Microsoft, every mention
114 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Brett Berson 43Jon Noronha 30David Cramer 20Sam Schillace 15Steve Blank 12Christopher Payne 12Jay Parikh 11Dennis Pilarinos 9Jeremy Epling 7Amjad Masad 6
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
The most expensive mistake in outsourcing your tech stack | Jay Parikh (EVP CoreAI, Microsoft)
- ▶ 8:25 Brett Berson There's probably a few other variables, but like how do you think about driving and maybe a way to sort of frame it as if I'm working on your team 10 years ago at Facebook and I'm working on your team today at Microsoft, are the cultures…
- ▶ 19:55 Jay Parikh I mean, we have teams now in Core AI and, and, and Microsoft that, you know, that I support, that I work with, that,
- ▶ 24:50 Jay Parikh Even in, you know, the team at Microsoft, my team, Corey, I like one of the things we have, uh, just as a cultural thing right now is like, you know, there is this like FTE thing out there.
- ▶ 33:36 Jay Parikh Some of these people come from very, very different backgrounds, very different cultures, so onboarding of folks into a company like Facebook, or even in our team at Microsoft, was something that our teams meet put a lot of time into,… 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:13 Jay Parikh The other, I think, shifts we're trying to make in Core AI at Microsoft is this balance between more ICs leading things, and what I also saw and what we did at Facebook is when these things like mobile or other things came in that were… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 52:53 Jay Parikh I mean, just, it's a long list as I was reflecting as I was moving from that company, and then after a couple months ended up at, at, uh, at Microsoft, but where I feel the learning has really propelled is a lot deeper understanding of the… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 54:35 Brett Berson And let's remove sort of this last chapter of Microsoft and you look back at the, the previous couple of decades.
How Gamma pulled off their AI pivot | Jon Noronha (Co-founder and CPO of Gamma)
- ▶ 2:25 Jon Noronha The target was always PowerPoint. 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 11:27 Jon Noronha A tool like PowerPoint is not a vertical solution.
- ▶ 17:32 Jon Noronha And so they actually caused all this pain for us of trying to figure out how to bridge this interactivity with this legacy format that was not interactive.
- ▶ 20:35 Jon Noronha Versus the sort of obvious realization that no, everybody is still exporting this thing to PowerPoint early on because that's where their team lives. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 24:51 Jon Noronha PowerPoint came out in 1987, and in the last 39 years, basically nobody else has managed to unseat them. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 29:46 Jon Noronha So Excel is such a dominant tool for spreadsheets and I love Excel. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:07 Jon Noronha PowerPoint felt so ripe to attack because it doesn't have the same feeling. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 30:44 Jon Noronha If you think about who's buying the Google suite or the Microsoft Office suite, nobody's doing it by comparing the feature set of PowerPoint versus Google Slides.
- ▶ 30:53 Jon Noronha They're, instead, they're comparing Outlook versus Gmail, and maybe after that, like, Word versus Google Slides, and PowerPoint and Google Slides are afterthoughts in their product roadmap.
- ▶ 30:53 Jon Noronha They're, instead, they're comparing Outlook versus Gmail, and maybe after that, like, Word versus Google Slides, and PowerPoint and Google Slides are afterthoughts in their product roadmap.
- ▶ 58:08 Jon Noronha You should choose Gamma over PowerPoint because we are so much faster at getting you to the polished outcomes.
Scaling DoorDash to market dominance | Christopher Payne (Former COO, DoorDash)
- ▶ 1:11 Christopher Payne You know, a Microsoft or other companies like the finance problem is like, you know, I don't know, add up the money if you build the right product.
- ▶ 5:05 Christopher Payne So I worked at Microsoft.
- ▶ 16:11 Christopher Payne I was in Microsoft during the early nineties.
- ▶ 19:14 Christopher Payne So I was in Microsoft coming into Amazon, and Microsoft's a very challenging environment, very competitive environment, uh, and when, you know, Bill challenges you, you respond with force. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:22 Christopher Payne I ran web search for Microsoft, what became Bing, and it was a great experience on the one hand. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:22 Christopher Payne I ran web search for Microsoft, what became Bing, and it was a great experience on the one hand.
- ▶ 27:31 Brett Berson You sort of said this is a passing comment, but if you go back to sort of Microsoft in the nineties, it, you talked to a lot of people, it was very competitive internally battling out of ideas. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:19 Christopher Payne Uh, and so on the cool thing about that, I had experienced that type of growth at Microsoft, but not that acutely, not that like crazy.
