Microsoft, every mention
95 scenes (2026), the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2026 anyone Steven Sinofsky 305Benedict Evans 279Marc Andreessen 73Chris Dixon 67Alex Rampell 60Michael Copeland 42Ben Horowitz 36Martin Casado 35Erik Torenberg 35Frank Chen 27
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
Inside the Race to Measure Frontier Intelligence
- ▶ 22:03 Ryan Chi You know, if you, if you have a very good coding agent, uh, chances are you have a model that can also make PowerPoint slides or DCFs in Excel, um, and, and with, with high degree of capability as well.
- ▶ 22:03 Ryan Chi You know, if you, if you have a very good coding agent, uh, chances are you have a model that can also make PowerPoint slides or DCFs in Excel, um, and, and with, with high degree of capability as well.
Why AI Agents Could Finally Reinvent the Credit Card
- ▶ 29:34 Alex Rampell Yeah, so Amit took over, we implemented, he was very, very excited, but, uh, and I remember I, I, I came up in Microsoft, I think I did this in Microsoft Word or Excel, like, here's our pricing sheet, because we needed the pricing sheet,…
- ▶ 29:34 Alex Rampell Yeah, so Amit took over, we implemented, he was very, very excited, but, uh, and I remember I, I, I came up in Microsoft, I think I did this in Microsoft Word or Excel, like, here's our pricing sheet, because we needed the pricing sheet,…
Why AI Demand Is Outrunning Compute Supply
- ▶ 47:54 David George So you mentioned Microsoft. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 57:19 Gavin Baker If they execute, but it's really, really hard to make it really simple for, oh, you know, click my co-pilot, link to all my stuff, train a model on our data, convince me that you're not going to share it with anyone else, and then put it…
Why Top Founders Are Racing Into AI Infrastructure
- ▶ 41:21 Martin Casado Why wouldn't Microsoft do this?
- ▶ 48:13 Erik Torenberg Patrick Coulson, you know, remarked a few years ago, he said, hey, it feels like there's less younger founders today, you know, in the way that Zuck, you know, in college building next Facebook or, or Gates, um, you know, in the same way…
How Cursor Built One of AI’s Fastest-Growing Companies
- ▶ 1:37 Matt Bornstein Now, um, the leading, uh, coding harness was Copilot by like a mile, right? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:44 Matt Bornstein Microsoft was doing their Microsoft thing. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:46 Matt Bornstein They had Copilot, they had Office, you know, they had VS Code, all of these things combined, they were going to somehow win AI.
- ▶ 12:18 Martin Casado Easy decision on the Series A, but, you know, you know, Matt, Matt, Matt led the early deal, and he saw something a lot of people didn't, which was this, which is, if you looked at the competitive landscape, it was almost silly, which is… 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:22 Martin Casado I mean, imagine like starting competing with Microsoft, ending, ending up competing with say, Anthropic, you know, both of these kind of, you know, mega companies with tremendous amount of capital and power and distribution.
The State of AI: Models, Moats, and the Consumer Renaissance
- ▶ 18:28 Anish Acharya Command Line is, we're sort of in the, the DOS era of AI, and for this technology and its capabilities to sort of fully be embraced by consumers, we're going to need the windows, so to say.
How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- ▶ 0:32 Steven Sinofsky Microsoft is worried way more about what Amazon and Google are doing than anyone in a startup space.
- ▶ 26:09 Steven Sinofsky Um, so, uh, Kane wrote the book, but it's with Catmull who, at Pixar, and with Daniel Lewin, who was at, at Steve's super good friend and was also at Microsoft.
- ▶ 47:07 Martin Casado And B, these companies are able to raise so much money that they're actually on competitive footing with like the Microsofts and the medicine and the Microsofts. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 53:42 Steven Sinofsky You know, I, I came down here, I sat across the table from all the Intel leadership, and I pulled out the first Surface, and I said, here's our new computer, and they got very excited, and then they were like, but what's in here?
Tokens Are the New Dollars | Stripe's Will Gaybrick & David George
- ▶ 7:23 Will Gaybrick You know, we work, of course, with the Amazons, the world, um, Microsoft's, and, you know, at the enterprise, it's sort of a different sales cycle.
- ▶ 10:34 Will Gaybrick You know, our sales team is organized pretty similarly to Microsoft's.
