Microsoft, every mention

229 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft

tap a year for its mentions
004013802520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions
0132520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodes it came up in
0021342520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026episodesmentions per episode

every year anyone Guy Raz 139Rich Barton 19Oliver Kharraz 7Ben Chestnut 7Tony Hsieh 6Melanie Perkins 6Luis von Ahn 6Chris Zarou 6Tristan Walker 4Sal Khan 4

Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up

loading…

Bogg Bag: Kim Vaccarella. The $100 Million Business She Almost Abandoned Sep 7, 2026 · 2 mentions

Serena & Lily: Serena Dugan and Lily Kanter. They Built a $20M Brand—Then One Investor Almost Destroyed It Aug 3, 2026 · 13 mentions

  • ▶ 3:30 Guy Raz She grew up in Kansas City and studied accounting in college, and after a series of jobs in technology and retail, landed an executive role in Microsoft. 10 times in the scene
  • ▶ 3:54 Lily Kanter They were printing cash on Windows and Office like no one's business, because there was no cost of goods sold.
  • ▶ 3:54 Lily Kanter They were printing cash on Windows and Office like no one's business, because there was no cost of goods sold.
  • ▶ 25:33 Guy Raz And you had that cash, presumably from your Microsoft options that you got during that time.

Build-A-Bear: Maxine Clark. A Former Shoe Executive Launches a Stuffed Animal Empire Jun 15, 2026 · 1 mention

NVIDIA: Jensen Huang. From near collapse to becoming the world’s biggest company May 18, 2026 · 1 mention

Advice Line with Miguel McKelvey of WeWork Mar 5, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 24:36 Melissa Jenski We were seeing lots of orders come in from places like Chewy, Nike, Microsoft, Gates Foundation, and, but it's just so hard to get a foot in the door.

La Colombe Coffee Roasters: Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti. A Brotherhood Built on Coffee (2020) Jan 12, 2026 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 8:45 Guy Raz I guess at the time, this is, this is Seattle before, like, Sub Pop and Starbucks and Microsoft.

Exploding Kittens: Elan Lee. How cat-themed Russian Roulette changed game night forever Dec 22, 2025 · 12 mentions

  • ▶ 9:24 Guy Raz I mean, so that, that obviously would have been a great place to work right after you graduated, but, uh, but instead, I guess you got a call from, from like a recruiter at Microsoft to interview for a job there. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 17:20 Guy Raz Microsoft that you're just like wiped out. 4 times in the scene
  • ▶ 20:13 Elan Lee Almost immediately got, uh, this call from Microsoft saying, will you work on Halo two?
  • ▶ 24:16 Guy Raz I know you, you, you had thought about trying a couple of things and, and, and you even did, but, but you eventually wound up going back to Microsoft for a while. 3 times in the scene
  • ▶ 26:35 Guy Raz Elon is almost 40 years old and about to leave Microsoft for the second time in his career.
  • ▶ 30:41 Guy Raz You had just come out of a multi-billion dollar company, Microsoft, right?

Khan Academy: Sal Khan. From Tutoring His Cousins to Teaching the World For Free (September 2020) Dec 8, 2025 · 1 mention

Advice Line with Bill Creelman of Spindrift Nov 27, 2025 · 1 mention

Babylist: Natalie Gordon. How a new mom used nap time to build a $500M business. Nov 3, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 3:59 Natalie Gordon Like, truthfully, getting a job at Microsoft was much more prestigious than getting a job at Amazon at that time in Seattle.

Advice Line with Michael Dubin of Dollar Shave Club Oct 9, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 27:51 Guy Raz It can be two, three, five pages in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Pressbox and Tide Cleaners: Vijen Patel. The $1.99 Gamble That Built a National Brand Oct 6, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 5:00 Vijen Patel Something around that, that number, but I, at the end of the day, the end of our work always culminated in a PowerPoint presentation, and so it just felt like there was something left to be desired.
  • ▶ 1:00:26 Vijen Patel You know, I could finally, for the first time, I made a PowerPoint slide again, and, you know, all of our employees who were making 15, 20, 25 dollars an hour because we didn't have more capital, all of a sudden, they got a pay raise.