- ▶ 56:43 Christopher Payne I would be like, you know, many people, when I was at Microsoft, like we would enter a space and they'd be like, oh my God, Microsoft, Microsoft's in the personal finance space. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 59:15 Christopher Payne I got some good feedback from, from a leader at Microsoft about that.
The product wisdom every CPO should ignore | Jeremy Epling (CPO, Vanta)
- ▶ 0:08 Brett Berson So, normally when you look at someone with a background like yours, basically, 20 years in various roles at Microsoft, they then join, not a small startup, but a scale-up startup, certainly relative to Microsoft, a tiny, tiny company. 7 times in the scene
- ▶ 3:41 Jeremy Epling I think that loop I had a little bit at Microsoft, but was not nearly as tight as it was at GitHub, where I felt like I was talking to our head of SE, like, almost every single day, and I was working on new products. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:22 Jeremy Epling The nice thing is I could still go and talk to people in Azure that I knew and worked with of, like, how did they go through that transformation, but then think about what does that mean for GitHub where, hey, we're selling a product every…
- ▶ 23:31 Jeremy Epling Uh, Microsoft had this term called, like, fetch a rock, where, like, someone's like, hey, can you go fetch a rock?
- ▶ 1:00:00 Jeremy Epling Like when I thought about my first years at Microsoft or even before I went there and like,
- ▶ 1:09:45 Jeremy Epling And I think I didn't really understand how I could do both of those, and I remember the first time I, like, signed, when I signed up for, like, the big mission that we had, you know, when I, when we came over, Microsoft bought GitHub, I…
Snowflake’s first sales hire on scaling from $0 to $3.5B | Chris Degnan (Former CRO, Snowflake)
- ▶ 48:50 Chris Degnan We're competing against Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, right?
- ▶ 55:11 Chris Degnan And I, I was like suspect of him cause he had managed like 10,000 people at Microsoft
How Harness runs 16 “startups within a startup” at scale | Jyoti Bansal (Co-founder and CEO)
- ▶ 56:18 Brett Berson It's like the opposite of the Microsoft strategy.
How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack Kanter (Founder and CEO of Stedi)
- ▶ 46:58 Zack Kanter And I remember when Slack came out, I knew a guy who was a, was an investor in Microsoft, which at the time, this guy didn't know anything about tech 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 47:09 Zack Kanter He's like, teams is going to kill Slack. 3 times in the scene
Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped this AI-native IT platform | Jake Stauch (Serval)
- ▶ 32:14 Jake Stauch So supporting Microsoft ends up being much, much harder than supporting the current stack of products because you have to rebuild every single thing that you're doing. 2 times in the scene
Saying yes to everything: How customer obsession built Samsara | Kiren Sekar (CPO)
- ▶ 27:19 Kiren Sekar They weren't even big tech companies like the Microsofts of the world.
Starting an education giant in a “bad market” | ClassDojo’s story | Sam Chaudhary (Co-founder & CEO)
- ▶ 39:05 Sam Chaudhary And we sat in on a few of these and we're like, we could just give you like a really good PowerPoint presentation and we could probably put like a QR code at the end of it or a link that you could, you know, flash up on the screen and…
- ▶ 1:11:04 Sam Chaudhary oh my God, we're gonna get taken out by Microsoft basically.
From Chrome extension to $5B platform | Postman’s journey | Abhinav Asthana (Co-founder & CEO)
- ▶ 2:46 Abhinav Asthana Like he was like, kind of, I think he mastered Microsoft Excel to such an extent that eventually you could just press a button and he would get all his work done.
- ▶ 13:33 Abhinav Asthana So if I go back to my childhood, I was, you know, I was in two camps, you know, I'm building on open source or I'm using all the stuff that Microsoft did.
