought by Intuit for $170 million in September. Then, of course, Buchheit’s own company FriendFeed was bought by Facebook in a talent acquisition in August.

Mint founder Aaron Patzer credited Buchheit with helping him think about the appropriate software architecture for his consumer finance site.

“He pushed us to prioritize performance and search speed and helped us to find ways to scale Mint successfully,” Patzer said.

reMail chief executive Gabor Cselle said Buchheit helped him hone his product down to its core essentials. Buchheit himself is a strong advocate of keeping products simple and focused.

“Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh endured my slide deck on our multi-step plan for global email domination, and pointed out that instead I should build something small, simple, and useful. It worked,” Cselle wrote in a blog post announcing the reMail acquisition yesterday.