Microsoft, every mention
220 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Mason Morfit 23Chris Dixon 16Ted Seides 14Josh Wolfe 14Morgan Housel 7Jose Feliciano 6Chris Douvos 6Stephen McKeon 5Rob Hale 5Ben Gilbert 5
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
Roadmap for Private Credit from Australia – Frank Danieli of MA Financial Group (EP.511)
- ▶ 17:05 Frank Danieli Excel's out the window.
Moat Investing Nuances – Pat Dorsey (EP.509)
- ▶ 12:52 Pat Dorsey You had Microsoft, you had Oracle, and that was it.
Senior Decision Makers: Nicholas Csicsko, Trinity Wall Street (EP.508)
- ▶ 19:33 Nicholas (Nick) Csicsko This manager specifically was very open about sharing his whole portfolio to the extent that he would just, he still does, sends his entire portfolio in an Excel file to me monthly because he doesn't have any concerns about what we would…
- ▶ 1:01:56 Nicholas (Nick) Csicsko It doesn't mean you don't have to do a bunch of work to try to understand what it is you're doing, but to think that there's a spreadsheet or a co-pilot answer is just not a thing.
Contrarian Quality at GQG Partners – Rajiv Jain (EP.505)
- ▶ 26:53 Rajiv Jain Microsoft is an exception, and maybe Oracle, it's a lower barrier to business.
- ▶ 35:55 Rajiv Jain If you look at Google and Microsoft is more than half open AI.
- ▶ 46:18 Rajiv Jain I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.
- ▶ 1:02:22 Rajiv Jain 2010, you lost two thirds of Microsoft.
Making Mistakes – Josh Steiner (EP.502)
- ▶ 56:57 Josh Steiner Michael and I have been fortunate to go on a whole variety of television to Good Morning America, Morning Joe, and then also spoken out at Microsoft, for example, or at the New Orleans Book Festival.
Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499)
- ▶ 41:06 Alex Sloane In Microsoft Excel, every roll-up looks easy, but in reality, operations are hard.
Ryan Lovell – Chainlink: The Infrastructure Pipes for Multi-Chain Finance (EP.491)
- ▶ 4:43 Ryan Lovell Discounted cash flows, Excel sheets, CAPM, pricing models. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:44 Ryan Lovell None of the existing systems could handle that because it wasn't scalable, but if you work on an institutional sales team and a large asset manager, and you're trying to bring in Amazon, Microsoft, you'll say anything.
Bobby Jain – Multi-Strategy Hedge Fund First Principles at Jain Global (EP.487)
- ▶ 36:41 Bobby Jain Many people would like to work at Microsoft and Google and Apple, and many people want to work at Stripe.
- ▶ 45:06 Bobby Jain The one Amazon is worth .2 Microsoft and .3.
Jonathan Lewinsohn – Credit Microcycles at Diameter (EP.484)
- ▶ 25:05 Jonathan Lewinsohn Then you can feel comfortable that not only do you have a really important company of consequence, the Metas, the Amazons, the Microsoft, the Googles,
Nick Rohatyn – Emerging Markets Multi-Asset Investing at TRG (EP.482)
- ▶ 1:09:57 Nick Rohatyn Now it's teams, what have you.
Mike Gitlin – The Century of Capital Group (EP.479)
- ▶ 53:56 Mike Gitlin Don't gold plate a PowerPoint presentation for us.
Year in Review 2025 (EP.478)
- ▶ 34:54 Ted Seides Most people track it on an Excel spreadsheet.
Top 5 of 2025: #4: Alex Sacerdote
- ▶ 16:42 Alex Sacerdote How do we find the next Microsoft or Dell or IBM in the mainframe world?
- ▶ 25:26 Alex Sacerdote There's the cloud delivery layer with AWS, Azure.
- ▶ 27:55 Alex Sacerdote What if copilot gets adopted?
- ▶ 38:16 Alex Sacerdote Microsoft is twenty-six-ish.
Matthew Dicks – Storytelling Mastery (EP.477)
- ▶ 23:51 Matthew Dicks Within six months, I found myself working with Microsoft and Salesforce and Slack and Google.
- ▶ 1:02:40 Matthew Dicks And then they open PowerPoint and they open a slide and they say, what should we start with? 2 times in the scene
Josh Wolfe & Brett McGurk – Venture, Geopolitics, and the Next Frontier (EP.476)
- ▶ 39:34 Josh Wolfe Google can Microsoft these large language model players, and the presumptive revenue growth at OpenAI and Anthropic, et cetera, would get hit 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 39:51 Josh Wolfe Google, 20 years ago, looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free, because they could, because they have this advertising model in search.
