How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs)

[00:00] We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for if there's a thing like that and do the hell out of it, right? Do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it as hard as you can do it. [00:30] with cool ideas, do the hell out of that. Work doesn't necessarily have to be hard. [00:37] Today my guest is Sam Scalace. Sam has an incredible resume that has [00:41] Very hard to summarize succinctly, I'll give it a shot. [00:44] Currently, he is Corporate Vice President and Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, where he leads efforts in the consumer product space, infrastructure, and AI. [00:53] Sam is most known for basically inventing Google Docs. [00:57] with his company, Rightly, which was acquired by Google, and became the foundation for what is now Google Workplace, which currently has over 1 billion active users a month. After joining Google, Sam ended up responsible for many of Google's consumer applications, including parts of Gmail, Maps, Automotive, Groups, Reader, and more. He's also founded six startups, was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Box through their IPO. He's also worked at Intuit, Macromedia. He was even a VC at Google Ventures for a time. [01:27] a fairly wide-ranging conversation, but the core focus was around innovation: how to think big, how to come up with original ideas, why optimism is so important and powerful, and also a ton of career advice. Sam is hilarious and not what I imagined a corporate vice president at Microsoft would be like, which gives me even more respect for Microsoft. A big thank you to Brett Burson for making this introduction. With that, I bring you Sam Scalache after a short word from our sponsors.

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[03:26] use Vanta to automate up to 90% of the work involved with SOC 2 and these other frameworks. For a limited time, Lenny's podcast listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. [03:48] Sam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Happy to be here. A really fun fact about you is that [03:56] Apparently you have the very first Google Doc [03:58] I don't know what you call it, the very first Google Doc document saved somewhere from before even Google Docs was a thing. Does it still work in today's Google Docs? And what is in this document? Yeah, it does actually still work. It's pretty funny. Actually, if I move my camera for a second, if you're on YouTube, you can see the Rightly thing in the background. Rightly was the company that did Google Docs. Yeah, it still works. It's kind of funny, though, because it's like the document of Theseus, right? [04:28] in C#, which is little known, in our own, there's like pre-cloud, so we had three file servers that we rented that were Windows machines in a data center in Texas with a sysadmin in the Philippines running them. So that's like, it started there, and then when we moved to Google, we ported everything to Java, we moved all the data over in Bigtable, and we didn't lose anything, never lost anybody's stuff, so it's still there, and moved across, [04:54] So that's one backend migration. Then there's another one at Spanner. And then like the front end has been rewritten twice as well. So it's like, is it really the same document? I don't know. Like the front end, backend have been rewritten. It's not much. It's just me saying something to Steve about is collaboration working? Are we colliding on each other? Because we were trying to figure out like typing on one line if that algorithm was working. And then there's a picture of Edna from the Incredibles pasted into it. I don't know why. I think that came...

[05:19] after, so I might have gone back and pasted that in. I'm not sure when. We must have been testing pictures or something. Unfortunately, we don't have the version history anymore, so I don't know what was original, original, but it is the oldest Google Doc from like [05:31] October of 2005 or something like that. I love that this philosophical answer of still the same Google Doc, considering all the code has been redone. The Computer History Museum wants to curate it. I talked to these guys, and they were like, oh, that's so cool. We'll take that. I'm like... [05:47] How? I can make you a PDF, now it's not the document. I can share you into it, but please don't edit it. It's like... [05:56] I don't, like, how do you curate this? - Yeah, I think it needs to be on the blockchain. - Yeah, if you made the NFT of it, that would be more authentic, I think, than the document, almost. It's kind of funny. [06:07] That's amazing. And it's amazing that it still works. That's a testament to you slash Google. Well, I'll tell you a quick Google story. When we migrated in to Google, we were very sneaky about it and we like, [06:19] like put the site into quote maintenance mode for eight hours on a Sunday where everything was just read only. And then we migrated all the data and moved everything and brought the new system up. And three days after that, Sergey was in a meeting with me. He's like, so when are you guys going to like move over to the Google infrastructure? And I got to tell him like, oh, yeah, we did it this weekend. No one noticed. Some blogger in Germany like noticed the IP address changed and that was it. Like nobody noticed it at all. So we were really good about it. [06:46] Man, I love these sneaky stories. I'm hoping we hear more. There's a bunch of stuff I want to cover. The first is this broad idea of