Craigslist: Craig Newmark — The Forrest Gump of the Internet Sep 29, 2025 · 2 mentions

(July 2021) Ben Chestnut: From Side Business to $12 Billion – The Accidental Triumph of Mailchimp Aug 25, 2025 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 31:34 Ben Chestnut And we started, you know, to put the numbers in Excel, just to look at the numbers.
  • ▶ 1:17:28 Ben Chestnut And I remember being in one recently where a head of one of Microsoft's cloud units, he was, he was speaking about 2 times in the scene

Crumbl: Jason McGowan Aug 11, 2025 · 1 mention

WHOOP: Will Ahmed Jul 21, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 50:38 Will Ahmed Microsoft was entering the space.
  • ▶ 59:06 Will Ahmed I had already seen how Nike and Adidas and Under Armour and Puma and Microsoft and Apple were supposed to be the death of Whoop.

Talenti: Josh Hochschuler Jun 30, 2025 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 8:07 Josh Hochschuler So, they wanted me to do Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints and stay there all night printing things on the printer, and then collating them, and then stapling them, and then, so
  • ▶ 8:07 Josh Hochschuler So, they wanted me to do Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoints and stay there all night printing things on the printer, and then collating them, and then stapling them, and then, so
  • ▶ 14:32 Josh Hochschuler I put it, like, onto a little PowerPoint, and I walked around, and anyone who would listen to me, I asked them, which, which idea do you like better?

UNTUCKit: Chris Riccobono Jun 23, 2025 · 5 mentions

  • ▶ 4:27 Chris Riccobono I'm not great at Excel or PowerPoint or all the socializing you need to do to move up.
  • ▶ 4:27 Chris Riccobono I'm not great at Excel or PowerPoint or all the socializing you need to do to move up.
  • ▶ 20:19 Chris Riccobono I couldn't put together a beautiful PowerPoint to go raise money. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 23:15 Guy Raz He was helping you kind of craft the PowerPoints and build a business model?

Figma: Dylan Field Jun 16, 2025 · 6 mentions

  • ▶ 15:01 Dylan Field And he goes, well, I've got offers from, you know, he lists all the places he had interned, you know, Microsoft, Pixar.
  • ▶ 45:53 Dylan Field So, early customers like Coda, um, Notion, Microsoft, Uber, MindBody, you know, there was a bunch that, that started to really use the platform.
  • ▶ 50:05 Guy Raz You found out that Microsoft, they had, um, designers there who were, who were really using it, but I guess corporate said, hey, you can't keep using this product because it's a free product, and it's not, uh, you know, it's not reliable… 4 times in the scene

Advice Line with Perry Chen of Kickstarter Jun 12, 2025 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 36:31 Joe Fontana Like, they would say, alright, here's, here's the thirty million over, you know, the 10 years, and we're not gonna charge you principal and interest, but then we can, like, accumulate it maybe on an Excel sheet, you know, so to speak, and…

Perfect Snacks: Bill and Leigh Keith Jun 9, 2025 · 2 mentions

Tecovas: Paul Hedrick May 19, 2025 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 1:03 Guy Raz I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Paul Hedrick made a sketch of a cowboy boot in Microsoft Paint and turned that into Tacobas, now one of the most popular brands of Western wear in the country.
  • ▶ 21:26 Paul Hedrick I created a PowerPoint deck, met with him.
  • ▶ 27:24 Paul Hedrick I did draw it with my hand, but then it, then I needed to send an email, and I couldn't get a good picture of what I was drawing, and so I went into Microsoft Paint, and I figured out that there was a function where you could kind of make… 2 times in the scene

Vizio: William Wang Apr 14, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 13:15 Guy Raz This is, I mean, it's kind of a fortuitous time, because, I mean, this is, people think of the eighties as a time when the PC boom really happened, but it was really the nineties when so many more people brought personal computers into… 2 times in the scene

Misfits Market: Abhi Ramesh Mar 31, 2025 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 6:20 Abhi Ramesh We created a gigantic Excel spreadsheet tagging thousands and thousands of SAT and ACT questions. 2 times in the scene

Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström Mar 17, 2025 · 17 mentions

  • ▶ 3:30 Guy Raz Skype was eventually sold to eBay and then, in 2011, sold again, this time to Microsoft for eight and a half billion dollars. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 35:51 Niklas Zennström And this was actually, ironically, Microsoft was ahead of the curve. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 52:09 Guy Raz I mean, you knew that the big tech companies, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, Google, they were looking at what you were doing, and they could easily build something to replicate it and potentially crush you. 4 times in the scene
  • ▶ 1:03:45 Guy Raz And I mean, I'm, I'm sort of, you know, fast forwarding here, but then it gets acquired by Microsoft in 2011, 18 months later. 6 times in the scene
  • ▶ 1:05:50 Guy Raz I'm curious just to get your thoughts on Skype today, because Microsoft clearly has leaned into Teams, which is its competitor to Zoom, and
  • ▶ 1:09:09 Guy Raz By the way, shortly after I interviewed Nicholas, Microsoft announced that it would permanently retire Skype and shift its remaining users over to Microsoft Teams.
  • ▶ 1:09:09 Guy Raz By the way, shortly after I interviewed Nicholas, Microsoft announced that it would permanently retire Skype and shift its remaining users over to Microsoft Teams.

