Microsoft, every mention
214 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Microsoft
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Pablo Srugo 80Jon Noronha 17Didi Gurfinkel 16Avery Pennarun 12Alex Sherman 11Stéphan Donzé 10Chaz Englander 10Don Mal 9Andrew Filev 8Siqi Chen 7
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Microsoft comes up
He spent $150K on brand before he had a product—closed $1.5M ARR in 1 month. | Endra
- ▶ 17:43 Niklas Lindgren Like lawyers work in Word, these, these engineers work in a platform called Revit. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 20:13 Niklas Lindgren And then they need to ingest that into an Excel file to then calculate, like, how much load do I have on this panel?
- ▶ 25:19 Niklas Lindgren As Lagora and Harvey integrates natively into Word, we did the exact same thing.
He lost his first 5 deals—built the next Looker, raised $250M | Omni
- ▶ 4:42 Colin Zima Write SQL, use Excel, do pivot tables, and also enterprise BI and embedded all in one platform. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 4:53 Colin Zima But the idea was always a product that could compete with Tableau and Power BI and Looker and your SQL runner and sort of do everything all in one place.
Worked out of a police department unpaid for a year—built a $6.8B company | Peregrine · PMF Show
- ▶ 5:00 Ben Rudolph Think dozens and dozens of Excel files, different time zones, messy data.
- ▶ 16:33 Ben Rudolph I got two free crime analysts who know how to write software and work with Excel really well.
He raised $75M—but kept his team to 21 people & pays everyone the same salary. | Cos Nicolaescu, ... · PMF Show
- ▶ 11:50 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu Not only were the tools not that helpful in terms of productivity, but they required so much manual work from like admin staff to go in and out of those tools, import and export and transform data, put it in Excel, resave it.
- ▶ 16:58 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu I don't know if ChatGPT is better, or Claude is better, or Copilot is better.
- ▶ 18:22 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu So originally grew up in Romania, moved here for college to study computer science and then started my career at Microsoft.
- ▶ 18:29 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu So we're super, super large companies, worked on Azure Office, so all the cloud services.
- ▶ 18:29 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu So we're super, super large companies, worked on Azure Office, so all the cloud services.
- ▶ 23:25 Cos "Kaz" Nicolaescu Like, infamously, uh, Zuck, when he was, um, he had the offer to get acquired by, I think it was Microsoft for a billion dollars.
He quit Stripe and hit $10M ARR in 4 years—with $0 marketing spend. | Anurag Goel, Founder of Render · PMF Show
- ▶ 23:55 Anurag Goel and it all comes down to organizational DNA and organizational incentives and where the money is coming from for these people and for AWS and GCP and Azure, all the money
- ▶ 26:49 Anurag Goel Uh, that's what AWS is really good at, and that's where they're competing with Google and Microsoft and all the others right now.
He shut down his last startup and gave the money back—then hit $1M ARR in 6 months. | George, Fou... · PMF Show
- ▶ 8:23 George Kurdin And three, and I still have this in all the recruitment docs, and at the time it was about science here and SAM, now it's Claude, but at the time I was very worried about Microsoft and OpenAI, and so we wanted to pick a problem where we… 2 times in the scene
He quit his $50M ARR startup to work as a paralegal—then raised a $60M Series A. | Dan Mishin, Fo... · PMF Show
- ▶ 19:55 Dan Mishin And we're going to give you one unified software layer that will replace your traditional Microsoft offices of the world and outlooks of the world.
- ▶ 19:55 Dan Mishin And we're going to give you one unified software layer that will replace your traditional Microsoft offices of the world and outlooks of the world.
He hit $1M ARR by sending 500,000 cold emails—then raised a $25M Series A in 6 days. | Mark Hughe... · PMF Show
- ▶ 40:51 Mark Hughes So I just had, like, the data room ready in Docsend, like, our, like, head of operations and finance, like, like, he's a wizard with Excel, something that I'm not the best at.
How this 1st-time founder went from closing customers for $500 a month to $300,000 a year. | Sean... · PMF Show
- ▶ 25:17 Sean McCarthy What we see is that historically, maybe they're pulling down an Excel spreadsheet, doing some sort of manipulation, and uploading it somewhere else, where obviously
- ▶ 29:26 Pablo Srugo It sounded right, but it wasn't true, except for the enterprises that bought Microsoft. 3 times in the scene
180 VCs rejected him—then a $60K billboard got him to $2M ARR in 4 months. | Isaiah Granet, CEO o... · PMF Show
- ▶ 19:59 Isaiah Granet But we can also deliver something that Microsoft, Apple, I don't know why those were our ideal companies at the time, but those were the companies that we thought would want to buy our software if we were enterprise oriented.