- ▶ 39:51 Josh Wolfe Google, 20 years ago, looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free, because they could, because they have this advertising model in search.
- ▶ 39:51 Josh Wolfe Google, 20 years ago, looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free, because they could, because they have this advertising model in search.
- ▶ 39:51 Josh Wolfe Google, 20 years ago, looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free, because they could, because they have this advertising model in search.
- ▶ 39:51 Josh Wolfe Google, 20 years ago, looked at Microsoft's main cash cow of Office, PowerPoint, Excel, Word, and Outlook, and they gave it all away for free, because they could, because they have this advertising model in search.
- ▶ 43:29 Josh Wolfe Then they pay Microsoft two dollars, so they're losing money, 50% negative margins. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 48:55 Josh Wolfe Compute, you used to have to go, have a data center, then you went to co-located, then you went to cloud, going from an CapEx decision to an OpEx decision, treating it like utility that you can get off of Amazon or Azure, Microsoft or…
- ▶ 48:55 Josh Wolfe Compute, you used to have to go, have a data center, then you went to co-located, then you went to cloud, going from an CapEx decision to an OpEx decision, treating it like utility that you can get off of Amazon or Azure, Microsoft or…
Daniel Mahr – Glass Box Quant at MDT Advisers (EP.472)
- ▶ 53:22 Daniel Mahr I think it's just me and a fellow who's worked at Microsoft for 23 years who have gone down the career route and stayed in one place.
David Lyon – Hybrid Capital Solutions for Private Assets (EP.471)
- ▶ 10:32 David Lyon 30 years ago, we didn't have Excel.
- ▶ 14:09 David Lyon The barrier to entry was, could you figure out Excel?
- ▶ 51:16 David Lyon Just sitting in Excel saying, well, if margins got better, I don't think that's a good way to scale a fund and go through life.
- ▶ 54:18 David Lyon And it's not just, well, I took an Excel
Dave Thornton – Unlocking Venture Access Through Stock Options at Vested (EP.469)
- ▶ 2:09 Dave Thornton I was the nexus between technology and trading, so I built out the risk models and the trading models, and I automated as much of the back office machinery as I could, given that everything was Excel-based, so there were limits, but that…
Mason Morfit and Rob Hale – Quiet Activism at ValueAct (EP.462)
- ▶ 1:28 Ted Seides Mason helped launch the firm and has driven many of its successful investments, including the turnaround of Microsoft in 2013.
- ▶ 23:47 Rob Hale If you're Microsoft, if you're Adobe, if you have a very strong franchise and you don't necessarily operate to potential for 10 years, you have a flat share price.
- ▶ 25:52 Mason Morfit We invested in Microsoft in 2013. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:29 Mason Morfit And they were talking about this thing called office three 65, which was to take office to the cloud. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:36 Mason Morfit oh my gosh, one thing that's happening is that office is decoupling from the window cycle. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:09 Mason Morfit We didn't yet know what to do with Bing or what to do with Xbox. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:43 Mason Morfit To the tune of four or five, six billion dollars a year that might be better spent driving Office three 65 in Azure instead of trying to chase the iPhone or chase the Google search dream.
- ▶ 36:49 Rob Hale Mason mentioned the office three 65 example where you could just say, okay, this is the number of users. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 41:07 Mason Morfit You're picking that scab there, Ted, because as many of our LPs remind us, we sold a little too early on a couple of these things, including Microsoft and MSCI. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 42:59 Rob Hale You could put Microsoft in that category, selling physical PCs with Windows and Office licenses.
- ▶ 42:59 Rob Hale You could put Microsoft in that category, selling physical PCs with Windows and Office licenses.
- ▶ 56:15 Mason Morfit It's easy to get a company to shift its allocations away from making Windows phones to focusing on Office three 65.
CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund)
- ▶ 1:16:06 Raphael Arndt So we're using Confluence and SharePoint, for example, for internal teams to be able to communicate with each other and work on, um, things together.
Michael Ovitz – Reinventing Talent and Building Momentum at Treville (EP.455)
- ▶ 59:01 Michael Ovitz I think when I tell investors that we had early deals with Microsoft and Intel in the mid-nineties,
- ▶ 1:00:54 Michael Ovitz And then I saw CD-ROMs, then I saw CDs, then I saw DVDs, and then I told three of the five record companies I consulted for that all their packaged goods were going to disappear, because Nathan Mirvold, who is the smartest guy, was…
Josh Koplewicz – Flexible Capital and Creative Structures at Thayer Street (EP.451)
- ▶ 5:38 Josh Kopowitz I was not someone that had been in warden doing Excel classes. 2 times in the scene
Jon Madorsky – Navigating the Evolution of Private Equity Secondaries (EP.448)
- ▶ 28:56 Jon Madorsky It might not be able to fine tune or drive a lot of the assumptions that we need the qualitative rich data that we're collecting, but to actually create and populate the Excel model is something that I can absolutely imagine AI using.
