Microsoft, every mention
64 scenes (2020), the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2020 anyone Harry Stebbings 480Rory O'Driscoll 98Jason Lemkin 70Tomasz Tunguz 24David Cahn 24Hadi Partovi 21Raz Herzberg 19Howie Liu 19Frank Quattrone 19Kaz Nejatian 16
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst
- ▶ 0:34 Harry Stebbings Finally, before SAP, Quentin spent an incredible 20 years at Microsoft in a variety of different roles, and I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Hemant, Catherine Boyle, Brent at Camus, and Ajit at ThoughtSpot for some amazing…
- ▶ 3:22 Quentin Clark And I was at Microsoft, and Microsoft before Satya was a little insular. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:46 Harry Stebbings So Shishir told me that there were some incredible war stories from the multiple different amazing companies that you worked at, from Microsoft to SAP to Dropbox. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:04 Harry Stebbings Especially the 20 years at Microsoft. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:52 Quentin Clark We lost the Windows franchise to Apple.
- ▶ 25:58 Quentin Clark I ran 8000 person division at SAP, a couple thousand people at Dropbox, a couple thousand people at Microsoft, lots of different products, lots of different efforts.
20VC: Figma Founder, Dylan Field on How Leadership Needs To Evolve with Scale, The Transition from Application to Platform & The Future of Remote Work, Education and Digital Spaces
- ▶ 3:52 Dylan Field I got to work at Microsoft Research as a research assistant to Dana Boyd, which was a really cool experience.
20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset
- ▶ 9:43 Reid Hoffman I have no, no operational authority, and it's one of the things that's, like, helped being on the Microsoft board, because Satya feels perfectly comfortable having me meet with, like, everybody, like, people in company, product groups, and…
20VC: Slack Founder Stewart Butterfield on Leadership Styles, Decision-Making, The 3 Levels of Wealth, IPOs vs Direct Listings & Why Effective Entrepreneurship is Like Parkour
- ▶ 18:26 Stewart Butterfield That's really ingrained, and I tried to explain this to people as the way that you approach Minesweeper, And now we're getting to a world where fewer and fewer people are familiar with Minesweeper, the classic Windows game, but for those…
20VC: Accel's Dan Levine on The Current State of Seed & Series A, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Solo Capitalists and Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed & Market, People and Product; What To Prioritise?
- ▶ 2:35 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investments have IPO'd like Beyond Meat, or been bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
- ▶ 10:04 Harry Stebbings Poor sense of skill and judgment around using Microsoft Excel.
20VC: Lessons from Investing in Uber and Airbnb, How To Think Through Bundling vs Unbundling, Late Stage Funds Moving Earlier, Early Stage Funds Moving Later& The Mechanics of Venture That Founders Should Know with Derek Zanutto, General Partner @ Capital
- ▶ 18:02 Derek Zanutto In terms of, you'd have a platform like an IBM, an SAP, an Oracle, Microsoft, holding, storing data.
20VC: Zach Weinberg on Whether A Company is a Democracy, The Importance of Ownership, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed and How he Approaches Both Risk and Personal Capital Allocation
- ▶ 18:17 Zach Weinberg I would say stick me in Excel and I'm on the bottom end of the spectrum of knowing how to build a model.
20VC: What Is Founder Narrative Fit and How to Detect and Invest In It, How To Avoid Consensus Thinking When Investing, Price Sensititivity; When To Pay Up vs Stay Disciplined & From New York Times To General Catalyst; Why Venture and Journalism are Not S
- ▶ 2:41 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investments have IPO'd like Beyond Meat, or been bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
- ▶ 45:53 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investments have IPO'd like Beyond Meat, or been bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
20VC: The 4 Phases of Effective Decision-Making, The No 1 Quality of Good Decisions, How To Approach Effective OKR Setting, & How To Optimise and Improve Your Operating Cadence with Shishir Mehrotra, Founder & CEO @ Coda
- ▶ 0:35 Harry Stebbings Before Google, Shashir was with Microsoft for six years as a director of program management, and Shashir also serves on the board of Spotify.
- ▶ 3:20 Shishir Mehrotra Then after that, I spent about six years at Microsoft.
- ▶ 3:23 Shishir Mehrotra I worked on Office, Windows, and then SQL Server, a wide variety of different projects in lots of different spaces.
- ▶ 3:23 Shishir Mehrotra I worked on Office, Windows, and then SQL Server, a wide variety of different projects in lots of different spaces.
- ▶ 3:23 Shishir Mehrotra I worked on Office, Windows, and then SQL Server, a wide variety of different projects in lots of different spaces.
- ▶ 4:18 Harry Stebbings It's always the best time when you can't think about anything else, but I do have to ask, you mentioned Google there, and you're also at Microsoft, 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 43:21 Shishir Mehrotra I sometimes describe founders in two ways, people that like to create products and people like to create platforms, and I've had the pleasure of having worked on some of the biggest platforms out there, whether it's YouTube or Windows or…
- ▶ 44:36 Shishir Mehrotra You need to open up Coda instead of your notepad, instead of Word, instead of your Google Doc, and take your meeting notes in it and have it be a delightful, thrilling experience.
