Microsoft, every mention
55 scenes (2021), the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2021 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: The Contentful Memo: Point Nine's Christoph Janz on The Cold Email That Led to a Unicorn Investment, How To Approach Market Sizing and Timing & The Pros and Cons of Pre-Emptive Rounds, When To Do Them vs When Not To?
- ▶ 20:56 Christoph Janz I guess, to a certain extent, that's still true, but at the same time, so many companies raise what you previously would have called a Series A on the basis of a PowerPoint presentation.
20VC: Eugene Wei on "Status as a Service", Why Networks Grow and Stop Growing, The Worst Design Choices Social Media Incumbents Have Made & The Next 10 Years of Media and the Metaverse
- ▶ 9:02 Eugene Wei The reason Amazon moved to the six-page memo process was in part because they felt like PowerPoint and the prevalence of PowerPoint in meetings gave too much power to charismatic speakers.
20VC: Crowdstrike Founder, George Kurtz on Scaling to a $60Bn Market Cap, How to Acquire and Retain the World's Best Talent & The Right Way to View Competition in Today's Market?
- ▶ 8:31 George Kurtz Tiny little company with 25 slides, and you know, they want me to leave Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, which are all people that joined us, right?
- ▶ 17:58 Harry Stebbings It could be Microsoft, SentinelOne, you name it.
- ▶ 19:44 George Kurtz So when you don't have a product, you got a PowerPoint, right?
20VC: The Two Largest Changes in the Investing Market Today, Why The Scarce Resource in Venture is Access & Why Investors Are Acting Mostly Rational and Upside Scenario Planning Needs To Change with Anton Levy, Co-President @ General Atlantic
- ▶ 41:51 Anton Levy Adam, the founder would kick me for saying this, but it's a souped up version, sort of PowerPoint for e-learning.
20VC: The Crowdstrike Memo: Accel's Sameer Gandhi on Leading Multiple Internal Rounds for Crowdstrike, Telling George Kurtz to Go Shop His Term Sheet, How To Think Through Market Sizing & The Importance of Speed of Execution and Knowing When To Go Slow To
- ▶ 32:28 Sameer Gandhi He was an up and comer at Microsoft.
20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C
- ▶ 4:16 Emilie Choi And then when it was acquired by Microsoft.
20VC: A Masterclass in Leadership and Scaling Companies: The Decisions only the CEO Can Make, The Secret To Talent Acquisition and Retention and How To Find The Unscalable Things that are Fundamental To Scale with Christa Quarles, CEO @ Corel Corporation
- ▶ 10:38 Krista Quarles It was like in somebody's like spreadsheet on Excel or we had never written a policy about anything.
- ▶ 12:27 Krista Quarles And so when I got into the company, we were at a point at which the software that we had inside the restaurant was an old Microsoft on-prem distributed database, like not in the cloud.
- ▶ 29:38 Krista Quarles So like running windows on a Mac or our remote application start, we've got all these sub brands.
20VC: Jeff Immelt on Leadership Lessons from 16 Years as CEO @ GE, Incumbent Innovation; Why Some Have Failed and Other Succeeded, When Boards Have A Positive vs Negative Impact on a Company & The One Fear Startup Founders Are Allowed To Have
- ▶ 7:17 Jeff Immelt And we tried to build, it wasn't like you could, in those days, you know, Microsoft or Salesforce or Amazon, nobody was really playing in that space, in the big data, AI space.
- ▶ 8:50 Jeff Immelt Here's what I would have done differently, you know, Harry, in all honesty, I've had four years to think about it, is I would have either bought a part of a startup company or done a joint venture with maybe salesforce.com or Microsoft and…
20VC's Therapist Thursday: We Are Not All Crushing It All The Time So Let's Stop Pretending, Working Through Challenges of Self-Worth and Self-Doubt & How To Find Joy in the Striving with Nick Mehta, CEO @ Gainsight
- ▶ 26:21 Nick Mehta My dad shows me a Time magazine and it has Bill Gates on the cover, founder of Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Why and How The Best Companies Build Economies Around Themselves, When, Why and How To Build Effective Partner/Channel Networks & The Power of Compounding Growth in SaaS with Jay Simons, General Partner @ Bond
- ▶ 10:03 Jay Simons We drew a lot of inspiration from Microsoft, which I think is a textbook case here. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:55 Harry Stebbings You mentioned Microsoft, there's obviously Atlassian, there's many others in play today.