[06:54] disruptive innovation. I know that you spent a lot of time thinking about this. Google Docs is a great example of this. Feels like Microsoft increasingly is getting really good at this. Just the idea of doing something completely new, oftentimes things that people didn't think were possible. [07:07] So let me just kind of ask a broad question. [07:09] Why is this important to you? Why do you spend a lot of time thinking about this? [07:12] And then just what are some tools you found to help you and other people [07:16] think more innovatively, more originally. It's an interesting question. Why it's important part, [07:22] I don't know, it just is. Everything you're wearing, eating, using, listening to, sitting on was a disruptive innovation at some point. That's how everything happens. I think there's this really interesting thing where... [07:36] Everything new is threatening at some level at the beginning. I mean, probably literally like the first guy who invented chairs, like got shit from his tribe mates for making a chair. [07:46] You know, it's like, but like, and they're all like obvious in retrospect, right? Like everything is obvious in retrospect, but there's, I think there's this really deep thing that people have where, you know, if something is disruptive of your worldview, it feels threatening and you kind of have this very stark choice to make. That's either you're wrong or it's wrong. And humans are storytellers. Like we, it's very easy for us to tell stories about why something is right or wrong if we, if we're motivated to. And so I think I call these why not questions that people ask these why not questions a lot. [08:16] So the new thing pops up and if you're not ready to receive it for some reason, like you're not kind of already half there or you don't have a problem that it solves or whatever, it's just threatening and irritating and you come up with a why not question. We heard a bunch of these with Google Docs in the early days about like browser wasn't ready, the whole model of the cloud was like, "People aren't going to trust you to store your files. That's really weird. What if there's no connectivity?"

[08:42] no connectivity on an airplane story, like a hundred times from journalists. Like what if I'm on an airplane on all right stuff? I'm like, I don't know. Like there'll be connectivity on airplanes soon. Like, you know, which there is like, [08:52] And those are all just why not questions. I think the more interesting ones are the what if questions. Like, what if this does work? Just like, use your imagination. Think about like, how far can I extend the curve? What are the implications of that? I'm an engineer and engineers are like fundamentally pessimistic people. You know, we kind of somebody once told me like engineers come into the world broken. They just like look at everything as a problem to be solved. I think there's something to that. And I think there's something to that. [09:19] But I feel like I've missed out more by being pessimistic than I have by being too optimistic too early. So I have this kind of mantra now that, like, you know, there's just, like, not that much of a prize for being pessimistic and right, particularly in a moment like this. Like, it's much better to be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right, I think. So, I don't know. That's like I just I and I'm like an impatient person. I'm a creative person. I'm a messy person. Like, I just like to create and explore and find stuff. [09:49] just seems natural to me. But I think it's not an exaggeration to say, like, literally... [09:54] you know, that, that wheat you had in your bread this morning, if you eat bread is like, you know, some weirdo like was messing around with plants a thousand years ago and everybody thought he was a nut. She was a nut. And like, you know, [10:07] Then we had wheat, you know, because somebody just, you know, everything, right? Everything is like that. Along the same lines, I was actually just working on a post around first principles thinking.

[10:16] I found this quote from Steve Jobs. [10:18] Just reminding us that everything around us was designed by some person that wasn't necessarily that much smarter than you. And there's no reason there isn't a better way. It just happens to be the way it is today. Yeah. One of the other ones that I like to keep in mind is every new idea looks dumb at first. Unfortunately, the dumb ideas also look dumb at first. It's not a perfect number. But the more disruptive they are. [10:38] kind of the more dumb you're going to feel they are. [10:41] You always listen for that stuff like, you know, if they say it's a toy or, you know, if it's practical or it's stupid or I don't get it or whatever. Like those are often. [10:49] Like toy is a good keyword. Like if you hear people saying something's a toy, that's often a really good signifier that it's actually something real and threatening and they can't think of a better criticism for it than it's, you know, it's just a toy right now. Yeah, I imagine people thought about Google Docs that way initially. It's like, oh, this little toy in the browser. Yeah, we got all this stuff. I mean, the real interesting thing, like I said at the beginning, like there's this. [11:11] you know, you'll have this very binary reaction that's possible, right? Like either you understand it, in which case like you're super excited about it. Like, cool, the world's going to change in this exciting way. [11:22] or you don't and you reject it. And to the degree that something is really disruptive, that reaction, that binary reaction gets really strong. And so like with something like GDOCS, we got this thing with GDOCS that was really confusing in the early days to me, where like there was a small group of people that really liked it. Some of them liked it more than we liked it. Like Nate Torquington over at Riley Lake was this super huge early booster for it. And like I did not understand what he saw in it at first.