Garry Tan: New Rules for Founders
- ▶ 0:10 Garry Tan We had to go over to the Windows team.
- ▶ 0:17 Garry Tan An org like Microsoft can't.
- ▶ 1:13 Garry Tan And so the two job offers I had were, uh, Microsoft for Windows Mobile, which I was pretty excited about, or Expedia.
- ▶ 8:10 Garry Tan That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time.
- ▶ 34:22 Garry Tan And, um, we needed integration, for instance, from the Windows team, which was, like, you know, on the other side of the highway in Redmond. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:06 Garry Tan Like, I think that, you know, I think about my time at Microsoft and it's like, I remember getting an iPod and like doing, um, competitive research for Windows Mobile versus the iPod. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 41:17 Garry Tan Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere.
AI Is Learning to Hack. Faster Than We Expected.
- ▶ 17:22 Feross Aboukhadijeh Hooked up this stuff to, you know, automation so that, you know, GitHub Actions kicks off the publish, and so that's gonna break, like, up, like the whole, basically the whole ecosystem when they do this, but I think it's the right call,…
“Every small business should run itself” | Lassie with a16z
- ▶ 25:45 Alex Rampell There was a company, I think it was called X one Microsoft outlook had really bad search. 2 times in the scene
Why Physical AI Is the Next Frontier | The a16z Show
- ▶ 9:22 Qasar Younis Like, even that sounds trivial, because when you think about, mostly when you think about models, you think about deploying them through a browser or on a phone, and everything's abstracted away, because you have iOS, and you have Android,…
- ▶ 1:07:22 Qasar Younis We hired so many people out of the Microsoft flight sim.
Why Every Founder Needs a Story | Replit CEO on a16z
- ▶ 25:41 Amjad Masad And then he advanced the point of view of, of Microsoft.
Software in the Age of Agents | The a16z Show
- ▶ 1:03 Elena Burger I'm here with Seema Amble, a partner here on the enterprise team, and Steven Sanofsky, who is a board partner at A-sixteen Z, as well as a former, uh, member of, of Microsoft, friend of the firm.
- ▶ 13:46 Steven Sinofsky Very quickly learned about delegate access and, and having calendars owned by multiple people and all of this crazy stuff. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:56 Steven Sinofsky Like when, back when we were first starting to get Excel used in companies, you'll laugh at this. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:04 Steven Sinofsky It's export to Excel and export as CSV and or PDF you pick. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 44:09 Steven Sinofsky Well, it's also, to your earlier point, you know, expertise exists in this cloud in an organization, and, and it is the, the untapped resource of the modern era, and Aaron Levy at Box has done the, the most eloquent job of explaining…
- ▶ 44:09 Steven Sinofsky Well, it's also, to your earlier point, you know, expertise exists in this cloud in an organization, and, and it is the, the untapped resource of the modern era, and Aaron Levy at Box has done the, the most eloquent job of explaining…
- ▶ 44:54 Steven Sinofsky You know, which are the sales PowerPoint presentations that are actually working?
- ▶ 45:34 Elena Burger Um, and in that piece, you also related it actually to, uh, sort of, like, early Microsoft litigation that the, that the Justice Department levied against them, and, 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 58:20 Steven Sinofsky And so they were using Excel when, when the other bankers were using one, two, three, there's actually floating around on the internet is this old commercial for Excel. 3 times in the scene
Ben Horowitz on the Global Race for Tech, Power, and Influence
- ▶ 36:02 Ben Horowitz And that evolution kind of, I think, snuck up on people, and so, and we've seen, you know, I mean, the, the great thing when it went from vandalism to theft, the vandalism company, Microsoft, is one who created all the theft opportunities
- ▶ 36:17 Ben Horowitz By putting windows on the internet when it wasn't ready to be on the internet, um, because it wasn't built for that kind of idea.
The Economics of AI Usage and What's Next For SaaS | Benedict Evans on a16z
- ▶ 14:08 Benedict Evans Windows and iOS did, but they were doing something else. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:38 Benedict Evans And, um, then Microsoft kind of crowbarred their way into the market, but it turned out that web browsers weren't the point because all the value was somewhere else.
- ▶ 19:51 Benedict Evans Another question is like, well, you know, that seems to be a bit like what you get if you do file new in Excel, like these are templates, and they'll take you so far, but at a certain point, you know, people outgrow the templates. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:36 Benedict Evans No more than, like, Microsoft or Apple could build every Windows app or every iPhone app.
