Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…Are there any that you think went particularly well in the last 5 years that are worth saying like, “wow, the one went really phenomenally!” Yeah, I think there certainly are. One thing I think that’s fun to watch is our changing approach to these things. I think in a lot of companies and certainly in Microsoft, it used to be a case where let’s say you’re the product team for Outlook and you’re trying to ship a mobile client and it’s not going so well, and you get management buy-off to go buy a mobile client. In this case, maybe Acompli, let’s just say as an example. Then you bring those folks into the company and now that startup that you just acquired is reporting to the same people who were failing before. That usually ended up being a recipe for just not– Let’s just say that the acquired companies are more excited to be in that position and let’s say that the managing folks there essentially went and continued to try and do the same thing but now with just new people. So, that usually didn’t end well, surprisingly. So I think with Acompli and with other companies we’ve acquired recently, we’ve done that differently and we’ve taken those folks and empowered them and assuming they’ve been successful, we’ve continued to expand their scope and give them more and more. So, I think you’re seeing the benefit of that approach with Outlook Mobile in iOS and how that’s worked. So, I think that’s a case where I think we’re pretty excited and you can say the same thing for I think a lot of the other companies we’ve acquired recently. It’s interesting. I always love thinking about what those, you know, as the organization matures, the corp dev organization matures or from my world as a VC firm grows and sees many cycles and as individuals within those organizations grow, you star to learn these VCs are all about pattern matching but you get these sort of senses that develop in kind of informal roles. What’s really interesting is when you decide to break the rules. But I’m thinking about one that actually would be relevant to my Carve Out, in VC that you learn pretty quickly is it’s really hard to build a big company if you’re not targeting a big market. I make that mistake, Madrona makes that mistake. Even other great VC firms make that mistake all the time. Then you’re always reminded like, “God, why did I do that?” But for you and for Microsoft now, for decades having been able to practice the craft of M&A and I think about VC as the same way, you definitely get these roles that kind evolve like oh yeah, maybe we shouldn’t if we’re buying a product to replace one that’s failing, we probably shouldn’t have them report to people who are not successfully shipping the current product.…

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