What Braintrust got right about product-market fit | Ankur Goyal (Founder and CEO)
- ▶ 2:44 Ankur Goyal I started studying CS, and then, again, trying to be like a good Indian kid, I interned at Microsoft, and I did research with a professor, and I hated both of them, so I had my second existential crisis, and decided to move to San…
- ▶ 4:13 Ankur Goyal Um, and there was one guy at MemSQL named Adam, uh, and he was a pretty senior database engineer from Microsoft, and
- ▶ 49:44 Ankur Goyal Braintrust now has like amazing support for Azure. 2 times in the scene
How rejecting conventional wisdom grew Sentry to a $3 billion company | David Cramer (Co-founder)
- ▶ 1:04:36 David Cramer I was talking to Microsoft a long time ago, strategic partnership, and they had this Azure, or this was the era where everything was Azure. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:04:36 David Cramer I was talking to Microsoft a long time ago, strategic partnership, and they had this Azure, or this was the era where everything was Azure. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:26:07 David Cramer Um, it could also be like non-founders, but it's like less common, but at large companies that often, the Microsoft non-founder, right? 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:26:16 David Cramer They're the co-pilot thing feels a little bit messy these days, but the sort of move towards open source, like they rebranded Microsoft entirely and he's not a founder. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:26:34 David Cramer And I was like the old school, like hate on windows kind of guy, you know, and now I use windows almost exclusively for like even work. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:36:52 David Cramer And what I'm, I'm very interested to see what happens in the space with like VS Code, Cursor, Windsurf, because Microsoft has a distribution. 2 times in the scene
From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO)
- ▶ 54:40 Rick Song And that original thought emerged from, it was actually a joke, a bit self-deprecating of one, but I think when I was at Square at that time, I was joking with someone once that, uh, have we ever thought that all of our work at Square is… 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 55:00 Rick Song Like, you know, like, and like Microsoft Word is just a speck in Microsoft's universe, and it's like a speck of a speck, and I think at that time we were joking about, like,
- ▶ 1:06:47 Rick Song Saying I'm going to like redo Google docs or like beat Microsoft word at their own game.
1Password’s growth story | How they went from bootstrapped to $6B company | Jeff Shiner (CEO)
- ▶ 3:26 Jeff Shiner I think they had a reader for Android and something similar for Windows, but it was really very much of an Apple focused company.
- ▶ 54:02 Jeff Shiner So, you know, for instance, when I came in in the first couple of years, it was very much of just, you know, the first year in particular was just trying to figure out what were the opportunities and getting us into things like…
Scrappy tactics and a huge post-COVID pivot | Adam Guild (Co-founder and CEO of Owner)
- ▶ 7:57 Adam Guild We even had some of those in the Microsoft world.
Building a $4B data platform: Inside dbt Labs' unconventional path | Tristan Handy (Founder & CEO)
- ▶ 19:18 Tristan Handy You can see that in Excel or Tableau or other products that like existed before that.
How Figma taps into taste, simplicity, and storytelling | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO)
- ▶ 1:51 Brett Berson Microsoft, YouTube, and Uber. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:17 Brett Berson And in the sense of Figma and Uber, Microsoft, Google, all, I assume, build products differently are all known for great products in sort of different contexts. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:35 Yuhki Yamashita Like for example, at Microsoft, I started and it was very much about the super detailed spec, um, where if you were the PM, you could be the PM just on control Z or, you know, undo feature of Excel or something.
- ▶ 40:13 Brett Berson Why has it not made sense for Figma to make meaningful acquisitions in terms of getting into the next product where you really buy something that's working and start to cross sell it away a la Microsoft, Salesforce, so many other companies.
How to find — and keep — product-market fit | Bob Moore (Crossbeam, RJMetrics, Stitch Data)
- ▶ 16:37 Bob Moore You get a landing page for every company that details their partnership, but also every combination of two companies that might have a partner, or if they do or don't, you can show how their ecosystems kind of like overlapped or intersect…
- ▶ 56:28 Bob Moore This is this really, really fraught process that was basically completely run, uh, even in multi-billion dollar market cap businesses by spreadsheets and email spreadsheets and, and, you know, writing V lookup functions in Excel.
Developing technical taste: A guide for next-gen engineers | Sam Schillace (Microsoft, Google Docs)
- ▶ 0:00 Sam Schillace I've got a team right now at Microsoft that's this sort of experimental prototyping team.
- ▶ 0:59 Brett Berson For today's episode of In-Depth, I'm thrilled to be joined by Sam Scilace, who's the deputy CTO and corporate vice president at Microsoft.
- ▶ 12:33 Sam Schillace I've got a team right now at Microsoft that's
- ▶ 17:42 Sam Schillace We had to build the PowerPoint. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:52 Sam Schillace We will not fight the war of features that everybody had been fighting and failing against Microsoft.
- ▶ 19:32 Sam Schillace To be honest, like, I'm a little bit sad at the state of Gdocs these days because I think they're losing sight of the idea that, you know, they're kind of turning it into Office and like making it very complicated to use again.
