Microsoft, every mention
72 scenes (said by Guy Raz), 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
Serena & Lily: Serena Dugan and Lily Kanter. They Built a $20M Brand—Then One Investor Almost Destroyed It
La Colombe Coffee Roasters: Todd Carmichael and J.P. Iberti. A Brotherhood Built on Coffee (2020)
Exploding Kittens: Elan Lee. How cat-themed Russian Roulette changed game night forever
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 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?
Advice Line with Michael Dubin of Dollar Shave Club
Crumbl: Jason McGowan
UNTUCKit: Chris Riccobono
Figma: Dylan Field
Tecovas: Paul Hedrick
Vizio: William Wang
Skype and Kazaa: Niklas Zennström
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 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.
Viator: Rod Cuthbert
Groupon and Descript: Andrew Mason
AI is smarter than you think with Shane Legg of Google DeepMind
- ▶ 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.
Sonos: John MacFarlane
Liquid Death: Mike Cessario
reCAPTCHA and Duolingo: Luis von Ahn (2020)
- ▶ 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
- ▶ 31:30 Guy Raz And presumably, Luis, I mean, given that you'd already turned down Microsoft like four years earlier,
Spikeball: Chris Ruder
- ▶ 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.
Twilio: Jeff Lawson
Tripadvisor: Steve Kaufer
ButcherBox: Mike Salguero
HIBT Lab! OpenAI: Sam Altman
Roblox: David Baszucki
HIBT Lab! Climeworks: Jan Wurzbacher
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.
- ▶ 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
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.
- ▶ 5:55 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
- ▶ 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.
- ▶ 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…
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…
- ▶ 6:48 Guy Raz Go on Microsoft Word or, or like? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 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.
Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar
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
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
- ▶ 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.
Stripe: Patrick and John Collison (2018)
Live Episode! OtterBox: Curt Richardson
Belkin International: Chet Pipkin
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
Canva: Melanie Perkins
- ▶ 2:52 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…
- ▶ 6:23 Guy Raz Go on Microsoft Word or, or like? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 23:42 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.
LinkedIn: Reid Hoffman
Patagonia: Yvon Chouinard (2016)
Compaq Computers: Rod Canion
- ▶ 1:07 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, and that makes perfect sense, right?
- ▶ 30:34 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