Microsoft
includes Microsoft Windows, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Bing, Microsoft OneNote, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server
24 statements across 17 episodes · 3 bullish · 6 bearish · 17 people on the record · first statement Sep 5, 2018 by Ben Thompson · said 243 times in 67 episodes since 2015 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Shane Parrish (47), Ben Thompson (20), Benedict Evans (15), Elad Gil (12), Bret Taylor (11), Mike Maples Jr. (8), Jim Collins (8), Garry Tan (8)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 20 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- What 12 Years of Failure Taught Steve Jobs About Success
- Beating the Market: Connor Teskey, CEO Brookfield Asset Management
- Mental Models That Change How You Think | Bill Gurley
- The Magic of Thinking Big | XPO CEO Mario Harik
- The Mindset Behind Building a Great Little Business | Brad Jacobs
- You Don’t Need To Innovate To Be Successful | FarmVille Creator
- Morgan Housel: Wealth is What You Have Minus What You Want
- How to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones | James Clear
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
2025 85 mentions in 15 episodes 6 per episode
- Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World
- Bret Taylor: A Vision for AI’s Next Frontier
- Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans
- How to Win by Being Right and Contrarian: Lessons from Zappos to DoorDash
- Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders
- Forensic Account: The Bubble No One is Talking About | Anthony Scilipoti
- Codie Sanchez: Your Blueprint to Financial Freedom
- How to Think Like a World-Class Marketer | Rory Sutherland
- 7 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 14 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Brian Halligan: Building HubSpot into a Multi-Billion Dollar Company
- Morgan Housel: Get Rich, Stay Rich
- Charlie Hoehn: Write Something People Want to Read
- John Mackey: Building Whole Foods
- John Bragg: The Blueberry Billionaire
- Matthew Dicks: The Storytelling Expert
- #197 Michaeleen Doucleff: The 4 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make
- Brad Jacobs: How To Build a Billion Dollar Company
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode
2022 21 mentions in 7 episodes 3 per episode
- Reid Hoffman: Better Decisions, Fewer Mistakes
- Balaji Srinivasan: The Network State
- TKP Insights: Making (Even) Better Decisions
- Barbara Tversky: Action Shapes Thought
- Tobi Lütke: Calm Progress
- Kunal Shah: Core Human Motivations
- Sarah Jones Simmer: The Foundation of Trust
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
2020 23 mentions in 6 episodes 4 per episode
2019 18 mentions in 5 episodes 4 per episode
2018 28 mentions in 5 episodes 6 per episode
2017 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2016 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2015 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
Everything said about Microsoft, oldest first
Sep 5, 2018 negative
External market context drives corporate outcomes far more than executive leadership
“Saying Microsoft failed because of the actions of Steve Ballmer. It's such a presumptuous and it's human nature to ascribe things to people, but it's wrong. Like, what matters far more is the context and environment around Microsoft”
Sep 5, 2018 neutral
Jan 22, 2019 neutral
Jan 22, 2019 neutral
Jan 22, 2019 neutral
Sep 29, 2020
Holland: Founders bypassed Vista using fake company DenWipAtsiv, 'Vista Pwned' backwards
“So what we did was we wrote a tool called DenWipAtsiv. The name of the company was DenWipAtsiv, which is Vista pooned in reverse. You know, got a signing certificate under this fake company, legitimately registered fake in reality, and released a tool that wou…”
May 18, 2021 bullish
Greenblatt: Tech mega-caps driving the market are not irrationally valued
“Most of the big indexes are driven by the Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and those businesses don't seem very irrational to me. Those are some of the greatest businesses that man has ever created partially due to the internet interconnectedness of the world…”
Apr 5, 2022 bearish
Sep 20, 2022
Hoffman: Companies should adapt between memos, slides, and bullet points
“And I actually think the answer is these are all tools and you should use all of them, right? Sometimes you should write like a six pager on something. Sometimes you should write a PowerPoint. Sometimes you should just have a list of bullets, right? And it dep…”
Nov 15, 2022 positive
Mar 21, 2023
Mar 21, 2023
Mar 21, 2023
Myhrvold left a postdoc with Stephen Hawking to build a startup
“Took a leave of absence to work on a project I had started in graduate school with some friends. And that project turned into a software company, and I became the CEO of the company. And Then Microsoft bought the company, and I was at Microsoft.”
Aug 6, 2024 negative
Halligan: Big tech 'press release hires' usually fail at scaling startups
“If you're hiring someone that you want to go from two to 2000, you're just really attracted by that person who came from Google or Microsoft or whatever huge company with a huge resume and all that stuff. And once in a blue moon, that'll work, but generally th…”
Jan 21, 2025
Microsoft acquired LinkExchange for $265 million on $15 million in revenue
“We had fifteen million dollars in revenue. You can kind of tell that we were in a bubble when someone would be willing to buy a company that had fifteen million dollars in revenue for two hundred and sixty-five million dollars. But also, you know, it was the t…”
Apr 1, 2025
Apr 15, 2025 neutral
Taylor: AI model market will consolidate into a few massive capex players
“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”
Apr 29, 2025 positive
Garry Tan: Microsoft's market cap heavily depends on OpenAI's success
“I mean, I think Microsoft has you know, just really, really deep access to OpenAI, and I think OpenAI is probably, you said public companies, right? ... So, you know, I think There's a non-zero, pretty large percentage of, like, the market cap of Microsoft tha…”
May 13, 2025 negative
Gil: The largest startup successes had solo or unequal founders
“If you look at the biggest successes in the startup world over time, they were either solo founders or very unequal founders. So that, and there's counter examples to that, of course, but that was Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos was the only founder. Microsoft, it w…”
Jun 10, 2025 neutral
Hastings: Outperformance of founder-led over professionally managed companies is not a strict correlation
“There are some very bad founder-led companies, there's some very good professional-led companies and there might be some correlation that founder-led ones, you know, are extraordinary, but you know, Microsoft under Satya Nadella has done incredibly well.”
Sep 2, 2025 bearish
Evans: Apple risks being 'Microsofted' by cloud-based AI models
“There's this sort of question for Apple around, does this actually change the experience of what a smartphone is, what the ecosystem is? Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted, in the sense that you're going to still, for the time being, you're still going…”
Sep 2, 2025 bearish
Sep 2, 2025 neutral
Apr 22, 2026
Brockman: Altman Asked Satya Nadella to Fund Venture Absorbing All OpenAI Staff
“Sam talked to Satya, who we'd been talking about. Hey, can you be a funder? Could you know, help, help support this new endeavor? I was like, Hey, actually, can we expand from the small life raft to like, yes, can we take everyone? And we're like, all right, w…”