Satya Nadella | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner
Episode publishedPodcast: BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and...BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley
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I think the company of this generation has already been created, which is OpenAI in some sense. It's kinda like the Google or the Microsoft or, or the meta of, this era.
Well, it's great to be with you. You know, when Bill and I were talking Satya and looking back at your tenure as CEO, it was really quite astonishing. You know, you started at Microsoft in 1992. For those who may not know, you took over online in 2007, you launched being search in 2,009. You took over servers and launched Azure in 2011, and you became CEO in 2014. And it was just before that, that a pretty now well known essay entitled the irrelevance of Microsoft had just been published. Now since then, you've taken Azure from 1,000,000,000 to 66,000,000,000 run rate. The total revenues of th
Yeah. So the way I've always thought, Brad, about sort of that entire period of time is some sense from 92 to now. It's just one continuous sort of, period for me, although, obviously, 2014 was a big event with, the accountability that goes with it. But what I felt was essentially pattern match when we were successful, and we when we were not, and do more of the former and less of the latter. I mean, in some sense, it's as simple as that because I've sort of lived through when I joined in 92, that was just after Windows 3 1 was launched. I think Windows 3 1 was, you know, May of 92, and I join
before we move on to AI, I I have a couple of questions about the transition. And and just echoing what Brad said, I mean, there's a I think that it's definitive that you may be the best CEO hire of all time. I mean, 3,000,000,000,000 is, unmatched. So, one, I read an article that suggested and maybe this isn't true, so you tell us that you wrote a 10 page memo to the committee that was choosing, the CEO. Is that true, and and what was in the memo?
Yeah. It it is true. Yeah. Because I think our, CEO, process was pretty open out there. And, at that time, quite frankly, it was, is definitely not obvious to me that, 1, in the beginning remember, I never thought that first Bill would leave, and then second, Steve would leave. Right? It's not like you join Microsoft and think, oh, yeah. You know, founders are gonna retire and there's gonna be a job opening and you can apply for it. I mean, that was not the mental model growing up at Microsoft. So when Steve decided to retire, I forget now, I think in August of 2013, it was a pretty big shock.
Was there was there any element of cultural shift? I mean, the number of CEO hire there's CEO hires made in this in the world all the time, and many of them fail. I mean, Intel's going through a a a second reboot here as we speak. And as Brad pointed out, there were people that are arguing, oh, Microsoft's the next IBM or death that its better days are over. So what did you do and what would you advise that new CEOs that come on to kinda reboot the culture and get it moving in a different direction?
Yeah. What one of the advantages I think I had was I was a consummate insider. Right? I mean, having grown up pretty much all my professional career at Microsoft. And so in some sense, if I would even criticize our culture, it was criticizing myself. So in an interest the break I got was it is it never felt like somebody from the outside coming and criticizing the, you know, folks, who are here versus it's about mostly pointing the finger right back at me because I was pretty much part of the culture. Right? You could I couldn't say, anything that I was not part of. And so I felt like to your
Well, speaking of that, you've, you know, you mentioned the phase shifts th
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