David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…He's got three reasons for why Seattle in particular. By the way, it worked. Every single person except for his secretary did make the move. (1) He grew up in Seattle. He's like, I just want to go home. He justifies it in two other ways, which I found pretty fascinating. This is from an interview in the early 90s that he did. He said it basically came down to Seattle or Silicon Valley. In Silicon Valley, it's hard to keep secrets because there's a rumor mill. In Seattle, we can be a little bit more removed, and we can announce things when we want to announce them. (2) In Silicon Valley, people switch around companies. I don't want that. I want people to just work at Microsoft. There was a disadvantage to not being able to recruit from your competitors, but for a while, they were really the only game in town in Seattle. But not really, though, because pretty quickly, Microsoft is such an important part of the industry. They recruit from Silicon Valley, too. We're going to talk about some of the people who come up. You're totally right, people stay at Microsoft. They don't leave. This continues right through to this day. The other thing that I think is really important to say that makes it work for Seattle in a way that I don't know that this could have worked in too many other places in the country is the University of Washington. The computer science department there was really good. There were great people. Steve Russell had come out there. There was real talent, and they were churning out graduates out of the U-Dub that would go on to populate Microsoft for decades to come. Bill, of course, reinvested in that flywheel, donating tons of money to the university. There are buildings, there are whole new schools.…

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