SpotHero: Mark Lawrence Mar 10, 2025 · 1 mention

Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day: Monica Nassif Feb 17, 2025 · 1 mention

BARK: Matt Meeker Nov 4, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 7:53 Matt Meeker And it meant we spent a lot of days in conference rooms talking about PowerPoints, and when we got stuck on things, we hired consulting firms to help solve those.

21 Seeds: Kat Hantas Oct 21, 2024 · 1 mention

Viator: Rod Cuthbert Oct 14, 2024 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 10:45 Guy Raz But, uh, but this was, from what I understand, it was like the Australian arm of, uh, of Microsoft, of, of Microsoft's MSN network, right? 3 times in the scene
  • ▶ 59:53 Rod Cuthbert Two software developers who were at Microsoft in Seattle.

Advice Line: Growing Beyond Your Niche Oct 10, 2024 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 4:49 Oney Colston I didn't have a lot of money for us to go out on this fancy dinner, so I just started creating cards on Microsoft Word. 2 times in the scene

Groupon and Descript: Andrew Mason Sep 9, 2024 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 5:00 Andrew Mason Like, I had made some using Microsoft front page at home, and thought this might be a way that I could do something that I, that I really love to do and get paid a bunch of money for it.
  • ▶ 7:01 Andrew Mason Yeah, so I put out an ad to be a computer consultant for people, like an Apple specialist that was helping people, like, set up their printer and get their camera working, and I started out as a consultant who was writing reports for…
  • ▶ 1:02:49 Guy Raz But this would be like a Word document, right? 2 times in the scene

Advice Line with Jamie Siminoff of Ring Aug 22, 2024 · 1 mention

Thrive Market: Nick Green Aug 12, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 6:25 Nick Green It's a Word document that I printed out of my house for the students.

On athletic shoes: Olivier Bernhard and Caspar Coppetti Jul 22, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 45:07 Olivier Bernhard So why, instead of trying to convince them what our tech does, and you know, with a PowerPoint presentation, why don't we just bring shoes, we go run in their environment.

AI is smarter than you think with Shane Legg of Google DeepMind Apr 11, 2024 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 9:34 Guy Raz We're going to come back to that, um, and later in this conversation, but I want to talk about what you would go on to do, because while you were in graduate school, you met, um, Demis Hassab is still at Google today, and, and Mustafa…
  • ▶ 20:33 Guy Raz I mean, Sam Altman signed this letter, Jeffrey Hinton, the sort of the godfather of AI, the heads of AI at Microsoft and, and Anthropic and everyone signed it.

The peril (and promise) of AI with Tristan Harris: Part 2 Feb 29, 2024 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 23:51 Tristan Harris Now it's not smart enough to have accurate, really deeply accurate instructions about how to do that, but we probably don't want to be releasing Lama three, Lama four and Microsoft and, you know, Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated within…

Sonos: John MacFarlane Feb 19, 2024 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 6:46 John MacFarlane But, uh, while it made a lot of sense, the folks that kind of were the gatekeepers at the big software companies at that time, Microsoft, Borland, Lotus, uh,
  • ▶ 8:27 Guy Raz And this is before Microsoft Outlook or Gmail or any of that stuff.

Building a decarbonization army with Shashank Samala of Heirloom Feb 8, 2024 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 14:40 Shashank Samala So today we have customers like Microsoft and Stripe meta who are buying removals from us to help them reach net zero. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 21:05 Shashank Samala Um, this year we, we signed a contract with Microsoft.

