Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…the real thing. Don’t overperform and just sit because all the work would've either happened, or will happen after. No, but I think Teams is the new wandering the halls, looking around those channels. A hundred percent. And the most beautiful thing is for me to be able to… That's where I make the most connections. I get to know, “Wow, he's the person working on Excel Agent. Oh, that's the eval that they're looking at.” I learn so much out of it than anything else I've done. So are teams at Microsoft just working away on their product and then Satya pops up and has a question on their product? I wish. Yeah, sometimes I feel like we are way too permissioned. I wish I had more access sometimes. In fact, my biggest complaint is that I can't drop in everywhere I want to. But yes, it is fun to be able to just go in there and it sort of normalizes it. And then people are also like—today's workforce is not shy of sharing their opinion with you. I've noticed, yeah. You are famous, at least in small corners of the Valley. Speaking of being methodical for staying very connected to what's going on in tech here, and I remember you came and visited the Stripe office, remember that one on the Mission? Yeah, when we were a pipsqueak company. It was probably right after you took over as CEO, I'm guessing. But Stripe was very small and Microsoft was very big. Actually before. I think the first time I came to your offices was when I was running Azure first. Okay, yeah. So it was even before that. So that would've been very early in Stripe's journey. Why do you think you do this much more than most other CEOs? Other CEOs should want to meet all the startups too. I've always grown up—in some sense, I grew up even at Microsoft, which had those developer relations, evangelism sort of gene in me. I kind of approach, I think a lot of it as, “Hey, if you don't follow developers…” There are two sorts of things that are ingrained in me. One is if you don't follow where developers are going, it's hard to sort of be relevant in terms of tech platforms and then you really need to understand the new workload in order to build a tech platform. Those are the two things that at least I've kept. And so therefore, the only way… If you're not following startups, it's very hard to know what is either the platform or the workload. So that's a thing that I've indexed towards. The other thing is I derive so much energy out of it. I mean I've always thought founders are just magical people who create something from nothing. I mean, it just sort of feels like a magic trick. So I’m always like, how the heck does one do that? it. I mean I've always thought founders are just magical people who create something from nothing. I mean, it just sort of feels like a magic trick. So I’m always like, how the heck does one do that? Yeah, it is funny you say that about following what the startups are doing. We always conceived of what Stripe was building as it was important to build for startups, both because today's small startups are tomorrow's public companies and we've seen that again and again on Stripe. But we just felt, at an intuitive level and we felt this before we could prove it, that what the startups were interested in were often better product experiences. And so if the startups want stablecoins or usage-based billing or what have you, we should build for those needs, not just because we’ll have a good startup business, but the enterprises will come around. And it took us, I would say many years to prove out that model, but now we're really seeing— Yeah, in fact, I think you guys are a bit of a gold standard on that. In fact, one of the things that I learned from you guys was rediscovering at some level what Microsoft was very good at, which is following the developer, being where the startups are. And so that's what sort of led me even to GitHub and NAT and all of the rest, which is to some degree the GitHub asset. Obviously it was a great asset. We needed to be good stewards of an open source ecosystem, but it’s also the place where every startup—the one thing that everybody does have is their repos in GitHub. And I felt like being in that loop was important for us, not just, “Oh, it's strategically great to have some position there.” To learn simply and to build better product, I think, is sort of well said. Because you sometimes lose the aesthetic of what is required, what's that friction-free way to deliver because the least amount of patience is there and the time to value, for example, has to be maximized. Is Microsoft thinking about generated UIs that are personalized to… When you think about it, software is stuck in the old paradigm of we write a bunch of software and it goes to Gold master and it goes out on disks, and now that same kind of software it's delivered in the cloud, but the UI you want is probably, we can render that exact UI in real time. Is that a direction you guys are going? it goes out on disks, and now that same kind of software it's delivered in the cloud, but the UI you want is probably, we can render that exact UI in real time. Is that a direction you guys are going? I think for sure. At some level what's happening is on one side our ability to generate. I mean if you sort of say you can generate all code so therefore you can generate some UX scaffolding around anything that's a lot more custom. So especially… In fact for the longest time, one of the things at Microsoft was what's the difference between a document, a website and an application, really? And so to some degree, yeah, exactly. So you can generate any one of those at any time depending on what format you want to present it. But at the same, interestingly enough for all the talk of “Hey, all these apps go,” take even our good old IDs. In some sense IDs are back, whether it's Excel or VS Code because the reality is AI generates output. I need to make sense of that output. In fact, I need a fantastic editor that lets me do diffs and iterations on it with AI. So the ID… one of the most exciting things is new classes of highly refined IDs that have even sort of a telemetry loop with the intelligence layer, but also they kind of act more like heads-up displays. I have thousands of agents going off. How am I going to make sense of the micro steering of thousands of agents? And that is what ID slash inboxes and messaging tools will be, which is I'm not messaging or dealing with triage the way I deal with it today, but it's going to be different. Okay, interesting. So you think right now programmers spend all their time in IDE, but they're one of the few professions that does that. And your vision is the accountant IDE, the lawyer IDE, and— What is the metaphor of how I will work with agents? So it's kind of like massive macro delegation. So there's lots of agents I go give a bunch of instructions to and they go off and work sometimes for hours, days, let's say, as the models get better. But they are checking in and so it's macro delegation, micro steering. So if you take that, how does one do micro steering with context? It can't be in the next notification hell, which is it sort of notifies me. It has five words. I don't know exactly what the real context is, or what have you. That I think is where, and that has to be multi app-like. So that's where I feel like all software finally when it grows up, it looks like an inbox and a messaging tool and a canvas with a blinking screen, except this time around a lot of work happened. Is that one app? Is that 10 different apps? It's kind of interesting if you think about the productivity speech that emerged, there were three big apps—Word, Excel and PowerPoint—but it's interesting that that number was not one and was not 40. It was three. And so how do you think about this?…

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