- ▶ 20:36 Benedict Evans No more than, like, Microsoft or Apple could build every Windows app or every iPhone app. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:38 Benedict Evans More PowerPoints.
- ▶ 36:24 Benedict Evans Um, of course, we're going to, we're going to build Office with open source.
- ▶ 38:13 Erik Torenberg Maybe less bundling or single behemoths like the Microsoft Enterprise?
- ▶ 39:48 Benedict Evans And then in the middle, you've got this kind of fuzzy improvised space of Excel and email and the shared file system. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 44:54 Benedict Evans That's not, you know, you, that's, that, that's, these are sort of problems in organizational management and how people function and how people can explain what they do that are very hard to write down and very hard to kind of bake into a…
- ▶ 48:31 Benedict Evans Well, there's a financial gravity problem in that, um, Microsoft, Meta, and Google are all on, in line to spend over 50% of revenue on CapEx this year. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 54:02 Benedict Evans I think the other answer to, of course, the problem here, of course, is consumer surplus, which is to say that, um, this is kind of what happened with Excel in that, you know, guess what?
- ▶ 56:41 Benedict Evans Um, Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.
The New Rule for Picking AI Winners | The a16z Show
- ▶ 0:00 David George Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft.
- ▶ 1:33 David George But as of November, I think all of our priors shifted around what is actually going to happen in the enterprise, but just maybe to contextualize what's happened since then, basically, Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month…
Goldman Sachs Chairman on Why Finance Adopts AI Differently | a16z
- ▶ 59:20 Lloyd Blankfein Microsoft, too, and other companies like that.
Box CEO on AI Agents & Why Enterprise Can't Keep Up | a16z
- ▶ 34:25 Steven Sinofsky And I, I think like there was a moment at the internet that, that I really was thinking about when, when you guys were, when I was seeing the timescale difference, which was suddenly the eight million quadrillion pages of how to use Word…
- ▶ 34:25 Steven Sinofsky And I, I think like there was a moment at the internet that, that I really was thinking about when, when you guys were, when I was seeing the timescale difference, which was suddenly the eight million quadrillion pages of how to use Word…
- ▶ 56:46 Aaron Levie I think we may be over, like, I mean, as a big lover of technology, I wish this was true, but I think we just over assume that like everybody's job is, is just, they're just inside of Microsoft Word and they're just typing a Word document. 2 times in the scene
Why Claude Feels Different (And What That Means for AI) | The a16z Show
- ▶ 2:16 unnamed speaker Got Ben Thompson writing about technology and markets, and if you want to have an analysis of an earnings report of Microsoft, I mean, who better in the world than Ben Thompson?
Box CEO on the AI Adoption Gap | The a16z Show
- ▶ 12:04 Steven Sinofsky I mean, like, I spent my life, my life with sitting next to people on airplanes saying, how can I make PowerPoint do X?
- ▶ 12:12 Steven Sinofsky Well, and, you know, it was, because it hurt, physically hurt, to watch somebody suffering with bullets and numbering in Word, or trying to figure out, you know, like, oh, let me just make a two-sided, a two-axis graph in Excel.
- ▶ 12:12 Steven Sinofsky Well, and, you know, it was, because it hurt, physically hurt, to watch somebody suffering with bullets and numbering in Word, or trying to figure out, you know, like, oh, let me just make a two-sided, a two-axis graph in Excel.
- ▶ 23:36 Steven Sinofsky During open source, like, we met in a conference room this big and debated how much open source we could use in Windows or Office.
- ▶ 23:36 Steven Sinofsky During open source, like, we met in a conference room this big and debated how much open source we could use in Windows or Office.
Why Balaji Srinivasan Thinks the SaaS Apocalypse Is Overhyped | The a16z Show
- ▶ 4:08 Balaji Srinivasan It's, it's like somebody who doesn't change the Windows default desktop wallpaper, right?
- ▶ 7:22 Balaji Srinivasan The main thing about Kai-Fu Lee's book is it has a history of the Chinese tech ecosystem, where, for example, you and me being in tech, we kind of know how, you know, Microsoft came up, Apple came up, Google, Facebook, you know, Amazon,…
- ▶ 56:51 Balaji Srinivasan Windows and Apple are still releasing things.