Brett Barth and Evan Roth – Stewarding Family Wealth at BBR (EP.433)
Mitchell Green - Lead Edge of Harnessing Networks (EP.429)
- ▶ 36:52 Mitchell Green You know much more about Nike and Pepsi and Microsoft stock.
Striking Oil – CrownRock by Lime Rock Capital (EP.428)
- ▶ 41:02 Jonathan Farber Jay put together this amazing hundred-page PowerPoint, and the idea was, are we crazy to continue holding this deal?
Year in Review 2024 (EP.424)
- ▶ 29:19 Ted Seides And so that went from an Excel spreadsheet to an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet. 2 times in the scene
Jon Glidden - Delta Airlines Pension Fund Turnaround (EP.417)
- ▶ 37:30 Jon Glidden He worked in Microsoft's treasury department as well. 2 times in the scene
Matt Miller – Crossing the Energy Divide at Grey Rock (EP.412)
- ▶ 15:50 Matt Miller And then I had that McKinsey toolkit to make a really pretty PowerPoint.
- ▶ 35:13 Matt Miller So you're Microsoft
David Breazzano - High Yields and Low Risk at Polen Capital (EP.405)
- ▶ 50:27 Dave Brizano He said, in this business, you got to read everything that's public that you can get your arms on, and when you write a memo, make sure it's grammatically correct, you do a spreadsheet, and this was hand spreadsheets before Excel,
Jase Auby - Risk, Size, and Talent at Texas Teachers (EP.404)
Rob Small and Anil Seetharam - Public Equity Adjacent to Private Equity at Stockbridge (EP.397)
- ▶ 49:00 Anil Seetharam Amazon and Microsoft are the ones we've been comfortable enough to get conviction and invest in.
- ▶ 52:02 Anil Seetharam Excel-based valuation methodology doesn't really capture the full distribution of outcomes.
Graham Weaver – People-Driven Private Equity at Alpine (EP.391)
- ▶ 12:48 Graham Weaver And it ended up just being you're sitting in a cubicle and you're working on Excel and you did that till two o'clock in the morning.
Brett Barakett - Digging for the Puck at Tremblant Capital (EP.386)
- ▶ 42:43 Brett Barakett You can have all the tools and, you know, everybody knows how to build an Excel spreadsheet and do a DCF and overlay a Michael Porter analysis and, okay, I'll get some data sciences work.
- ▶ 1:02:06 Brett Barakett Let's say you bought Microsoft in your PA and over time it doubled. 3 times in the scene
Chris Dixon - Empty Rooms: Web3 After the Fall (EP.380)
- ▶ 20:17 Chris Dixon There's the cathedral is Microsoft is this tower and priests and secretive.
Shiloh Bates – CLO Investing at Flat Rock Global (EP.379)
- ▶ 47:33 Shiloh Bates So I think the two biggest people are going to be the two people on HR who took an Excel spreadsheet with a hundred names on it of people from different universities and decided which industries they were going to cover.
Michael Leffell – Opening Doors to Niche Private Opportunities at 10 East (EP.373)
- ▶ 36:22 Michael Leffell He could take the data and give it to me in an Excel format if that's what I wanted.
Michael Milken – Innovations in Finance, Medicine, and Education (EP.371)
- ▶ 1:15:01 Michael Milken When they were going after Microsoft as a monopoly in the nineties and told them he should get out there, talk, interview, get on shows.
Michael Mauboussin - Pattern Recognition and Public Markets (EP.370)
- ▶ 36:44 Michael Mauboussin For example, you think about the leaderboard, the top 20 greatest wealth creators of all times, and it would include some suspects you would guess, which would be Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and Alphabet and so forth, but it also…
Magnus Grimeland – Day Zero Investing at Antler (EP.369)
- ▶ 44:47 Magnus Grimeland So we negotiated free credits with Microsoft, the store, AWS,
Brad Jacobs – Masterclass on Leadership and Management (EP.368)
- ▶ 47:52 Brad Jacobs And then I also ask people before the meeting, because we don't do PowerPoints at meetings as a general rule.
Sanjay Ayer – Think Different and Get Better at WCM (EP.366)
- ▶ 47:50 Sanjay Ayer Think Evernote journals, Excel spreadsheets, who knows, sticky notes.
