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
Richard Craib – Crowdsourcing Data Science for Returns at Numerai (Capital Allocators, EP.314)
- ▶ 15:42 Richard Craib So you can imagine opening that in Excel or something and looking at each of the features, but the feature names are hidden.
Ashby Monk – Investor Identity, Navigation, and Resilience (Capital Allocators, EP.312)
- ▶ 25:49 Ashby Monk Like you're still get a word document at the end, but I think what's really exciting is like when technology lets you hold less cash, it actually changes your portfolio.
Aaron Sack – Branded Middle Market Investing at Morgan Stanley (Capital Allocators, EP.311)
- ▶ 25:57 Aaron Sack These are typically 60 to hundred page PowerPoint documents that focus on the four or five levers that we've identified during due diligence that are going to move the needle during our investment period.
Rod Wong – Empty Rooms: Innovation in Biotech at RTW (Capital Allocators, EP. 310)
Dan Ivascyn – Fixed Income in the Limelight Again (Capital Allocators, EP.298)
- ▶ 46:57 Dan Ivascyn I think it was easier for people like myself, Scott Simon, others in the business to do that back in the old days when you were pricing bonds on an Excel spreadsheet, when Bloomberg had these primitive functions where you're typing in…
José E. Feliciano – Flexible Private Market Investing at Clearlake (Capital Allocators, EP. 297)
- ▶ 9:16 Jose Feliciano As I mentioned before, if you learned about business behind an Excel spreadsheet where in Excel, almost everything is possible. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:00 Jose Feliciano I'm not a big believer of having these 200 page PowerPoint decks. 3 times in the scene
Marshall Boyd – Meat and Potatoes Multi-Family Real Estate at IEC (Capital Allocators, EP.295)
- ▶ 16:49 Marshall Boyd I was pretty good at making PowerPoint presentations because that had been my job for several years.
Anthony Scaramucci – Another Winter and Another Rebirth (Capital Allocators, EP.292)
- ▶ 20:07 Anthony Scaramucci Taking place on the internet, and oh, by the way, you're going to go through a pandemic, and you're going to use the internet, and you're going to use Zoom, and Teams, and all these different protocols to do your business someday.
Sachin Khajuria – Two and Twenty, An Insider's Take on Private Equity (Capital Allocators, EP.285)
- ▶ 25:51 Sachin Khajuria Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, etc.
- ▶ 45:58 Sachin Khajuria Who's the Microsoft of distressed?
Michael Rees – Inside GP Stakes at Dyal Capital (Capital Allocators, EP.278)
- ▶ 55:50 Michael Rees At an early age or early part of my career, I thought everything came out of Excel. 2 times in the scene
Louis-Vincent Gave – The Case for Emerging Markets (Capital Allocators, EP.275)
- ▶ 14:53 Louis-Vincent Gave They're returning capital to shareholders like Microsoft and Apple were 10 years ago.
Friends Reunion 2 – Five Allocators Riff on Investing with Meredith Jenkins, Casey Whalen, Brett Barth, Jon Harris, and Ted Seides (Capital Allocators, EP.271)
- ▶ 34:40 Jon Harris I think a lot more money will be lost than made because you always have to ask yourself the question, what's stopping Microsoft from coming in and walking over XYZ company.
Avichal Garg – Programmer-Centric Crypto Investing at Electric (Manager Meetings, EP.34)
- ▶ 26:58 Avichal Garg In PC land, you would have seen Windows all the way on the left.
- ▶ 41:20 Avichal Garg She was CTO and she worked on search at Microsoft.
Ashvin Chhabra – The Aspirational Investor (Capital Allocators, EP.260)
- ▶ 40:26 Ashvin Chhabra My view was, give me any large cap stock, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, IBM, Microsoft, I still don't know what I'm investing in.
Chris Dixon – Frameworks and Investing at Scale (EP.258, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.05)
- ▶ 14:14 Chris Dixon And like Excel and Word are still very popular products after 40 years.
- ▶ 14:14 Chris Dixon And like Excel and Word are still very popular products after 40 years.
- ▶ 22:04 Chris Dixon So I think the most popular was Encarta, which was created by Microsoft.
