Microsoft, every mention
229 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
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
Roku: Anthony Wood
- ▶ 46:14 Anthony Wood PCs have windows and I felt like TVs needed Roku.
Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer
Bluemercury: Marla and Barry Beck
- ▶ 17:20 Marla Beck I think at a certain point, we knew we had hidden the idea, and we developed like a ten-page PowerPoint, and we were gonna go try to raise money.
ButcherBox: Mike Salguero
HIBT Lab! OpenAI: Sam Altman
Roblox: David Baszucki
HIBT Lab! Universal Standard: Polina Veksler
- ▶ 5:12 Polina Veksler And so the first chance that I got, um, I was able to move to Seattle and work in strategy at Microsoft.
Twitch: Emmett Shear
- ▶ 9:37 Emmett Shear Like there should be a, like Outlook has a calendar. 2 times in the scene
HIBT Lab! BlocPower: Donnel Baird
- ▶ 33:32 Donnel Baird And so, the majority of the capital that we've raised is actually from Goldman and Microsoft, and we have to repay them.
HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher
PayPal: Max Levchin (Part 1 of 2)
- ▶ 37:33 Max Levchin Yeah, I, I was very awkward, and this totally did not work in venture capital, where I would show up, like, with a disheveled hair and a t-shirt that said, Microsoft sucks, or something like that, and people were like, all right, this is…
- ▶ 1:03:42 Max Levchin Definitely some interesting, very loud debates between engineering teams on religious matters between Windows and Unix.
Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath
- ▶ 30:19 Michael Horvath Why won't that just be handled by Microsoft outlook or, you know, the other email software companies out there that just, they didn't understand the translation between personal email and customer service via email.
HIBT Lab! Armbrust American: Lloyd Armbrust
- ▶ 16:19 Lloyd Armbrust I did the worst PowerPoint presentation of my life.
WordPress & Automattic: Matt Mullenweg
- ▶ 8:12 Matt Mullenweg There was early website publishing software, web services like GeoCities, software like Dreamweaver or FrontPage that would allow you to make, uh, honestly kind of cool for the time websites.
Discord: Jason Citron
- ▶ 4:54 Guy Raz In the case of Discord, it now has more than a hundred and fifty million monthly users, and in twenty-twenty-one, it was widely reported that Microsoft offered Jason ten billion dollars for Discord.
- ▶ 36:34 Jason Citron So I'm talking, you know, Nintendo, Sony with their PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox, you know, Valve has their Steam store.
- ▶ 1:17:54 Guy Raz You, um, uh, this has been widely reported, so I'm not, I'm not saying anything that you don't know or haven't heard a million times, that in March of, of twenty-twenty-one, um, uh, Microsoft, uh, you were in talks with Microsoft,… 4 times in the scene
M.M.LaFleur: Sarah LaFleur (2020)
- ▶ 11:16 Sarah LaFleur Uh, I didn't know how to do PowerPoint.
Back to the Roots: Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez
- ▶ 15:52 Alejandro Velez Was an Excel monkey, and I pulled out Excel, and I modeled it out as Nikhil's talking, and I said, this could be a big business, and like, that was our, off our first meeting.
Audible: Don Katz
Title Nine: Missy Park
- ▶ 12:25 Missy Park Finance, Procter & Gamble, Microsoft, and I was the only one that actually ended up not getting one of those good jobs, so I had to figure out something else to do.
Lynda.com: Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin
- ▶ 44:08 Bruce Heavin A lot of people who taught web design and Photoshop were using our courses, and they were bringing it into their schools and into their companies, so we'd be installed in all of Apple, all of Adobe, all of Microsoft, all of Google, and the…
Logic: Logic & Chris Zarou (2018)
- ▶ 24:47 Chris Zarou Yeah, it was, uh, I remember I made, and at the time, having to come up with a company name, it was more just to kind of, you know, I formed an LLC when I started to make money, because I had to be paid, and, um, I had a little, I…
- ▶ 40:13 Chris Zarou So we ended up getting back and I'd, I'd later put everything into, you know, an Excel spreadsheet and, and try and, you know, log everything. 2 times in the scene
Robert Reffkin: Compass
- ▶ 34:30 Robert Reffkin And we just started talking about it, and the idea was, what's, what's an industry that's really, really big, that the big companies, Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, aren't competing within, and it really came down to real…
- ▶ 1:03:00 Robert Reffkin What Microsoft did, what Google did, they didn't invest it back in research and development to create a better company for their customer.
Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut
- ▶ 31:06 Ben Chestnut And we started, you know, to put the numbers in Excel, just to look at the numbers.
- ▶ 1:19:43 Ben Chestnut And, um, these days, these days, you know, MailChimp is much bigger, and I get invited to ritzy events with some really great business leaders, and I remember being in one recently where a head of one of Microsoft's cloud units was 3 times in the scene
Expedia & Zillow: Rich Barton
- ▶ 2:10 Guy Raz And in the early 19 nineties, a young Microsoft employee named Rich Barton was obsessed with this kind of disruption.
- ▶ 5:09 Rich Barton My, really, one of my great friends from Stanford, she took a product manager job there at Microsoft and moved to Seattle right out of school, which was an interesting little company that recruited on Stanford's campus. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:55 Guy Raz I, I, so it's still pre-Windows. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:21 Guy Raz So you work on, on the DOS system, you worked as a product manager on the DOS system for, I guess, um, two or three years, and, uh, I guess around 90, 19, 94, you actually request a transfer to Microsoft's consumer division, which, can you… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 8:03 Rich Barton One was called Cinemania.
- ▶ 10:32 Rich Barton Um, Bill Gates, at the time, Microsoft was still relatively small and ran these, uh, what were called product reviews every year, and the product teams would come through his boardroom and say what they're working on, what they wanted to… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:26 Rich Barton Kind of a Windows version of this and giving it to consumers could be a complete game changer for consumer empowerment. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 16:36 Rich Barton Um, and Microsoft was scary. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 19:47 Guy Raz Microsoft spun out Expedia as a public company in, in 1999, and, uh, and you became the CEO, still pretty young, um, of a public company at the time.
- ▶ 21:31 Rich Barton And so in order to stay out of my wife's hair, I took an office with an ex Expedia, early Microsoft Stanford friend of mine, Lloyd Frank.
- ▶ 29:13 Rich Barton We both had resources from Expedia and Microsoft.
- ▶ 29:28 Guy Raz Alright, so from what I understand, you recruited a pretty high-level team that you'd worked with at Microsoft and then at Expedia, but a year, like almost a year into this Zillow venture, like, you really, you weren't really kind of going…
- ▶ 47:20 Rich Barton I've always liked to do lots of things, and we had just such a great, the kind of Microsoft slash Expedia diaspora was such a talented group of people that I loved, and one of those great people, Robert Homan, who had been a development…
Policygenius: Jennifer Fitzgerald
- ▶ 47:57 Jennifer Fitzgerald We then had to get access to their, uh, rate filings for their products, and then, uh, I think, yeah, Francois in Microsoft Excel, in a spreadsheet, built the first, uh, like, comparative rater and pricing engine for pet insurance, working…
- ▶ 57:22 Jennifer Fitzgerald Into the system to get, to generate quotes, then we put those quotes into a custom PowerPoint presentation for the quote requester. 2 times in the scene
Live Episode! Wellness Coach and Podcaster: Jay Shetty
- ▶ 40:18 Jay Shetty I made a list of every single exec at every single media company in an Excel spreadsheet, and I emailed, tweeted, and mailed every exec every week when I released a new video.
Robinhood: Vlad Tenev
- ▶ 16:24 Vlad Tenev And I guess the observation that Bijou had made, which convinced us to get into business together, was that, you know, a lot of these firms are building their software on Microsoft Windows. 2 times in the scene
How I Built Resilience: Lisa Baird of National Women's Soccer League
- ▶ 8:30 Lisa Baird What I later learned is that some people just loaded in one Excel spreadsheet and got their loan, but I was so worried that
How I Built Resilience: Alex Lieberman and Austin Rief of Morning Brew
- ▶ 3:08 Alex Lieberman It was a PDF that I would put together using Microsoft Word, and then I would export it into a PDF.