- ▶ 1:02:13 Sanjay Ayer We did an offsite several years ago where Mike Trigg and myself, we got up, and we just talked about every mistake we made over the last 10 years, and that was, it was like a fifty-point PowerPoint deck, and showing about these mental…
Chad Summe and Mike Veith – Corridor of Commerce at eGateway Capital (EP.364)
- ▶ 34:08 Mike Vieth So Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers, some cold storage, where they're
George Michelakis – Chess Master's Approach to Long-Short Equity at Gladstone (EP.362)
- ▶ 32:11 George Mikulakis It took Microsoft three goes to replace Bill Gates. 2 times in the scene
Brian Christiansen – High-Conviction Growth Investing at Sands Capital (EP.361)
- ▶ 46:13 Brian Christensen But then if you take something like Microsoft, for example, it's seen some multiple expansion, but the predominant driver of the exceptional stock price in Microsoft for the last five years has been earnings. 2 times in the scene
Gary Sernovitz - Inside the CIO Seat (EP.357)
- ▶ 19:16 Gary Sernovitz Of just feeling like you can master this as something that should be able to fit into the Excel formula, making these capital decisions, which obviously is not something that if Excel had a formula, it would make everyone's life a lot…
- ▶ 22:12 Gary Sernovitz And then hunger is the one that probably the Excel formula doesn't get right, and probably one of the hardest things to do for people in a CIO seat is these natural life of a money management firm.
Rick Heitzmann – New York Venture Investing at FirstMark Capital (EP.350)
- ▶ 22:03 Rick Heitzman So fast forward to now, Google, Microsoft, all the biggest companies, this is a huge engineering headquarters where Google has several million square feet, where they're putting more and more engineers.
Tim Lyne – Three Decades of Private Credit at Antares (EP.346)
- ▶ 2:08 Ted Seides And by the way, we both know that 15 minutes would turn into a half hour, because that's the minimum time block available in Outlook's calendar.
Raelan Lambert, John Jackson, and Erik Sebusch – Inside Mercer Consulting (EP.345)
- ▶ 5:45 Ted Seides And by the way, we both know that 15 minutes would turn into a half hour, because that's the minimum time block available in Outlook's calendar.
Isaac Corre – Event-Driven Investing at Governors Lane (EP.344)
- ▶ 38:52 Ted Seides I'd love to walk me through an example, and the one that's coming into my head is the Activision Microsoft deal where you have US regulatory of the UK and EU. 3 times in the scene
Adam Karr – Extreme Alignment at Orbis (EP.338)
Jenn Birmingham – Organizational Alpha at PRINCO (EP. 336)
- ▶ 16:36 Jen Birmingham Sure, Microsoft chat helped us a ton in terms of being able to talk to someone as if they were next to you, but it still wasn't the same.
- ▶ 35:06 Jen Birmingham Many folks might still be in the Excel world where you use Excel as a database, but Excel is actually a calculation engine. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 57:28 Jen Birmingham If someone didn't, I would say that having all your facts, I can go back to when I was trying to influence Andy and the senior team to automate what they really held as this Excel spreadsheet of performance.
Stan Miranda – Modern Endowment Model at Partners Capital (EP.334)
- ▶ 14:11 Stan Miranda And we got our Excel turned into more institutional technology and so forth.
- ▶ 39:37 Stan Miranda You just pull out an Excel spreadsheet, you put in what you paid for it in terms of multiples on earnings, and what you're likely to get for it when you sell it,
Seth Klarman – Timeless Value Investing (EP.328)
- ▶ 41:28 Seth Klarman So don't call us with IBM Insights or your new rating of Microsoft, but when you find that secondary partnership interest, or you find that illiquid stake in a private company, call us with that, because we'll have a bid for you.
Don Mullen –Single-Family Rentals at Pretium (Capital Allocators, EP.324)
- ▶ 1:04:08 Don Mullen He got me on the payroll at First Boston as the assistant to the secretary named Louise, and I actually whited out things on spreadsheets and typed them in because we didn't have Excel back then, and then would take him to the photocopier,…
Jim Falbe – Modern Value Investing at Saguaro (Capital Allocators, EP.320)
Hedge Fund Master Class – Craig Bergstrom, Adam Blitz, and Dan Fagan (Capital Allocators, EP.318)
Kiyan Zandiyeh – Empty Rooms: Venture Capital on the Emerging Frontier at Sturgeon Capital (Capital Allocators, EP.317)
- ▶ 24:26 Kiyan Zandiyeh And that really they're coming back to the country because they believe that the opportunity set for themselves is larger than if they were to earn a pretty good salary working at Google or Microsoft.
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