David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…We’re pumped. We’ll see you there. This show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies that we discuss. and so do all of you if you own index funds. This show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. Okay, David, the middle chapter of Microsoft. The middle chapter Indeed, and boy is there a lot to discuss. Ben, you covered this in your intro, but I think everybody knows the narrative about what happened to Microsoft between (call it) 1995 and 2014 when Satya took over. There’s even a quote from Satya himself in the very first paragraph of the book that he wrote in 2017 called Hit Refresh, which that title gives it away right there. He writes, “I joined Microsoft in 1992 because I wanted to work for a company filled with people who believed they were on a mission to change the world. But after years of outdistancing all our competitors, something was changing and not for the better. Innovation was being replaced by bureaucracy, teamwork was being replaced by internal politics and we were falling behind.” Then he references the famous gun-pointing org chart by cartoonist and software engineer Manu Cornet that probably listeners many of you are familiar with. We will link to that in the show notes. You can sum this whole narrative up as Microsoft was winning, and then it sucked for a long time, and then it is now winning again, and that’s all thanks to Satya. The question we asked as we were doing our research was, is this true? What we ended up learning from the literally dozens and dozens of people that we talked to surprised us a lot. I think we’ll probably surprise listeners too. David, you’re burying the lead here a little bit. We talked to probably four to five times as many people as the next highest episode. I’m looking at our little thank you list. It’s like 20-something people long.…

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