He raised a $10M seed with no revenue—then grew 30x to $30M in year two. | Bobby Samuels, Founder... · PMF Show
- ▶ 19:52 Pablo Srugo So how can you like, say you're trying to sell to Microsoft, just making it up.
He ran Prime fulfillment for Amazon—then raised $20M to replace e-commerce with AI. | Maju Kuruvi... · PMF Show
- ▶ 1:47 Maju Kuruvi And next thing you know is I was working for Microsoft here in the U.S.
She got rejected by 22 VCs—then built 6sense to $100M+ in revenue. Now she's back for AI. | Amand... · PMF Show
- ▶ 31:27 Amanda Kahlow So we also join calls so she can be on zoom and on teams, et cetera.
How he grew his AI startup from $2M to $20M ARR in 12 months. | Omar Haroun, Co-Founder of Eudia · PMF Show
- ▶ 11:36 Omar Haroun But actually people like Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft is on the board of relativity.
She raised $20M from Accel to replace QuickBooks with AI. | Helen Hastings, Founder of Quanta · PMF Show
- ▶ 10:17 Helen Hastings These are called month-close workbooks, which are always an Excel sheet living on, on someone's laptop with a lot of tabs.
He made 0 sales for the first 8 months. Now he does $200M+ ARR. | Ryan Anderson, Founder of Filevine · PMF Show
- ▶ 35:22 Ryan Anderson It was incredibly tricky, and of course, they all wanted that calendar to also sync up with their Gmail or Outlook calendar, which also proved pretty tricky.
- ▶ 46:57 Pablo Srugo You've got Spellbook that's doing stuff like inside, you know, Word documents.
He raised $150M with $0 revenue. Then hit $1M ARR in 4 months. | Michel Tricot, Co-Founder of Air... · PMF Show
- ▶ 7:15 Michel Tricot The moment you start offering something that is on-demand, consumption-based for data, you're opening up a new type of usage for, for data, and it comes from the new families of connectors or systems you need to connect to, because maybe…
He failed for 5 years. Then hit $20M ARR with 100% outbound. | Didi Gurfinkel, Founder of Datarails · PMF Show
- ▶ 3:53 Didi Gurfinkel Let's try to connect all the organizational Excel files, all the organizational spreadsheets into one centralized database. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:21 Pablo Srugo Maybe what was the first kind of use case, the first idea that what you wanted to solve, you know, out of Excel? 13 times in the scene
- ▶ 14:39 Didi Gurfinkel They take data from one system, export to Excel, take it from another system, export to Excel, and when the data joined together, now they have something that they couldn't see before, and it was 10 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:37 Didi Gurfinkel You know what they call in Microsoft, they call Excel the second best option for anything.
- ▶ 18:46 Pablo Srugo To that point, because there are others you mentioned before, nobody wants to leave Excel and there are FP&A tools that try to get people to leave Excel, but there are others.
- ▶ 33:47 Didi Gurfinkel So all the rest are using Excel.
How I grew my AI startup to $3M ARR in 3 months. | Chaz Englander, Founder of ModelML · PMF Show
- ▶ 34:33 Chaz Englander I don't know, like, you know, there was a lot of things that you could do, so that's where it started, and it just got more sophisticated, so it wouldn't just give you the bullet points, it would actually create you like a Word doc or a… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 34:33 Chaz Englander I don't know, like, you know, there was a lot of things that you could do, so that's where it started, and it just got more sophisticated, so it wouldn't just give you the bullet points, it would actually create you like a Word doc or a… 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:46 Chaz Englander PowerPoint, Word, Excel outputs. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:46 Chaz Englander PowerPoint, Word, Excel outputs. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 36:46 Chaz Englander PowerPoint, Word, Excel outputs.
He wrote the book on Account Based Marketing. Here are his GTM secrets for enterprise. | Bassem H... · PMF Show
- ▶ 14:11 Bassem Hamdy I ran my first ABM program in Excel.
- ▶ 30:14 Bassem Hamdy Maybe I could just do it in Excel.
- ▶ 31:38 Bassem Hamdy It's like a generative PowerPoint builder.
It took him 4 years to launch—then he hit $1M ARR in 30 days. | Siqi Chen, Founder of Runway · PMF Show
Solo Episode: B2B SaaS is dead. Here's what the best AI founders are doing instead. · PMF Show
- ▶ 5:31 Pablo Srugo So, okay, right now you're probably using Excel or word or these kind of horizontal tools. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:31 Pablo Srugo So, okay, right now you're probably using Excel or word or these kind of horizontal tools. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 5:48 Pablo Srugo You might be a recruiter and maybe you put your candidate list like an Excel spreadsheet, and maybe you write some stuff in word and maybe use PowerPoint.