Canva: Melanie Perkins (2019)
- ▶ 3:19 Guy Raz And when Melanie went to university to study communications, this was in the mid-two thousands, she started using graphic design and publishing software, programs like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher, and she was frustrated that the…
- ▶ 3:53 Melanie Perkins And so I had this very oversized vision for taking on all of these different industries from, you know, Microsoft Office and lots and lots of other industries as well.
- ▶ 6:48 Guy Raz Go on Microsoft Word or, or like? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:51 Melanie Perkins Yeah, Microsoft Word or Publisher.
- ▶ 12:28 Melanie Perkins And it had a picture of us beating Microsoft Office, and Adobe, and Google Docs, and a whole bunch of other companies.
- ▶ 24:06 Guy Raz but, you know, like, look, Microsoft or Google, the minute they see what you guys do, they'll crush you because they'll just put something else out way bigger, and, and, I mean, you're just going to get crushed right away.
Simple Mills: Katlin Smith
- ▶ 35:39 Katlin Smith Uh, so I had put in all that I possibly could, and I had modeled out my little Excel model that we needed probably 200,000 dollars
Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar
Patreon: Jack Conte and Sam Yam
- ▶ 49:03 Jack Conte And so, yeah, we made an Excel spreadsheet with, with those folks, and I found their contact info, and, um, reached out to all 40 of them, and, uh, and, and all 40 of them said no.
How I Built Resilience: Morra Aarons-Mele of Women Online
- ▶ 7:09 Morra Aarons-Mele Excel.
- ▶ 22:00 Morra Aarons-Mele It was my partner who showed me an Excel spreadsheet and said, you know what, let's adjust the forecast. 2 times in the scene
Author and Podcaster: Tim Ferriss
- ▶ 46:28 Tim Ferriss Yeah, while I was traveling, so what I'd done up to that point is scheduled my entire life in 10 or 15 minute outlook increments, right?
Riot Games: Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill
- ▶ 36:41 Marc Merrill So that was a really contentious moment in, in the office where it turned out that we heard that this individual was having meetings with, you know, Sony and Microsoft to try to go build games for, you know, the, the, the PlayStation…
Remembering Tony Hsieh of Zappos
- ▶ 8:52 Tony Hsieh And then ultimately ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty five million. 2 times in the scene
Dropbox: Drew Houston
- ▶ 7:21 Drew Houston What I did there was they had, they were running everything on Windows. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 26:13 Drew Houston Google, Microsoft, you name it, was gonna do this and eat our lunch.
How I Built Resilience: Sonia Gil of Fluenz
How I Built Resilience: Jennifer Neundorfer of January Ventures
- ▶ 18:59 Jennifer Neundorfer You need to get the points across, but then we, we hear how the founder would tell their story rather than flipping through on a static PowerPoint.
Khan Academy: Sal Khan
Calendly: Tope Awotona
- ▶ 48:18 Guy Raz And that calendar would be integrated with whatever they used, whether it was Google or, or Microsoft or whatever.
- ▶ 1:04:40 Guy Raz And, and was your idea already at that point that hopefully one day big companies, like Microsoft or, you know, Microsoft, but like, you know, big companies would, would use your, your service? 3 times in the scene
Zocdoc: Oliver Kharraz
- ▶ 0:03 Oliver Kharraz Uh, Cyrus ended up going door to door for doctor's offices, actually showing them a PowerPoint page, and this is really a testament to Cyrus's sheer will and determination.
- ▶ 13:52 Oliver Kharraz You know, we, what we, what we started doing is actually mocking up, uh, the site, uh, and how we imagined it back then, uh, in PowerPoint and just the, the image of a website. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:04 Oliver Kharraz So, uh, Cyrus ended up going door to door for doctor's offices, actually showing them a PowerPoint page. 2 times in the scene
How I Built Resilience: Alberto Perlman of Zumba
- ▶ 14:57 Alberto Perlman And Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, they were teaching on these platforms, and, and a lot of audio issues or video issues as they were learning, right?