- ▶ 21:12 Brett Berson It's very hard to take word and instantly compete with Google Docs if you want to compete on that specific dimension.
- ▶ 21:17 Sam Schillace It's weird being at Microsoft and talking about this now because I've talked about this before I was there, so none of this is like inside or anything, but you can kind of see this from the outside. 8 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:59 Sam Schillace Could kind of get their head together on what their response was going to be, you know, the office three 65 response that they eventually came up with.
- ▶ 22:52 Brett Berson In the case of Google Docs versus Office, 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 22:54 Brett Berson It also feels, you know, and I haven't studied this closely, that Google Docs was, was actually far less disruptive than one would imagine, meaning that Microsoft, that both suites ended up winning and doing very well. 6 times in the scene
How to be effective up and down the org chart | Matt MacInnis (Rippling, Inkling, Apple)
- ▶ 49:06 Matt MacInnis Yeah, there's Microsoft
Building products that delight customers | Adam Nash (Daffy, Wealthfront, LinkedIn, eBay, Apple)
- ▶ 2:23 Brett Berson Like if you think about Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, you go back and they're all 5 times in the scene
- ▶ 18:42 Adam Nash But if you look at how spreadsheets built out, obviously, Excel, for a lot of reasons, ended up dominating. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 57:13 Adam Nash I mean, I don't know what it'd be like if, if Bill was running Microsoft today, but I think it's amazing what Microsoft is doing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 1:11:12 Adam Nash Microsoft has a family plan.
Essential lessons for building and scaling DevTools | Dennis Pilarinos (Unblocked, Buddybuild)
- ▶ 2:18 Brett Berson One of the interesting things is that going all the way back to the start of AWS, Azure, et cetera,
- ▶ 8:25 Dennis Pilarinos Microsoft, relatively straightforward. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 17:35 Dennis Pilarinos When I was at Microsoft, I remember people had gone and started companies, and I'd be like,
- ▶ 38:01 Dennis Pilarinos And they're geographically distributed, and they only use Microsoft Teams. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 42:27 Dennis Pilarinos I worked at a big company at Microsoft and Amazon.
- ▶ 43:56 Dennis Pilarinos It'd be interesting if you went back and talked to the employees who were early at Microsoft and early at Amazon, how much historical retrofitting has been done to go and do, and I, I see a couple, there's actually a couple interesting… 2 times in the scene
Scaling and selling AI products for enterprise | May Habib (Co-founder and CEO of Writer)
The secret lever Replit pulled to scale ahead of its competition | Amjad Masad (Co-founder and CEO)
- ▶ 34:16 Amjad Masad I described the current era we're living in, in terms of AI add-ons, where you get Windows and you get Copilot for 10 bucks.
- ▶ 34:16 Amjad Masad I described the current era we're living in, in terms of AI add-ons, where you get Windows and you get Copilot for 10 bucks. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:34 Amjad Masad You would, you know, pay Microsoft 50 bucks to get the Windows add-on. 2 times in the scene
The human side of world-class engineering leadership | Michael Lopp (Apple, Palantir, Slack)
- ▶ 3:19 Michael Lopp And then he expanded that over in Scotts Valley here in Northern California to be really a Microsoft competitor at the time. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:43 Michael Lopp When it's the CEO, going back to Philippe at the beginning, he, this Borland did office before there was office, man.
- ▶ 25:52 Michael Lopp They got the ask, they got, they're gotten problems with Microsoft, but that's these, what these product people do is they really, these are visionaries and they see these things and they can, and we're talking about CEOs, but I think…
Inside Figma’s early days: How to build a world-class sales org | Kyle Parrish (VP of Sales)
- ▶ 19:21 Kyle Parrish I couldn't come in and read the notes on working with Microsoft and what that relationship looked like.
- ▶ 29:36 Brett Berson Did you spend as much time thinking about and caring about Microsoft being a potential early customer as it was kind of a 250 person venture backed tech startup? 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 44:04 Kyle Parrish anyone that's using Figma, whether you're an individual, uh, you know, designer and building a consultancy shop, you work at SMB, you work in an agency, or you work at Microsoft, Google, or any of these large companies, you're using it in…
Mastering modern entrepreneurship | Steve Blank (Author of The Four Steps to the Epiphany)
- ▶ 27:47 Steve Blank And the, the first step is when I teach students and you ask them for an Excel spreadsheet, every one of their spreadsheets have a five-year plan that looks like this.
page 1 of 2 · 100 scenes per page · newest episode first next →