- ▶ 22:04 Chris Dixon So I think the most popular was Encarta, which was created by Microsoft. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 47:17 Chris Dixon There is also sometimes an advantage to starting later in the same way that you had Apple and the other tinkerers, but then you had Compaq and Dell and Microsoft and all these other people take the baton and run with it.
Ben Forman – Opportunities in DeFi (EP.256, Crypto for Institutions 2, EP.03)
- ▶ 38:46 Ben Forman You just use Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, and it works.
Greg Dowling – Mid-Market Institutional Consulting at FEG (Capital Allocators, EP.248)
- ▶ 30:15 Greg Dowling It's really difficult to do a group Zoom or Teams call in terms of due diligence because you might have people talking over each other.
Louis-Vincent Gave – Macro Consequences of Government Sanctions (Capital Allocators, EP.247)
- ▶ 28:57 Louis-Vincent Gave And because people wanted that, it's not one of the top 10 shareholders in Apple, one of the top 10 shareholders in Microsoft, etc.
Steve Papa – Entrepreneur's Perspective on Venture, Venture is Eating the Investment World 13 (Capital Allocators, EP.244)
- ▶ 24:53 Steve Papa Another was, interestingly, the way I got to know the Oracle Corp dev team was in January, 2008, Microsoft acquired a company called Fast, which was a Norwegian search company. 2 times in the scene
Josh Wolfe – Caution and Innovation at Lux Capital, Venture is Eating the Investment World 8 (Capital Allocators, EP.236)
- ▶ 25:41 Josh Wolfe Recruiting away from Microsoft and Amazon and elsewhere and Facebook Reality Labs, that's now Meta Reality Labs.
Joelle Kayden – Canvassing the Landscape at Accolade Partners, Venture is Eating the Investment World 7 (Capital Allocators, EP.235)
- ▶ 9:48 Joelle Kayden I mean, the firm had an amazing franchise in so many different sectors, whether it was consumer taking Starbucks public or whether it was taking Qualcomm public in the semiconductor world, America online, and then every software company…
Aydin Senkut – Tenacious Sourcing and Founder Support at Felicis, Venture is Eating the Investment World 6 (Capital Allocators, EP.234)
- ▶ 13:37 Aydin Senkut I didn't get lucky joins Google and the rest is history, but I had three years at Silicon Graphics, which I think was an equally impressive company with amazing people, just had no contingency plan, had a really great thing going and…
- ▶ 36:55 Aydin Senkut So many people think that just because they have the degree, they have the title, they have the idea that the deal and the win is going to fall into their lap, and the founders, they are putting their life into this, they don't want to…
Fabrice Grinda – Canvassing Seed Stage Marketplaces at FJ Labs, Venture is Eating the Investment World 4 (Capital Allocators, EP.232)
- ▶ 14:42 Fabrice Grinda but I'd started with 300,000 dollars from the profits from the prior companies, which I'd invested in Intel, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon, which I'd done rather well and were the seed funding for the company.
- ▶ 58:48 Fabrice Grinda Then we needed to build our own data centers, and I needed to have Oracle databases and Microsoft web servers.
Sean O'Sullivan – Start-up Development at SOSV, Venture is Eating the Investment World 3 (Capital Allocators, EP.231)
- ▶ 14:15 Sean O'Sullivan So everyone from the Microsofts and the Oracles would bundle it into their products and
- ▶ 47:39 Sean O'Sullivan They're waiting for somebody to come in and show their PowerPoint presentation of what the traction numbers look like, et cetera.
Chris Douvos – The LP's Perspective from Ahoy Capital, Venture is Eating the Investment World 2 (Capital Allocators, EP.230)
- ▶ 17:37 Chris Douvos I always think there's, you can invest pre-Excel or post-Excel, EX-CEL, the, the software package.
- ▶ 20:07 Chris Douvos I was just on a call where somebody was talking about mid-level, not even senior engineers at Microsoft are making a million dollars.