Drunk Elephant: Tiffany Masterson Jan 29, 2024 · 1 mention

Liquid Death: Mike Cessario Jan 22, 2024 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 1:08:15 Guy Raz It's like the Microsoft, the famous Microsoft documents where you build a moat and then, you know, nobody can compete with you. 2 times in the scene

Charging up the electric vehicle market with RJ Scaringe of Rivian Dec 28, 2023 · 1 mention

reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn (2020) Dec 18, 2023 · 8 mentions

  • ▶ 18:06 Guy Raz Yeah, and I guess, like, around this time, too, I don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but I read that Bill Gates personally called you to try to convince you to leave your job at Carnegie Mellon and to go work for Microsoft. 4 times in the scene
  • ▶ 18:50 Luis von Ahn And so I had good ties with Microsoft, and they really wanted to hire me for Microsoft Research.
  • ▶ 20:19 Luis von Ahn So I use, I use PowerPoint. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 31:30 Guy Raz And presumably, Luis, I mean, given that you'd already turned down Microsoft like four years earlier,

Priority Bicycles: Dave Weiner Nov 13, 2023 · 3 mentions

  • ▶ 7:32 Dave Weiner And all of a sudden, I realized that Microsoft owned this software, and they were going to be putting tremendous resources behind it. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 7:45 Dave Weiner And so I started to look for, uh, for, for a role in, in doing this new, uh, new software, uh, Mike, which was later called Microsoft Dynamics.

Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan Oct 23, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 30:28 Scott Norton So we go to Wickenden Pub, and, and we end up writing for him, like, a couple of page Word document of, like, the annals of what we had done, and we sort of bulleted out, like, well, what would be next?

Leading through radical change with Julia Hartz of Eventbrite Oct 19, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 38:24 Julia Hartz Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think if you flip it, and you look at it from a blank slate opportunity perspective, rather than a recapturing of what was and what worked for us when we were wee little pups, I tend to find that, um, great…

Vuori: Joe Kudla Oct 2, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 4:12 Joe Kudla And when we were in middle school, we moved to Bellevue and you know, Bellevue was really known for Microsoft was really becoming a popular thing.

Orgain: Andrew Abraham Aug 7, 2023 · 1 mention

When AI is your personal tutor with Sal Khan of Khan Academy Jul 27, 2023 · 2 mentions

  • ▶ 19:42 Sal Khan Microsoft Azure money, which then uses that money to go buy expensive NVIDIA chips.
  • ▶ 32:25 Sal Khan The more that I thought about it, and I'm, I'm writing a book about all of this right now, so I've been interviewing folks, and, you know, I interviewed Kevin Roos, who, who famously, you know, New York Times writer, uh, who had that…

Spikeball: Chris Ruder Jun 19, 2023 · 6 mentions

  • ▶ 2:02 Guy Raz In around 2000, Microsoft released a tablet computer. 2 times in the scene
  • ▶ 25:04 Guy Raz And by the way, I think around this time, you get a new job working for, I think for Xbox, for Microsoft Xbox.
  • ▶ 26:27 Guy Raz Alright, so you got, so you've got this new job at Microsoft Xbox, um, and, and also kind of, you know, the side project, and, and with a 100,000, roughly 100,000 dollars, where, where did you start?
  • ▶ 34:56 Guy Raz I mean, you were working for Microsoft, so I have to assume you weren't super stressed out about that.
  • ▶ 45:53 Guy Raz I guess you'd moved on from, from Microsoft at this point.

HIBT Lab! Landed: Alex Lofton May 11, 2023 · 1 mention

HIBT Lab! Hevesh5: Lily Hevesh Apr 27, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 14:57 Lily Hevesh There's a couple of programs, um, one on Excel, and a couple that are coded by domino builders, uh, like from scratch, where essentially you can insert an image, and that will transform it into a pixelated version, um, of what you're…

Twilio: Jeff Lawson Apr 3, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 55:37 Guy Raz And you're quoted, um, around this time, maybe it was to, uh, you said, you know, our end goal is to open the black box of telecom and move the world away from the legacy of Cisco and Microsoft's big expensive hardware that you put in your…

Chomps: Pete Maldonado and Rashid Ali Jan 30, 2023 · 2 mentions

Tarte Cosmetics: Maureen Kelly Jan 23, 2023 · 1 mention

  • ▶ 12:54 Maureen Kelly I just, I wasn't a business person, and I'd never created, like, a business plan in my life, or had never done an Excel spreadsheet, but

Alienware: Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez Dec 12, 2022 · 4 mentions

  • ▶ 17:36 Nelson Gonzalez It's, it's Windows based.
  • ▶ 47:28 Frank Azor And then at the same time, you had Microsoft taking notice of all of this and saying, they're gonna get into the gaming space with the Xbox. 3 times in the scene
page 1 of 3 · 100 scenes per page · newest episode first next →
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 800 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.