Speaker unverified: belief

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…machines and they're running Microsoft Access and there are SQL Server and everything is neatly packaged together in this Microsoft life, to moving towards more of an open and interoperable strategy. I think that the way I would say is my thing was to go back even to the Microsoft of the eighties perhaps., Because most of what happened was really in the nineties there was Microsoft and there was pretty much nothing else, and so there was sort of a lot more of our things coming together, whether it was on the client or on the server. The eighties, to your point, we built Office on the Mac. Windows came later. In fact, the concept that Bill had when he started Microsoft was it's a software factory, I'm not in love with any one category, I'm just going to build the best software factory and it's going to churn out whatever problem. Flight i sim. You want a basic interpreter, no problem. We have one. You want an operating system? We have one too. So in some sense, that was the idea and at what point we got into a lock between four or five parts of that that became the Windows and Windows NT and client server and what have you. So I sort of realized that when I became CEO, and even when I was running our cloud business that hey, this is a time where the market's going to be a lot bigger and got different, and we didn't have the mobile platform at that time. And so therefore we really needed to make sure we would stay relevant in the largest markets that we could address by bringing our products together in configurations that made sense. S I would say if it was not in the core DNA of the company, I don't think just because I showed up as a CEO and I said, “I want to do this,” we would've executed well. It was in the core DNA of the company that we can in fact take our software to every platform. Yes. Speaking of the core DNA of the company, the famous cartoon of Microsoft with all the guns pointing at each other. How much cultural tweaking did you have to do and how do you actually do that? When you get down to brass tacks, you can see all the nice things, the all hands and things like that, but ultimately culture comes down to what you will and won’t tolerate and how decisions are made and things like that. Yeah, I would say there are two things that I learned from that entire episode. Because I always say, look, I'm a consummate insider. Anything good and bad about Microsoft for the last 35 years, I lived through them all and I'm part of it, so I can't deny any of it. The thing that I felt was a little bit of that was we lost our own belief because we lost the narrative. That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality. People started to identify with the cartoon. own belief because we lost the narrative. That cartoon is a great example of someone else defining what became the cultural narrative more so than reality. People started to identify with the cartoon. That's right. I mean, I think one of the fundamental issues of today's social media and the zeitgeist is you can absolutely lose narrative. It's completely reflexive. So one of the interesting things is, of course, all of these things have signal, so this doesn't mean, oh wow, we were all perfect divisions and we are all sort of in greater harmony. That is not the case, but in some sense, some of these divisional tensions are real issues that need to have tension. We can't have, social cohesion is not a goal. Winning in the marketplace is a goal, but at some level you have to orchestrate these large organizations. In fact, you may even have two competing teams by design. How many people is Microsoft? I think around 200,000. Okay, so rough number is Microsoft has 200,000 people. Stripe has 10,000 people. Maybe there's someone who's listening to this who runs a company that's 500 people or something like that. A lot of the things that we do are probably fairly scale independent, where you're trying to make sure that you're talking to customers, you're holding a leadership offsite. We're looking at the numbers for ‘26. We want the revenues to be a bit higher and the cost to be a bit lower. There's a lot of activities in companies that are kind of the same, regardless of size. That said, there's also probably things that only show up at the 200,000 person city state size that I wouldn't be aware of at the 10,000 person size. What effects only show up when you're that big? . That said, there's also probably things that only show up at the 200,000 person city state size that I wouldn't be aware of at the 10,000 person size. What effects only show up when you're that big? There are two things I would say. Quite honestly, having only worked at Microsoft, it's not that I'm like an expert, but the one thing I would say taking over for a founder— Steve and Bill built the company. I mean Paul and Bill started it and Steve and Bill scaled it, and I was sort of the first “non-founder” person. The thing I realized quickly, or in fact I got into the job and I realized that I need a team. And just to have the ability to manage the scope, but then that A.G. Lafly thing that we put out there, which I think is a great one. Being clear about what the CEO clearly needs to do, which businesses are you in? Which businesses are you synthesizing from the outside? Having the standards, setting the standards for culture, and then the ability to your point about having that performance culture that you can't say, “Hey, I'm only about the long term, or I'm all over the short term.” You’ve got to deliver both. Getting a real grip of the four or five things that only you can do, and then building the team. You'd say even at 500 people, that's what you do, but quite frankly, you can keep in your working memory. Growing up as a developer, there was a set of things everybody would talk about. How many lines of code do you know personally? At some point you sort of say, “Oh, that's the person who knows that module or that library”. That becomes more. Everybody starts where they know every line of code at some level. Then you have to get to the person who knows, “Oh, I know the person who wrote that,” and I think that that modularity and team building and the cohesiveness is— Am I understanding you correctly that maybe it's Stripe scale or at a smaller scale you can still reason about the product as a product and know everything that you're shipping and everything— I also think founders are unique in that sense because the founders are, that's kind of what is singular about them because they've grown up with it from day one. See, it's kind of hard to take the working memory of a founder and say, “Oh, let me take it and imprint it”—sort of a professional CEO.” It just doesn't work because even for me, I joined the company in ‘92. I was not there in the early eighties, and so to some degree it was a continuous scale that only the founder CEO or the founders see it. And so that's why I think having respect for what founders can do uniquely.And founders having respect for whoever comes next, that they can't be doing exactly the same thing that they did. So that's why I think this founder mold thing is interesting, which is clearly the culture personality of a founder is unbelievable and you use it, maximize it. Then mental model CEOs like us have to also be, you can sort of be in the founder mold but don't think you're a founder, and that nuance I think is an important one.…

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