- ▶ 22:02 Ted Seides As you're walking through this, I'm hearing this resonance that I saw in the public markets for a long time, which was some form of wage inflation, meaning the engineers are getting paid a million bucks to be at Microsoft, but Microsoft…
David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert – Acquiring an Industry. Venture is Eating the Investment World 1 (Capital Allocators, EP.229)
- ▶ 8:16 Ben Gilbert Well, I did computer science undergrad, ended up going to Microsoft, working there as a program manager on Office for iPad, which was super fun to work on that at the time. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 50:03 Ben Gilbert But then the unbelievable, magical invention that Microsoft had in the nineties of we can copy software, and then we have zero marginal cost in creating that next
- ▶ 1:05:26 Ben Gilbert And Greg is the person that made time for me when he was a general partner at a venture firm, and I was a twenty-two-year-old newbie at Microsoft, who met with me quarterly to mentor me, who ultimately pulled me out of Microsoft and let me… 2 times in the scene
Bill Trenchard - First Round Capital (Manager Meetings, EP.23)
- ▶ 13:13 Chris Douvos And I remember putting flight simulator in and waiting two minutes and 40 seconds for that thing to load.
- ▶ 14:15 Bill Trenchard The thing that I learned early on from looking at all those products, and I think I got a sense of, Steve Jobs had this famous saying about Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:00 Bill Trenchard Outlook was our model at the time, which was desktop software.
- ▶ 21:01 Chris Douvos So you guys sold to Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
Ian Charles & Doc O'Connor – Investing in Sports Teams at Arctos Sports Partners (Capital Allocators, EP.225)
- ▶ 23:03 Ian Charles Names like Qualtrics, Microsoft, TIBCO, Blackstone, Appaloosa, Apollo, Fortress, Aries, Bain, really sophisticated people.
Chas Cocke - From Allocator to Manager (Capital Allocators, EP.224)
- ▶ 6:13 Chas Cocke My first stock purchases in my young teens were not well researched, not surprisingly, I guess, but included, uh, GE and Microsoft and Cisco systems and a company called Fiocall, which is a defense contractor that made boosters for
Brian Higgins - King Street Capital (Manager Meeting, EP. 21)
- ▶ 36:12 Brian Higgins So we used to fax our daily trades to the bookkeeper, and then we kept internally on Excel spreadsheets that I built our positions.
Richard Tedlow - Charismatic Business Leadership (Capital Allocators, EP.222)
- ▶ 25:13 Richard Tedlow And the second thing that happened that was important was that Microsoft launched Windows 95.
- ▶ 30:52 Richard Tedlow Steve Ballmer, who was the CEO of Microsoft in twenty-oh seven, thought it was going to fail because since it didn't have a plastic keyboard,
- ▶ 37:17 Richard Tedlow Other companies, Microsoft is famous for vaporware.
- ▶ 44:48 Richard Tedlow But Satya Nadella, who's the CEO of Microsoft, and who is a very interesting individual, has said that we have to be involved in this because if we're not, the future is very much in peril.
Jordi Visser – Analytics and AQ at Weiss (Capital Allocators, EP.221)
- ▶ 32:24 Jordi Visser Right now, 18% technology without the F-A-A-M-G, but when you add Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google as a separate group, that's about 23% of the S&P.
- ▶ 46:18 Jordi Visser I don't envision this to be like the tech boom with Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and their ability to dominate the software and, and smartphone world in terms of getting these big things in web too.
Jennifer Heller – Beginner's Mind with Professional Wisdom at Brandywine (Capital Allocators, EP.211)
- ▶ 11:46 Jenny Heller So there was a very long, very robust PowerPoint presentation that they shared with the team that didn't lead to an investment, but that's knowledge that we've now built as a group.
Jonathan Lewinsohn – Diameter Capital Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.05)
- ▶ 32:29 Jonathan Lewinsohn So if I want to go buy Microsoft stock, it's pretty easiest to buy and sell Microsoft stock.
Jeremy Grantham – GMO (Manager Meetings, EP.01)
- ▶ 40:19 Jeremy Grantham Our claim to fame in our first quant funds is that we owned Microsoft in our value stream in the top decile of value from the day it appeared as a stock that met our size limit until late 99, when it finally got overpriced enough that it…
Private Equity Masters 3: Robert F. Smith – Vista Equity Partners (Capital Allocators, EP.202)
- ▶ 21:17 Robert F. Smith For instance, you need to migrate a product into AWS or Azure or something of that sort.