How his AI-first services company grew $0 to $40M ARR in one year. | Eric Foster, Founder of Tenex · PMF Show
- ▶ 39:42 Eric Foster One of the great businesses that I had very much a pleasure being a part of and helping to build, uh, we grew this company called Risk IQ that we ultimately sold to Microsoft.
He added AI to parking lots—then raised $3.5B. | Alex Israel, Founder of Metropolis · PMF Show
- ▶ 3:32 Alex Israel Exited that company to a Microsoft spin out called Enrix.
He walked away from $5M ARR—then built a $50M company. | Russ Fradin, Founder of Larridin · PMF Show
- ▶ 0:02 Russ Fradin The number of things that can kill it, whether you become the scale of NVIDIA, the scale of Stripe, it's actually just a miracle that an investor, when they give you a dollar, has a reasonable expectation that they might get back more than…
- ▶ 19:34 Russ Fradin I mean, just look at the last 30 year history of Microsoft.
- ▶ 30:49 Russ Fradin But also the reality of corporate America is you do not just tell 20,000 employees, hey, here's Copilot or Claude or whatever, like pick your amazing AI tool.
He built a $20B public company, left—then raised a $100M Series A. | Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of N... · PMF Show
- ▶ 9:20 Dheeraj Pandey Windows, especially. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 35:57 Dheeraj Pandey I mean, even Microsoft couldn't touch them.
- ▶ 36:36 Dheeraj Pandey Recently we had a customer that had almost a hundred terabytes of SharePoint and, uh, Dropbox to actually get in.
5x founder asked Ford for a contract so large—they acquired his company instead. | Amar Varma, Fo... · PMF Show
- ▶ 11:45 Amar Varma I got to work for Paul Moritz, who was the number three person at Microsoft during the eighties and nineties under Bill.
They failed every POC—then grew their cybersecurity platform to $100M ARR in 5 years. | Dean Sysm... · PMF Show
- ▶ 17:19 Dean Sysman I'm just like experimenting or I already have a contract with Microsoft or with Amazon or whatever.
- ▶ 33:55 Dean Sysman So you really have to create this very, very close relationship to the buyer and you have to have them be your champion in that organization because they're going to fight for you much harder than to buy something from Microsoft, right?
He tested his pitch on Uber drivers—then built a cybersecurity platform to $180M raised. | Casey ... · PMF Show
- ▶ 12:15 Casey Ellis And, you know, I challenged that notion and say, well, look, I'm in security research and like all of the patches that you receive on your windows box come from people that are outside of your organization and they're already part of…
He quit Google & his 1st startup failed—but his 2nd grows at $1M ARR every 10 days. | Zach Llyod,... · PMF Show
- ▶ 30:26 Zach Lloyd Yeah, so the IDE is a thing where you open it up, it kind of looks like Microsoft Word. 2 times in the scene
He tried to return $200K to investors 30 days in—then exited to Microsoft 5 years later. | Alex S... · PMF Show
- ▶ 1:36 Pablo Srugo Your last company was also MarTech, sold to Microsoft.
- ▶ 5:17 Alex Sherman And that was sort of the starting point of what became promote IQ that we ended up selling to Microsoft.
- ▶ 21:14 Alex Sherman We were super paranoid all the way through our acquisition by Microsoft. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:28 Alex Sherman So Microsoft has an ad business, which not everyone is aware of. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 21:49 Alex Sherman It was also sort of a time when the rest of Microsoft was Azure.
- ▶ 24:26 Pablo Srugo How does that, I assume you work at Microsoft for a few years, like when does this idea for Bluefish happen? 4 times in the scene
He spent 5 months working with customers before building—then grew to $10s of millions ARR. | Avi... · PMF Show
- ▶ 6:33 Aviv Leibovici He draws out an Excel out of his drawer and says, this Excel is my tracking of what's going on here, and this thing takes unbelievable effort to create, and I will tell you that it's far from accurate, and this is how I run this job. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:58 Aviv Leibovici So very early on, this was about, in essence, that Excel that that first guy showed us from his desk.
- ▶ 16:53 Pablo Srugo Or like, how come these people are using Excel versus some other project management software? 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 43:18 Aviv Leibovici Because this person, Amir, who's our VP of industry transformation now just built this from our data, this same sort of insights in Excel and gave it to them and saw that it works.
- ▶ 47:33 Aviv Leibovici Hack it in Excel and Power BI.
- ▶ 47:33 Aviv Leibovici Hack it in Excel and Power BI.
