Microsoft, every mention
42 scenes (2025), the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year 2025 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
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?