Ashby Monk – Innovation in Institutional Portfolios (Capital Allocators, EP.196)
- ▶ 44:28 Ashby Monk Not like having 40 Excel spreadsheets, but an elegant framework for helping a chief investment officer
Innovation in Private Markets 3: Sulaiman Alderbas – A Massive Restart at PIFSS (Capital Allocators, EP.194)
- ▶ 18:22 Sulaiman Alderbas So we created an Excel sheet for every single line item in the AT.
- ▶ 42:45 Sulaiman Alderbas So when COVID hit, for us here at PIFS, it was a seamless transition because leading up to COVID, we already had the cloud and everyone's active on teams.
Brian Bares – Qualitative Concentration at BCM (Capital Allocators, EP.191)
- ▶ 22:14 Brian Bares I felt like I needed the best opportunity that I could have to, as a, just a single person to underwrite these ideas and feel confident about the work that we were doing and eke out a very perception based upon research that honestly, if I…
Crypto for Institutions 4: Ari Paul – Exploiting Inefficiencies in Crypto Trading (Capital Allocators, EP.183)
Crypto for Institutions 3: Seth Ginns – Investing Beyond Bitcoin (Capital Allocators, EP.182)
- ▶ 26:00 Seth Ginns What's really cool is like in the future, we envision they'll get all of the benefits from these blockchains without having to know whether, do you know, if your video service is on AWS or Google cloud or Azure, it doesn't matter to you.
BONUS – Michael Mauboussin on the Decision Education Podcast
- ▶ 33:33 Michael Mauboussin You can, you could do this in Excel very quickly.
Chris Dixon – The Future of Blockchain at a16z (Capital Allocators, EP.172)
- ▶ 27:14 Chris Dixon I mean, people say windows, Microsoft missed mobile phones. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 27:14 Chris Dixon I mean, people say windows, Microsoft missed mobile phones.
- ▶ 31:09 Chris Dixon The information superhighway was Microsoft, Disney, Comcast, which was to have these big centralized systems and you would go buy a box and they would have these video on demand stuff and a bunch of like, it'd be like this little play pen,…
- ▶ 45:45 Chris Dixon Microsoft building the word processor and all these other, you know, that was really what drove a lot of the early PC stuff.
James Clear – Mastering Habits (Capital Allocators, EP.171)
- ▶ 52:10 James Clear I wrote an article about it at one point, but there was this Microsoft executive thing.
Joel Greenblatt – Common Sense for Value at Gotham Capital (Capital Allocators, EP.165)
- ▶ 58:41 Joel Greenblatt So the example I would give you is let's say Microsoft is hired for its HR department or its accounting department. 4 times in the scene
Shane Parrish – Learning to Learn at Farnam Street (Capital Allocators, EP.164)
- ▶ 38:57 Shane Parrish Whereas if you think of a PowerPoint, it's designed to persuade you.
- ▶ 49:10 Shane Parrish And I think that the world is just really rich and detailed and there are structured approaches to decision-making and a lot of people use decision trees and they complicated Excel sheets, but all
Morgan Housel – The Psychology of Money (Capital Allocators, EP.155)
- ▶ 28:42 Morgan Housel He said, if there were no Lakeside High, there would be no Microsoft. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 48:46 Morgan Housel Like in the last 10 years, it's been Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix.
- ▶ 50:10 Morgan Housel They make them at the dinner table with their spouse, with their family, where all these emotions and nuance comes into play that moves the needle in a way that you can't really summarize neatly in Excel.
Matthew Granade – Inside Data Science at Point72 (First Meeting, EP.22)
- ▶ 20:24 Matthew Granade How much technical acumen a team has, and so we have a lot of teams that have analysts that are fairly technical, and those teams plug directly into our databases and things like that, and can pull the data into Excel models and manipulate…
Taimur Hyat – After the Great Lockdown (Capital Allocators, EP.149)
- ▶ 10:31 Taimur Hyat You recognize that some of the real challenges around talent and organization and how to convince people to do things rather than what the five-page PowerPoint answer is.
Adam Fisher – Blending Global Macro and Real Estate at Commonwealth Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.21)
- ▶ 49:31 Adam Fisher Now you could say, oh, Microsoft or Amazon or whatever, but by the way, it's actually deceiving.