La Colombe Coffee Roasters: Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti
Sub Pop Records: Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman
reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn
- ▶ 17:55 Guy Raz 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. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:38 Luis von Ahn And so I had good ties with Microsoft, and they really wanted to hire me for Microsoft Research.
- ▶ 20:07 Luis von Ahn So I use, I use PowerPoint. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 31:18 Guy Raz And, and presumably, Luis, I mean, given that you'd already turned down Microsoft like four years earlier, um, you were not going to become a Googler.
S'well: Sarah Kauss
- ▶ 25:22 Sarah Kauss I started designing the product actually in PowerPoint.
Stripe: Patrick and John Collison (2018)
Eventbrite: Julia Hartz
- ▶ 22:14 Julia Hartz You know, either you were using checks and cash collected at the door and tracking your attendees on maybe Excel spreadsheets or by hand.
M.M.LaFleur: Sarah LaFleur
- ▶ 11:00 Sarah LaFleur Uh, I didn't know how to do PowerPoint.
Wikipedia: Jimmy Wales (2018)
- ▶ 12:46 Jimmy Wales One of the problems that Newpedia had, uh, is that the only real way to collaborate back then was to email around a Word doc. 2 times in the scene
Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson
Live Episode! Luke's Lobster: Luke Holden and Ben Conniff
- ▶ 27:39 Ben Conniff So pull up that strip and see how many lobster rolls it says we sold at the end of the night, and then we'd back into what we had, and, and it was, you know, I had never used Excel in my life at that point, so 3 times in the scene
Live Episode! Walker & Company: Tristan Walker
- ▶ 0:05 Tristan Walker I remember the very first pitch deck, which was a PowerPoint of graduated to keynote, but like we had a PowerPoint of like clip art because I didn't have 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 28:59 Tristan Walker Actually, I remember the very first pitch deck, which was a PowerPoint. 2 times in the scene
Aden + Anais: Raegan Moya-Jones (2019)
- ▶ 32:28 Raegan Moya-Jones You know, obviously the way you run a hundred million dollar company to the way you run a, you know, a 20 or even a 30, forty million dollar company, you know, you can get by with running your business on Excel spreadsheets at thirty…
Dyson: James Dyson (2018)
- ▶ 42:23 Mike Sorrentino Right, and our logo is something I made up in Microsoft Paint.
Zappos: Tony Hsieh (2017)
- ▶ 9:56 Tony Hsieh And then ultimately ended up selling the company to Microsoft in 1998 for two hundred sixty five million. 2 times in the scene
Belkin International: Chet Pipkin
Framebridge: Susan Tynan (2017)
- ▶ 22:53 Susan Tynan I say we because there were some people on the PowerPoint, um, pitch check who now have joined.
Compaq Computers: Rod Canion (2019)
- ▶ 1:30 Guy Raz So if you have a PC at home or at work, and you buy some software like Word or TurboTax, it doesn't really matter if you have a Dell or an HP or a Toshiba, because if it's a PC, it will run PC software.
- ▶ 30:56 Guy Raz You think about Compaq, it was such a powerhouse in the eighties, a fortune 500 company, does a billion dollars in revenue within five years, and then you think about all of the companies that, that it was associated with, or that it… 2 times in the scene
Logic: Logic & Chris Zarou
- ▶ 23:43 Chris Zarou Yeah, it was, uh, I remember I made, and at the time, having to come up with a company name, it was more just to kind of, you know, I formed an LLC when I started to make money because I had to be paid, and, um, I had a little, I remember,…
- ▶ 39:05 Chris Zarou You know, an Excel spreadsheet and try and, you know, log everything. 2 times in the scene
Squarespace: Anthony Casalena
- ▶ 5:40 Anthony Casalena Like, that was, like, at the time, Dreamweaver and FrontPage and all that. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 7:50 Anthony Casalena Front page Microsoft, Dreamweaver, Macromedia, and later Adobe.