[11:49] And, you know, but then we had people that just wanted it to die in a fire. And like that, like bifurcation of like, love it, hate it is really how you have an idea of like, [11:58] whether you have impact in what you're building. If you get like the more of the bell curve of like, [12:03] kind of moderate indifference and maybe mild like and mild dislike or like that's sort of an that's an incremental product like that's not really disrupting anything but if you look at something like chat tpt where like the entire world is like this is amazing or this is terrible and there's like not a whole lot in between that's a on you know very good signifier of it being like truly impactful and disruptive whether it's actually good or bad is a separate question but like there's [12:33] framework. Basically, [12:35] If it feels like people sort of like it, some people, mostly people don't care. Very few people love it or hate it. [12:40] Probably not disruptive if some people absolutely love it and a lot of people really hate it. Good sign. Right. Yeah, actually, weirdly enough. And like it doesn't even you don't even have to like. [12:50] It's not voting, right? Like in the early days, like we had like, [12:54] I don't know, a couple million users, five million users, and there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea and that it should stop and, like, we shouldn't be doing it. So, like, you know, like, for a long time, the haters outnumbered the people who were fans. And... [13:09] you know, I, who cares? Like, whatever, you know, like it's, it's fine. Like as long as you're like, as long as you don't run out of the people who love it, [13:16] You know, that's fine. [13:17] Is there another example of you using this what if?

[13:20] approach either on a product you worked on or something you've seen and it working out? I'm doing a lot of it right now, honestly. I mean, that's probably the most immediate example, but I could almost point at any product and there's moments like that in there. But right now, there's a lot of why not stories around generative AI. So it's expensive. It hallucinates. You can't necessarily try. It's sarcastic. It's random. It doesn't do the same thing twice. Yeah, they're real. They're actual issues to solve. [13:50] I look at it and think, well, what if? What if we can build software around it? What if we can build more complicated programs than what we've been able to build? What if we actually have a reasoning engine that we can use to do meaningful things? What if this is actually really the second industrial revolution where in the first one, we had a surplus of physical energy beyond just our bodies and things like water reels, and now we have a surplus of energy. [14:13] cognitive energy beyond just our brains, right? And like, that's a really transformational idea. And like, I think, so I, you know, I'm, I'm completely in that mode right now, honestly, like, I think that's just like, [14:26] the right mindset for something that's obviously this disruptive. [14:30] right or wrong. Tesla is a great example. SpaceX is a great example where people are like, that doesn't make any sense. You know, when Elon's like, well, what if you could land rockets and reuse them and they get really cheap? Like, that's pretty amazing. What if I can fix the battery problems and like the car is basically a software product? Right. Those are pretty amazing. What if questions of those products? [14:49] Yeah, so in this work on understanding what first principles actually looks like when you're thinking of first principles,

[14:55] The steps are essentially figure out what you want to do, figure out [14:58] the levers that [14:59] keep you from achieving that thing and then to basically question every assumption that [15:03] stands in the way of making this possible. So I think Elon's a great, like the classic example, like you can't talk about first principles thinking without quoting Elon. [15:10] telling stories of Ulan, but essentially it's just [15:12] okay, how much would it cost to make this if we were to start over and not? I mean, the why not? There are actually problems you need to pay attention to eventually to build stuff. But once you have the what if, right, like just to pick on SpaceX for a second, right? Like if you have the what if of like if I could make, you know, payload to space costs a lot less, what if? Like, okay, that's amazing. That's an amazing world. Let's see if we can work on that problem. And then now you have all the why not. Why not? Why isn't it as cheap as it could be? [15:42] and think about it that way. It's like that is a good, it's a good model. This connects to something else that I know you're, [15:48] big on which is optimism. [15:50] Being optimistic. There's this feeling that pessimism, you're often right, [15:55] There's all kind of growing pessimism in the world in a lot of ways, especially in technology. [16:00] I know you're a big proponent of [16:01] Staying optimistic. Can you just talk about why you think that's important and how you approach that? It's funny. It's a choice. I'm not an optimistic person by nature. I just not. All the people in my life, if any of them listen to this, they'll just laugh at the idea that I'm a proponent for optimism per se. It's just a conscious choice. I don't think you get very much for being pessimistic, necessarily. You definitely don't get a lot for being careless. You can be optimistic to the point of being careless and causing harm, for sure.