- ▶ 59:06 Adam Fisher It's better than Microsoft.
Sustainable Investing 5: David Blood - Pioneering a Generation (Capital Allocators, EP.143)
- ▶ 29:59 David Blood We've owned Microsoft, for example.
Clarke Futch – Healthcare Royalty Partners (First Meeting, EP.20)
- ▶ 46:51 Clark Futch So that's a case where we're trying to get, it's not a Excel spreadsheet, but we're trying to get a little more exposure to those areas.
Laurence Siegel – Current Myths and Long-Term Optimism (Capital Allocators, EP.137)
- ▶ 21:03 Larry Siegel Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Mark Baumgartner – Allocating in a Crisis at IAS (Capital Allocators, EP.128)
- ▶ 11:34 Mark Baumgartner I think something came through on, uh, learning Excel skills. 2 times in the scene
Dan Rasmussen – Private Equity Risk and Public Equity Opportunity at Verdad Advisers (First Meeting, EP.15)
- ▶ 9:13 Dan Rasmussen I couldn't do Excel models.
- ▶ 21:10 Dan Rasmussen Would you rather put it in Apple or Microsoft or something?
Anne Martin - Pulling the Oars as CIO of Wesleyan University (Capital Allocators, EP.114)
- ▶ 8:28 Anne Martin Over my summer at business school, I actually worked for Microsoft.
- ▶ 22:18 Anne Martin There were a lot of Excel spreadsheets with our historical performance, none of which I was certain didn't have fat finger errors in them.
Ash Fontana – Investing in Artificial Intelligence at Zetta Ventures (First Meeting, EP.11)
- ▶ 1:02:44 Ash Fontana Don't get me wrong, like, DeepMind is an amazing institution, and Google has a huge amount of talent, and so does Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft and whatnot.
Scott Kupor - Andreessen Horowitz (First Meeting EP.07)
- ▶ 12:28 Scott Kupor And so the time it takes obviously to give them the feedback and allow them to fix it in a way that makes sense versus you just basically going into the Excel model and changing it.
- ▶ 18:50 Scott Kupor So we were part of the group that bought Skype out of eBay, and then that got sold about 18 months later to Microsoft.
- ▶ 26:16 Scott Kupor They might have a PowerPoint.
- ▶ 41:25 Scott Kupor I think the implications of that are, number one, what it means is there's a huge amount of money that used to be in the public markets that's now looking for appreciation in the private markets, because when these companies go public,…
- ▶ 49:12 Ted Seides So your sovereign wealth fund might be financial returns, and then you see, oh, Microsoft's gonna invest, and there's this notion that all of the companies that SoftBank banks will shift their cloud services to Microsoft. 2 times in the scene
Eric Ries – Lean Start-Ups and the Long-Term Stock Exchange (Capital Allocators, EP.107)
Sam Sicilia – Seizing on a Long Time Horizon at HostPlus (EP.103)
- ▶ 11:07 Sam Sicilia Term, and you had the CEO literally firing up Excel, building their own models, and they had recognized that the time had come to consider bringing in some expertise.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy – O'Shaughnessy Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.01)
- ▶ 45:46 Patrick O'Shaughnessy So it's not just VC and startup, but big public technology companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon and asking whether or not we can apply those principles to a very simple old school asset management business.
- ▶ 49:31 Patrick O'Shaughnessy So like I've talked to executives from Microsoft and Amazon and all these places who just are interested in talking about this. 2 times in the scene
Khe Hy – Radical Shift from Investing to Purpose (Capital Allocators, EP.101)
Michael Mauboussin – Who's on the Other Side (Capital Allocators, EP.99)
- ▶ 22:00 Michael Mauboussin Bill Gates, when he was CEO of Microsoft, used to carry around a list of priorities for the organization. 2 times in the scene
Matt Levine – Money Stuff (Capital Allocators, EP.97)
- ▶ 23:26 Matt Levine Another thing you can do, by the way, is like, if a company default, if like Microsoft did that, which they wouldn't, but if they did that, CDS wouldn't pay out very much because their bonds are not distressed, and like the CDS pays out…