He quit his job, went all-in on AI agents—then grew to 100K users & a $30M Series A in a year. | ... · PMF Show
- ▶ 2:23 Soham Ganatra So you want the agent to essentially, um, talk to Salesforce, talk to Gmail, talk to Outlook, do a bunch of different tasks on it, right?
- ▶ 47:44 Soham Ganatra Hey, I want my ChatGPT to connect with Outlook because that is what I care about.
Paul Graham Said His Startup Was Worthless—2 Months Later He Hit $1M ARR. | Jon Noronha, Co-Found... · PMF Show
- ▶ 3:26 Jon Noronha I mean, I've never liked using PowerPoint or Google Slides, and I don't think most people do. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 6:14 Jon Noronha And so then I kind of went down this other spiral of, gosh, PowerPoint hasn't been replaced in 40 years. 4 times in the scene
- ▶ 9:48 Jon Noronha Um, we did a lot of really cool stuff with animations, just showing, like, you know, if you break out of this PowerPoint paradigm and use more, like, modern web technology, you can do, like,
- ▶ 11:35 Jon Noronha So we had the general problem we wanted to go after, which is, uh, presentations like rethink PowerPoint. 3 times in the scene
- ▶ 15:47 Jon Noronha Uh, because when people talk about using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, they don't talk in the same way.
- ▶ 24:40 Jon Noronha And this is actually where we started to maybe get our first glimmer of hard questions I should have asked when we started the company of like, why haven't people moved off PowerPoint in all this time? 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 25:18 Jon Noronha But we also learned about stuff like, you know, our company like stores everything in this one place in SharePoint. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 37:23 Jon Noronha And so we started out doing all this prototyping, exploring image models while at the same time, most of the team was just trying to improve the core product on a bunch of aspects that have nothing to do with AI, like good PowerPoint…
- ▶ 39:55 Pablo Srugo It's, it's interesting because like, if you think about the evolution of these products, like, you know, PowerPoint is kind of the core slides, right?
- ▶ 44:01 Jon Noronha Also from our users we already had, we knew that we needed things like many more visual layouts, but we also knew we needed things like PowerPoint export that had nothing to do with AI.
He quit Google, launched Rubrik—then grew to $1B ARR & a $16B market cap. | Soham Mazumdar, Co-Fo... · PMF Show
- ▶ 2:10 Soham Mazumdar And the more I dug into it, what I realized was what these hyperscalers, you know, like Google, and now obviously after that, Amazon, Microsoft, all of them,
- ▶ 32:40 Soham Mazumdar I would say, um, from a customer perspective, uh, you know, we were, I would say like, I don't know if you know this, like, um, so Microsoft was like, it eventually became an investor in us. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 32:52 Soham Mazumdar Uh, and the reason for that was that we were the biggest driver of data into Microsoft Azure. 2 times in the scene
He Bootstrapped to $55M in Revenue—without ever having to hit 100% YoY growth. | Stéphan Donzé, F... · PMF Show
- ▶ 6:10 Stéphan Donzé So Google, Google Gmail, Google Drive in the enterprise, and then Office three 65 starting in 2015.
- ▶ 10:24 Pablo Srugo Because the partnership strategy, as far as I know, like Microsoft tends to be the strong, like partnership driven kind of go to market. 6 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:34 Stéphan Donzé We're talking Outlook on-premise, Microsoft Word of Office three 65 wasn't even a thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:34 Stéphan Donzé We're talking Outlook on-premise, Microsoft Word of Office three 65 wasn't even a thing. 2 times in the scene
- ▶ 10:34 Stéphan Donzé We're talking Outlook on-premise, Microsoft Word of Office three 65 wasn't even a thing.
- ▶ 11:20 Stéphan Donzé It's just cheaper virtual servers, and Microsoft was saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, don't worry, you can keep our Cook and Excel, you know, and nothing will change.
- ▶ 12:32 Stéphan Donzé We're not talking about your file server and your attached files in, in, in Outlook.
- ▶ 15:10 Stéphan Donzé In Google or in Notion or in SharePoint or in those, those tools, the user is in control.
- ▶ 32:19 Stéphan Donzé You have a cloud product, but the fast you're putting in the product, they actually in your environment because it's in your Google drive or in your Azure or your S three.
He Bootstrapped Wrike to $10M ARR—then exited for $2.2B. | Andrew Filev, Founder of Wrike & Zencoder · PMF Show
- ▶ 6:47 Andrew Filev Um, so, so that, that was kind of a true app living in there, in the browser, irregardless of what you thought about Microsoft and Outlook and whatnot, but it was kind of two, one of the first two web apps. 2 times in the scene
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