OpenClaw, Claude Code, and the Future of Software | Peter Yang on The a16z Show
- ▶ 15:38 Peter Yang But like, you know, like, I, I don't want to use PowerPoint anymore.
- ▶ 16:15 unnamed speaker I think Satya said this, um, which is that Excel is the most powerful or most popular programming language in the world. 2 times in the scene
Palantir CTO on The SaaS Apocalypse & Preventing The Next World War | a16z
- ▶ 22:29 Shyam Sankar Make a PowerPoint slide?
- ▶ 26:18 Shyam Sankar And what they were talking about was zoom and teams and how that enabled them to go remote.
Emil Michael: The Department of War Is Moving Faster Than Silicon Valley on AI | The a16z Show
- ▶ 1:41 Emil Michael Um, you know, after my first company, Tell Me Networks, we had this speech recognition software we sold to Microsoft.
Inside a16z’s Top 100 AI Apps Report with Olivia Moore
- ▶ 1:46 Olivia Moore We have Cloud in Excel, PowerPoint in Chrome, and then we have desktop apps like Cursor, Whisperflow, Granola.
- ▶ 1:46 Olivia Moore We have Cloud in Excel, PowerPoint in Chrome, and then we have desktop apps like Cursor, Whisperflow, Granola.
- ▶ 3:16 Olivia Moore Cloud in particular has really doubled down on prosumer with things like Cowork, Cloud Code, Cloud in Excel, and PowerPoint.
- ▶ 3:16 Olivia Moore Cloud in particular has really doubled down on prosumer with things like Cowork, Cloud Code, Cloud in Excel, and PowerPoint.
Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next
- ▶ 5:43 Mike Cannon-Brookes A bunch didn't make it, you know, from, I don't know, Windows to, to the internet era or whatever, whichever era you want to say, no one is going to say, I think that a hundred out of a hundred SaaS companies are going to make it through,…
- ▶ 31:37 Mike Cannon-Brookes I can take a gigabyte from AWS and go put it in Azure.
- ▶ 51:58 Mike Cannon-Brookes Think of Microsoft Word without a toolbar, but with chat only. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 53:19 Mike Cannon-Brookes Maybe the first time someone looked at Excel, they were like, wait, where do I type the paragraphs or something? 2 times in the scene
AI Markets: Deep Dive with a16z's David George
- ▶ 31:40 David George You know, Meta, Microsoft, AWS, NVIDIA as counterparties?
- ▶ 32:46 David George And AI revenue to what happened with Azure. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:57 David George Um, so these, this is just Microsoft reporting data, which I think is a, a cool way to, to frame how quickly this has happened.
The Biggest Bottlenecks For AI: Energy & Cooling
- ▶ 2:37 David George It turns out they're the best companies, you know, probably ever created, um, you know, companies like Google, Facebook, um, you know, Amazon and Microsoft, and they can bear, um, you know, potential capacity overbuild and things like that.
The AI Opportunity that goes beyond Models
- ▶ 0:46 Alex Rampell But the, the infra players, if you were, were Apple and Microsoft.
- ▶ 8:52 Alex Rampell Um, so, uh, Microsoft is getting into the space in a meaningful way, and if, if you look at the history of software, I mean, this firm was started by Marc Andreessen. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:47 Alex Rampell They probably spend money on Microsoft Office.
- ▶ 53:11 Alex Rampell It's like, onboard me into Microsoft Office.
Marc Andreessen's 2026 Outlook: AI Timelines, US vs. China, and The Price of AI
- ▶ 42:43 Marc Andreessen And so they were already in the war for kind of cloud services, and this is like AWS versus Azure versus, uh, Google Cloud, um, you know, and then all the, all these other, all these other cloud efforts.
- ▶ 43:49 Marc Andreessen For a startup building an AI app, they don't have giant fixed costs because they can just tap into the OpenAI or Anthropic or Google or Microsoft or whatever, you know, cloud, you know, tokens by the drink, you know, intelligence tokens by…
- ▶ 51:08 Marc Andreessen So, I mean, look, you know, big companies that are definitely, you know, playing hard, you know, Google's playing hard, Meta's playing hard, um, Amazon, um, Microsoft, um, you know, there's a bunch of these companies that are, you know,…