Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
22 published records
01 / evaluation
“You can be in Wunderlist in Berlin, you can be Accompli, you can be in Silicon Valley. It doesn’t matter.”
02 / belief
“Clearly they were on sale, as you say, in more ways than one. But I think the other route is let’s say LinkedIn had managed to stay independent, they’re having a hard road executing on building another pillar of monetization on top of their network asset.”
03 / belief
“Actually, the press release talks about how he’s going to be doing that with Scott Guthrie who leads Enterprise which includes both Azure and Dynamic CRM product, and Jie Liu which chief purview is mostly kind of productivity, so the whole Office Suite and Bing. So I think there’s a little bit of clue there as to what they’re going to do with it probably in Office and then some combination of Azure and fueling the Dynamics product.”
04 / belief
“I mean they basically were signaling that we are hitting the top of our S curve and that you can’t count on this continued growth of the future which had been priced into their stock. So I think while that core business was still strong, they were looking for secondary revenue channels.”
05 / belief
“I think all we have right now is a press release to go off of and it will be super interesting to see how advertisers and brands adopt that.”
06 / belief
“The nature of companies has changed and I think that – We’ll talk about trends in a little bit but I think that a big tech trend or really a big world trend that’s happened is people move around a lot.”
07 / belief
“Mike Moritz takes over and is still to this day, I believe, on the board of LinkedIn.”
08 / observation
“If you were going to attack LinkedIn, this is the only way to do it because it’s the only way where you can actually get enough critical mass.”
09 / belief
“You talk to a bunch of current and former Microsoft employees about this and that is the most common reaction, I would say.”
10 / belief
“There’s been some news from our last couple episodes that we think are worth talking about for a minute here.”
11 / uncertainty
“The Samwer brothers had a venture capital firm – I don’t know if it still exists – called the European Founders Fund.”
12 / belief
“I think that’s right. Anyway, so they launched in May of 2003 and they have a really interesting sort of bootstrapping mechanic for the network to get how do you start a network from a cold start, and that was the infamous and product of a lawsuit later on as is a recurring theme on our show, the infamous scrape your address book and spam everybody in your email address book.”
13 / prediction
“I think what happened otherwise, it would have gotten sold to Salesforce and in that case, I wonder for the future of what Microsoft is doing with Dynamics if they lose out on this deal because I’d feel like that’s a nail on the coffin for Salesforce.”
14 / evaluation
“I think that that’s just an interesting thing to note when you’re thinking about starting new start-ups because I’ve heard so many people say “LinkedIn sucks, I’m going to try unseat it and disrupt LinkedIn.”
15 / evaluation
“Microsoft is also a developer-facing company. So if they open up the LinkedIn API to – I mean, I think about like even venture capital firms, so many firms are building data tools internally for themselves to be able to identify people who might be founders, great founders before they start companies or people who might be interested in joining startups before they do who are really talented.”
16 / evaluation
“I mean, I think today sitting here, I say this is a great buy because a year ago-ish, LinkedIn was worth twice this much and it’s this incredibly unique, incredibly defensible asset that is now part of Microsoft, so I’m like huge thumbs-up.”
17 / evaluation
“I remember reading The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick and in that book he kind of talks about that there was a group of people that were in Silicon Valley that were super involved in a lot of tech products and realized that social networking was going to be the next big thing and that it explains their fast time to market because I think that with Friendster right around then –”
18 / recommendation
“I think at some point here we might rename this to just a show about tech acquisitions because we’re doing things that didn’t go well, things that did go well.”
19 / evaluation
“They had it in their sales contracts that they would make money for one copy of Windows per-core shipped by someone who entered an agreement with Microsoft to sell Windows at all. So they basically swashed the competition because manufacturers realized oh, well, I’m paying for a copy of Windows whether I put it on here or not, so I may as well ship Windows.”
20 / prediction
“I think there’s so many ways/angles to think about LinkedIn but one of them that you would have to imagine people at Microsoft are thinking about is as a data set and a data acquisition and the ability to continue to operate LinkedIn as the set of products that it is within that segment but then infuse that data into Office, into Active Directory, into Dynamics, into all of the sort of "mobile-first, cloud-first" world that Microsoft lives in now, all of the business tools that they have, you have to imagine it’s something they’re thinking about.”
21 / evaluation
“The second reason, we kind of talked about identity and Office 365 there, I think that as it extends to Dynamics CRM, it's hugely valuable to know an entire person’s work history when you are trying to sell something to them.”
22 / evaluation
“The way I think about LinkedIn is it’s such a canonical example of the power of a network effect and the value of the asset of LinkedIn’s network that they've built, and I’ll get into this in a little bit in tech themes. But if you take for a given for the moment that the network effect and the defensibility of that means that their professional network that they built basically can almost never be disrupted and Lord knows many people have tried over the years despite the product being really crappy and all these other things.”