20VC: Qualtrics Founder, Ryan Smith on The 2 Hour Decision Whether To Sell Qualtrics for $8Bn in Cash, Why Tying Your Identity To Your Company Will Never Make You Happy and His Relationship To Risk, Wealth and Responsibility as a Result
- ▶ 34:29 Ryan Smith One gentleman's named Duff Thompson, who was at WordPerfect back in the day, and WordPerfect had the market share and the lead, and they were fighting against Microsoft, and WordPerfect
- ▶ 34:39 Ryan Smith Lost the processor, the business to Microsoft Word, and they bundled, and then they sold to Novell, and it didn't work out the way that it probably could have, and they missed a window from being the biggest player, and Duff, having Duff…
20VC: The Roblox Memo: First Round's Chris Fralic on The 17 Year Journey to Build a $41BN Market Cap Company, Why It Is Way Harder To Increase Ownership Across Rounds Today & What Happens Post SPACMania
- ▶ 30:47 unnamed speaker In order to do that, they couldn't just open up all the millions of games that they have on Roblox that can look like YouTube in terms of almost too much choice, and Microsoft and Xbox forced them to have a very limited small number of…
20VC: Rippling's Parker Conrad on Why The VC/Founder Marriage Analogy is Weird, Why The Notion of Focus, Focus, Focus is Overrated, Why Narrow Point Solutions Are Not Best in Class Products & The Rise of the "Compound Startup"
- ▶ 11:06 Parker Conrad You look at Microsoft, Salesforce, those are all companies that succeed because they have this broad product portfolio, and because of the ways that all of these products interrelate with each other.
- ▶ 13:31 Parker Conrad You know, Microsoft Teams is one small part of their portfolio, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 13:31 Parker Conrad You know, Microsoft Teams is one small part of their portfolio, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:07 Parker Conrad If they had built a set of productivity tools, like what you see with Notion or Coda, to sort of compete directly against the Office suite.
20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
20VC: Checkout.com Founder Guillaume Pousaz on The Transition From Bootstrapped Founder to Raising $830M and a $15Bn Valuation, What It Means To Have "3 Roadmaps For Life" & How Becoming a Parent Changes the Type of Leader You Are
- ▶ 29:41 Guillaume Pousaz I'm amazed how at 53, when he's on top of the world with Microsoft, he says, hey, I'm gonna quit and I'm gonna work in my foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
20VC: Benchmark's Peter Fenton on The Single Question That Defines The Art of Early Stage Venture, Marketing Timing Risk, Why The Oversupply of Capital Is Good & His Biggest Lessons from 12 Years On The New Relic Board
- ▶ 13:55 Peter Fenton We needed over time, you know, the move to cloud AWS and Microsoft deployments.
- ▶ 20:59 Peter Fenton We didn't sit through PowerPoint slides, and I've talked about the
20VC: The Pinterest Memo: Bessemer's Jeremy Levine on The Secret To Success within User Generated Content Plays, Where Most Investors Make Mistakes When Analysing Consumer Social and How The Pinterest Deal Wouldn't Have Happened without a Diverse Partners
- ▶ 2:33 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies IPO-ing, like Beyond Meat, or being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
- ▶ 42:59 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies IPO-ing, like Beyond Meat, or being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
20VC: Basecamp CEO Jason Fried on His Relationship To Risk, Money, Vulnerability and Self-Doubt, Fantasising About Being Fired, How To Optimise Decision-Making and Minimising Regret
- ▶ 13:30 Jason Fried Microsoft and Facebook, you know, Zuckerberg, and I'm like, that must suck.
20VC: NEA's Scott Sandell on SPACS and Why Liquidity is One of the Challenges of our Time, Why We Are At An Inflection Point For Secondaries & Why There Is Nothing To Suggest The Boom Will Not Continue
- ▶ 3:31 Scott Sandell And in my case, what happened was I had left Microsoft
20VC: The Snapchat Memo: Lightspeed's Jeremy Liew on The 4 Key Elements To Consider When Evaluating A Consumer Social Product, What is Good/Great/World Class For Retention, Usage and Downloads in Consumer Social Today & The Core Insight Development of Eva
- ▶ 2:50 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies IPO-ing, like Beyond Meat, or being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
- ▶ 39:25 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies IPO-ing, like Beyond Meat, or being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle.