- ▶ 44:36 Shishir Mehrotra You need to open up Coda instead of your notepad, instead of Word, instead of your Google Doc, and take your meeting notes in it and have it be a delightful, thrilling experience.
20VC: Lambda School Founder, Austen Allred on How To Assess Your Relationship To Risk and Money, Why San Francisco Is A Case Study For The Greatest Squandering of Wealth in History & Why Complexity Increases Exponentially with Scale
- ▶ 2:40 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investments have IPO'd like Beyond Meat, or been bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
- ▶ 31:52 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investments have IPO'd like Beyond Meat, or been bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
20VC: Sequoia's Ravi Gupta on His Lessons From The Hyper-Growth of Instacart, The Key Question To Ask When Building or Evaluating Teams & The Importance of Investing In and Detecting Slopes Rather Than Intercepts
- ▶ 20:49 Harry Stebbings Optional Excel modeling skills, which I have to say did make me very happy because honestly, Excel is not exactly my, uh, domain of comfort. 4 times in the scene
20VC: Calm Founder Alex Tew on What It Takes To Build Viral Products Today, The Current State of Customer Acquisition Costs, What Makes The Best Brands
- ▶ 2:35 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investments have IPO'd like Beyond Meat, or been bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
20VC: SPACs. What Are They? Why Now? How Do They Change The Venture Landscape? Are They Better Than IPOs & Direct Listings? How Should Founders Think About Them? Kevin Hartz & Troy Steckenrider @ A*
- ▶ 10:49 Kevin Hartz If you look back at Microsoft in the 19 eighties or Amazon in the 19 nineties, one would maybe not recall that they went public at a five hundred million dollar valuation each, something that in just a few years ago would be unheard of.
- ▶ 25:27 Kevin Hartz If you look at Microsoft on its historical basis through the eighties and nineties, it was always seen as far too ahead of its skis in terms of valuation.
20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed
- ▶ 40:46 Sahil Lavingia I mean, like Bill Gates has been a hero of mine for a long time, but I think his rise into the sea of Microsoft and sort of, I feel like he almost had a rebirth. 3 times in the scene
20VC: MongoDB CEO, Dev Ittycheria on Why Sometimes You Have To Be Inefficient To Be Effective, The 2 Different Types of Decisions and How Great Leaders Respond To Each & Why Value To Overhead Ratio Is The Metric To Use When Selecting Investors
- ▶ 21:30 Dev Ittycheria And three, we believe that it was important to support the three major cloud providers, not just run on one particular cloud, but we support Amazon, Google, and Azure.
20VC: Why The Unbundling of Fintech Will Continue, How VCs Are Propping Up The Neo-Banking Industry & Why We Need A New Framework To Value Businesses Today with Clay Wilkes, Founder & CEO @ Galileo
- ▶ 26:34 Clay Wilkes I look, for example, at Microsoft right now. 3 times in the scene
20VC: Steve Blank on Why The Startup Ecosystem is Partially A Ponzi Scheme, 3 Things That Determine Startup Survival in a COVID World & Facebook: Platform vs Publisher and Where Does Their Responsibility Lie?
- ▶ 10:04 Steve Blank Anybody who's used video conferencing, Zoom or Teams or anything else has now discovered that while you could see other people and talk to them via conferencing, it's exhausting.
20VC: Craft Ventures' David Sacks on How To Assess Founder Psychology, How To Accurately Evaluate CAC, Burn and Churn & What Makes The Very Best Startup Boards
- ▶ 0:57 Harry Stebbings David then founded Yammer, the secure solution for internal corporate communication and collaboration, which was acquired by Microsoft for 1.2 billion dollars.
- ▶ 3:34 David Sacks After that, I founded Genie, which then pivoted into becoming Yammer, which we sold to Microsoft, and also did a stint as a CEO at Zenefits.
20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture
- ▶ 10:32 Merci Victoria Grace Depending on the stage, obviously we'll use Excel. 2 times in the scene
20VC: How To Scientifically Measure Product-Market Fit, How To Efficiently and Accurately Segment Users Into Cohorts, Why Investors Analysing CAC's at Pre-Seed Is Not Useful & How To Determine Between Customer Feedback to Accept vs Reject with Daniel Eric
- ▶ 3:28 Daniel Erickson Two and a half years later, after growing from 30 people to about 550, we were acquired by Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research
- ▶ 8:01 unnamed speaker So our role model for this is Excel. 5 times in the scene
20VC: Airtable's Howie Liu on Potential Consolidation In The Collaboration Tools Market, The Transition From Peacetime To Wartime CEO & How To Make The Move To Remote Work Successful; The Process Beyond The Tools
- ▶ 3:33 Howie Liu You know, Apple and Microsoft were kind of obviously the big companies when I was growing up in tech.
