Windows 95
product on 16 shows · 11 statements across 5 episodes · said 114 times in 44 episodes since 2015
Acquired 58 
How I Built This 12 
the a16z Podcast 12 
Another Podcast 6 
Latent Space 5 
Big Technology 4 
20VC 4 
TBPN 3 
We Live to Build 2 
Capital Allocators 2 
BG2 Pod 1 
Cheeky Pint 1 
the Knowledge Project 1 
My First Million 1 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 1 
the MAD Podcast 1
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
Acquired 58the a16z Podcast 12How I Built This 12Another Podcast 6Latent Space 520VC 4Big Technology 4TBPN 38 more shows
2026 9 mentions in 6 episodes 2 per episode
- Anthropic’s Felix Rieseberg on AI Coworkers, Local-First Agents, and the Future of Knowledge Work
- NVIDIA: Jensen Huang. From near collapse to becoming the world’s biggest company
- What 12 Years of Failure Taught Steve Jobs About Success
- 🔬 RL with Verifiable Rewards, but the Verifier is a Lab — Lila Sciences
- XBOX Layoffs, Tesla's New Model Y, $12.8M Lottery Dispute | Diet TBPN
- Is AI Killing Software? — With Bret Taylor, OpenAI's board chair and CEO of Sierra
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 12 mentions in 10 episodes 1 per episode
- Booz Allen CTO: AI in Government, Autonomous Driving, Quantum's Promise
- Satya Nadella describes how lessons from Microsoft’s history apply to today’s boom
- Marc Andreessen & Amjad Masad on “Good Enough” AI, AGI, and the End of Coding
- Sam Altman's Masterplan or a Gift to Anthropic? Palantir & Shopify Crush Earnings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 30,000 Units a Year, 17 Competitors: How Neil Finds Products With Amazon's Own Data
- Weekly Recap: Grok 4 Launch, Texas Floods, Web Browser War, Top Signals, Meta Smart Glasses
- Former Microsoft Executive on Apple’s Hidden China Problem
- Adam Neumann: This is How You Build Iconic Companies
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 68 mentions in 8 episodes 9 per episode
- Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- The peril (and promise) of AI with Tristan Harris: Part 2
- Bret Taylor: Why Pre-Training is for Morons & Companies Will Build Their Own Software | E1209 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Ep13. Silicon Valley’s Political 180, META AI, COVID Postmortem | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod
- This World Does Not Exist — Joscha Bach, Karan Malhotra, Rob Haisfield (WorldSim, WebSim, Liquid AI)
- Golf at 5:30am in the Dark Changed Everything About How He Runs His Company
- The Cashflow King: “Here’s How I Do It”, Negotiating w/ Jeff Bezos, Elon’s Cracked Rocket
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 5 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Metaverse - how to be wrong in the right way
- 20 Growth: Why Retention Defines Product Market Fit, What is Good Retention Levels Today, The Most Counterintuitive Elements of Product and Growth & Why So Many Startups Mess Up Hiring For Growth Teams with Brian Hale, Head of Consumer Product & Growth @
- Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- Talking about crypto
- The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 6 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222)
- The Meta reality
- Metaverse - beyond the buzzword
- 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
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 10 mentions in 7 episodes 1 per episode
- Clippy: The Unauthorized Biography
- Squarespace: Anthony Casalena
- Inside the Apple Factory: Software Design in the Age of Steve Jobs
- a16z Podcast | How the Internet Happened
- a16z Podcast | The $200 PC in the Enterprise
- a16z Podcast | For Your Ears Only
- a16z Podcast | Mobile is Eating the World (and Apple is Gobbling Fastest)
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
11 statements about Windows 95, every show
Beam: Lila uses a vision-language model to automate Windows 95 machines
“We actually have a vision language model controlling a Windows 95 machine. Because that's the only way to automate it.”
Huang: NVIDIA's initial graphics architecture was incompatible with Microsoft's DirectX API
“And Microsoft is about to announce Windows 95. And Windows 95 has a API called DirectX, and DirectX does it the right way, and we were incompatible with DirectX. And so anyways, we chose some approaches that were just fundamentally wrong.”
Rosenthal: Windows 95 lacked an internet browser at launch
“There was one thing. That was missing from Windows 95 at launch. That if you were a consumer user of technology, of software, of products, of operating systems, maybe you kind of wanted to have. And that was an internet browser.”
Gilbert: Windows 95's true significance was becoming the internet's launchpad
“But in retrospect, the thing that mattered about Windows 95 all these years later is that's the platform that everyone started using the Internet on. And everything that we talked about in the last episode, yeah, it's all important, but it's not nearly as impo…”
All Windows operating systems released prior to Windows 95 were DOS-based
“Until Windows 95, all of the Windows operating systems were DOS based.”
Windows was merely a graphical shell over DOS until Windows 95
“And actually, it was not until Windows 95 that Windows was its own operating system. It was in Windows one, two, three, three dot one, and Windows for Workgroups, it was a graphical operating environment.”
Microsoft had 75 million Windows users before Windows 95 shipped
“I mean, even before Windows 95 shipped, they had seventy five million Windows users.”
Only 360 people built Microsoft Windows 95
“There's only 360 people that built Windows 95, so it's still kind of a small team”
Windows 95 sold 7 million copies in its first month
“Windows 95 comes out, sells a million copies in the first week, seven million copies in the first month.”
Microsoft was the first software firm to reach $10 billion in revenue
“Fiscal 95. So this is the 12 months ending in June before Windows 95 comes out. Microsoft did 5.9 billion dollars in revenue. Fiscal 96, they did 8.7. Fiscal 97, when Windows 95 is really going, they do twelve billion dollars in revenue. First software company…”