20VC: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon on How To Approach Effective Decision-Making in Leadership, When Is The Right Time To Hire Recruiters and Heads of People, Balancing the Expectations of Wall St with Long Term Vision and What Truly Successful Board Management
- ▶ 13:07 Todd McKinnon I, you know, I made this PowerPoint and, and I kind of argued my case. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction
- ▶ 3:02 Harry Stebbings So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups, and how did you most recently come to found the game changer that makes even, like, terrible PowerPoint users like me great at PowerPoints with pitch? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:43 Christian Reber Launched it for Mac and Windows, and it was an insane hit.
- ▶ 5:59 Christian Reber Then I launched mobile apps, built a team around it, turned it into a typical venture startup, venture-backed startup, and then I sold it five years later to Microsoft, and at that time, my wife and I were expecting our first kid, so I was… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:12 Harry Stebbings Okay, next chronological thing is, you mentioned they're selling to Microsoft.
- ▶ 9:46 Christian Reber I didn't want to sell it to Microsoft, because I really, truly believed I could turn this into a massive company. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:33 Christian Reber I think I went through some kind of depression after selling my business to Microsoft because I didn't want that really.
- ▶ 17:35 Christian Reber But the money we kind of need, if you think about it, we have to build the next generation of PowerPoint, which is hard on its own, but then we kind of integrate something like Docsend and SlideShare right into the product, so we built…
- ▶ 21:57 Christian Reber I didn't want to get bought by Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:20 Christian Reber I use Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, Android, iOS.
- ▶ 23:28 Christian Reber So I think I developed over time a pretty good sense for how software is evolving, how hardware is evolving, and I'm, I think as a founder, I'm just trying to identify an upcoming trend, like the rewrite of the office suite, for example,…
- ▶ 26:21 Christian Reber My confidence was at an all-time low, and we had a pretty bizarre board meeting, and it turned out that it was the best release we've ever had, and it actually, in the end, it was the reason Microsoft bought us, because of the real-time…
20VC: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg on Why Generalists Over Specialists, Why Boutique Smaller Firms Over Multi-Stage Firms, Portfolio Construction Theory, Capital Concentration Limits and How To Think Through Reserve Allocations with Market Cycles in Mind?
- ▶ 15:43 Michael Eisenberg Microsoft, which even went down in the Balmer era, has come back with a vengeance.
20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard
- ▶ 20:57 Hubert Palan And just like with Excel, like Microsoft Access, I don't know whether you remember, remember, but you would build your CRM in a spreadsheet or in Microsoft Access, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:57 Hubert Palan And just like with Excel, like Microsoft Access, I don't know whether you remember, remember, but you would build your CRM in a spreadsheet or in Microsoft Access, right?
20VC: The Memo: Sequoia's Alfred Lin on Why Chasing GMV Leads To Bad Behaviours, How To Approach Competition and Capital Efficiency & The Core Importance of Understanding the Difference Between Input and Output Metrics
- ▶ 2:45 Harry Stebbings Or even being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name a few.
- ▶ 40:02 Harry Stebbings Our crowd investors have benefited from our crowd companies IPO-ing, like Beyond Meat, or even being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name a few.
20VC: Evernote & mmhmm Founder Phil Libin on Why We are Beginning a Multi-Trillion Dollar Restructuring of the World, Why Shortcuts are the Biggest Mistakes Startups Make & The Future of Video and The Unbundling of Zoom
- ▶ 29:13 Phil Libin So everyone had smartphones, but companies knew the old reality, which was, you know, Microsoft, like knew how to make Microsoft word. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:13 Phil Libin So everyone had smartphones, but companies knew the old reality, which was, you know, Microsoft, like knew how to make Microsoft word. 2 times in the scene
20VC: Hims Founder Andrew Dudum on Hims Going Public, The Reasoning and Benefits of SPACs, The Biggest Misconceptions of Successful Company Building & Wall St's Changing Perceptions Towards Growth and Profitability
- ▶ 30:39 Andrew Dudum I think what they've done in the post-Microsoft years, the continued investment in technology, the continued push on health, the continued focus on populations that need focus more than any populations is just incredibly powerful and is…
20VC: Databricks CEO, Ali Ghodsi on The 3 Phases of Startup Growth, How to Evaluate Risk and Downside Scenario Planning & Who, What and When To Hire When Scaling Your Go-To-Market
- ▶ 0:21 Harry Stebbings To date, Ali's raised over eight hundred and ninety seven million dollars for the company, including from the likes of Andreessen, NEA, Microsoft,
20VC: Bill Gurley and Howard Marks: What Happened In 2020? What Can We Expect Looking Forward to 2021?
- ▶ 20:56 Howard Marks Microsoft and so forth were icebreakers.