- ▶ 14:55 Howie Liu And I think that the real competition for us is from the bigger companies, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, kind of recognizing that this is a huge
- ▶ 16:39 Howie Liu I think you see not just tools trying to go and replace office three 65 or word documents, but also like tools that are doing completely new things, right?
- ▶ 16:39 Howie Liu I think you see not just tools trying to go and replace office three 65 or word documents, but also like tools that are doing completely new things, right?
- ▶ 19:55 Howie Liu I think he does a great job of really tearing down a lot of the contemporary platforms from Apple to Shopify to Microsoft to even companies like Uber, Amazon, et cetera, that are maybe more like partly aggregators, partly platforms.
- ▶ 24:18 Howie Liu The first is hard drive, which is basically a account of the early founding history of Microsoft.
- ▶ 27:03 Howie Liu Database, you know, Microsoft Access or FileMaker that's been modernized and now is web and collaborative based.
20VC: Notion's Fundraise with Index: The Most Anticipated Deal in The Valley: How It Came To Be | The Future of Remote Work |How Notion Approach The Balance of Growth and Profitability
- ▶ 12:17 Sarah Cannon There's an unbundling of Microsoft Office's suite into like best in class, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 12:22 Sarah Cannon I think the same is happening for Adobe and for Atlassian, and I think what we're seeing is kind of next-generation, best-in-class products in each category, so Slack taking on Teams,
- ▶ 14:08 Akshay Kothari And then in the nineties, I think like Microsoft really bundled a lot of this together in office.
- ▶ 30:21 Sarah Cannon There are more than a billion people who use Microsoft Office every day, and if they pay a hundred dollars a year, that's a hundred billion in revenue just for Office, not to mention the potential to expand in a lot of ways that Akshay… 2 times in the scene
20VC: Twitch Founder & CEO Emmett Shear on When To Persist vs When To Give Up For Entrepreneurs, The Fundamental Tension When Scaling Orgs and How To Optimise Them & How The Role of CEO Fundamentally Changes with Scale
- ▶ 3:44 Emmett Shear We both looked at Outlook, and we said, man, Outlook's a pretty good calendar, but it'd be much better if it was on the internet and collaborative.
- ▶ 21:05 unnamed speaker And, you know, Microsoft, I believe it's, you know, I worked at Microsoft as an intern for a while. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:09 unnamed speaker It seemed to be driven by PowerPoint presentations.
- ▶ 22:31 unnamed speaker And if you look at the kind of products that Microsoft builds that are, you know, Microsoft's famous for office, for example, I think it's probably the canonical example. 5 times in the scene
20VC: Alexa Von Tobel on Raising NYC's Largest Ever Female Led Fund , Portfolio Construction, Compression of Fundraising Timelines, Reserves Management & Personal Branding in Venture
- ▶ 1:38 Harry Stebbings But for me, the main reason I just love it is because it takes your audio, and it turns it into text, and so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's…
- ▶ 36:58 Harry Stebbings and so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's super simple, and just the best tool that I've seen for editing by far.
20VC: The Most Successful Companies Are Not Where Employees Work The Most, How To Know When To Promote From Below Or Bring in External Candidates & Why It Is A Unique Advantage To Be Building A Company Outside A Tech Hub with Rick Nucci, Founder & CEO @ G
- ▶ 1:37 Harry Stebbings But for me, the main reason I just love it is because it takes your audio, and it turns it into text, and so you can actually edit the text almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's…
- ▶ 5:53 Rick Nucci Understand our market, how to position, how to differentiate, and ended up in a very unfortunate position of having to compete with big incumbents like IBM and Microsoft and Oracle and, you know, TIBCO and all these vendors.
- ▶ 39:39 Harry Stebbings and so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's super simple, and just the best tool that I've seen for editing by far.
20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
- ▶ 1:55 Harry Stebbings and so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's super simple, and just the best tool that I've seen for editing by far.
- ▶ 56:00 Harry Stebbings and so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's super simple, and just the best tool that I've seen for editing by far.
20VC: Khosla Ventures Founding Partner, Samir Kaul on Why Pro Rata Is A Cop Out, Why He Likes Technical Risk and Does Not Take Market Risk & How To Approach Time Allocation Across The Portfolio In Venture
- ▶ 14:39 Samir Kaul It was Jack and Jim in a PowerPoint. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Raising $105m in Just 13 Months Over 3 Separate Rounds, The 5 Core Ways VCs Can Add Value & How Founders Can and Should Fully Leverage Their Cap Table with Kurt Rathmann, Founder & CEO @ ScaleFactor
- ▶ 1:54 Harry Stebbings And so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's super simple, and just the best tool that I've seen for editing by far.
- ▶ 34:17 Harry Stebbings It's because it takes your audio, and it turns it into text, and so you can actually edit the text, almost as if it's a Word document, and remove the audio and the text that you don't want, and it's super simple, and just the best tool…