[16:31] Maybe a better way to say it is growth mindset. You want to look at the possibilities rather than the limitations and suspend some disbelief and just kind of work on these problems. I just personally feel like I've missed out on more than I've protected myself from. If I sum up both sides of that equation over my career, I wish I had been more open-minded and more optimistic and more willing to try things and more focused on possibilities rather than problems. [17:01] choosing to do that, try to do that as a habit. Nothing deeper than that, I just think it's a better place to be, particularly, [17:08] It's kind of funny, when I came out here, I was pre-med, I dropped out of school, I came out to be a computer scientist with my friend. I didn't think of it that way. I came out to have a job at Ashton Tate with a friend of mine and spent 10 years... [17:23] not understanding that I was actually in a career and thinking that it was a temporary thing where I had to go back and like, [17:29] go back to med school and get my degree and be a doctor or something boring like that. And so like, it's like for 35 years of doing this, like it hasn't occurred to me that like, oh, actually I'm in this computer industry. That's like this technical industry is constantly growing and constantly inventing things and constantly, you know, coming up with these new ideas. And actually the best posture in that world is to be creative and curious and open and optimistic and try things and stuff like that. The other thing I'll say about optimism too,

[17:59] going back to this idea of all the... [18:03] the good ideas look bad at first right so that's okay so that's a that's a first principle like that's a sort of fundamental thing of you're going to constantly be challenged by the really good ideas so how do you overcome it well one way you can overcome it is you know you want to be able to try things more easily well so part of that is being more optimistic so being more willing to try stuff and part of it's also just like making it cheaper to try things like me you know if it's you know in the very early story of ddocs when i had the idea for rightly like my two co-founders [18:33] and word processors were like, the browser's never going to support this. It's a bad idea. Let's not do this. And they were like right and wrong at the same time. Like they're right that it didn't support even what we have today and wouldn't have supported a full experience, but you know, wrong in that like the world was going to change and evolve. We would never have done the first experiment if it had been a long and costly thing to do. Right. So like the fact that our tools were sharp and we could, I could say like, let's do this thing. And it only takes a [19:03] and see how it feels. [19:05] It's like kind of a form of optimism, right? Like, you know, if you're super pessimistic, you're like, even that's not worth it. Like two days is a waste of time. [19:13] There's always a little bit of a leap of faith, and then you want to make those [19:17] as consumable as possible. You want to be able to try things out quickly and learn things [19:22] and do these experiments. Lots of people have said that before, but I think all those pieces connect for me in this idea of being optimistic and open to trying stuff. Because, you know,

[19:32] Stuff always is different. You're always wrong about products. It's one of my other rules is like you're just always wrong. [19:38] And so you have to try it. You have to put it in front of people. You have to try it yourself before you'll understand it. Like no one can really design products in their head completely as far as I can tell. [19:47] Awesome. There's a few threads I want to follow there, but [19:49] This is also a tool that I found came up again and again in the [19:54] First principles thinking people that are really good at this is just trying it. [19:57] There's a lot of just like, nah, it's not going to work. [20:00] and exactly as you just described. [20:02] you often find out. [20:03] You're completely wrong when you actually try it out. You have this quote, I think, in one of your newsletter posts. [20:08] talking about building Google Docs, you describe it as just fuck around. [20:12] Yeah. [20:12] Kind of. Get to the edge of something and fuck around. That's the strategy. Yeah, get to the edges. Get your tools as sharp as you can get them to be. Make it so that you can try lots of cheap experiments. [20:22] and just mess around and see what happens, see what pops out, and just try to be observant. I think the other part of optimism, too, is like, [20:29] there's a receptiveness to it, right? Like if you're very pessimistic, [20:33] you might miss the surprising result that pops out of an experiment. Like you might force yourself to do a bunch of experiments grudgingly, but you're like, you know, I hate this. I'm doing four experiments today because I have to do it because I want to be an entrepreneur, but it sucks and everything's miserable and black. And then like, you know, you won't notice that like, oh, this thing didn't work, but it didn't work in an interesting way. And, you know, you're more receptive to that kind of surprising thing, I think, when you're in an optimistic frame of mind. Like, oh, let's see how far I can get with this. Like, oh, it's not working, but why isn't it working?

[21:03] like with Procure. We've done stuff like that in some of the projects I've got going. [21:08] in Microsoft right now. We've got a chatbot thing we've been working on for a while and [21:13] with memory, long running memory, so that you can like have long conversations with it. And, you know, they work OK, but they don't work great in some ways. And we gave we were trying to get multiple versions of them working together, like multi agents working together. We gave them whiteboard working memory, like as a shared working memory thing to fix this problem. And that turns out to make them much smarter. [21:33] Don't know why. Like it just makes them smarter. It's like that was kind of one of these nice little like bits of discovery. Like if you're in a pessimistic frame of mind, you might have said like, well, these don't work that well. Let's like give up on it. More optimistic frame of mind is like, well, let's try to like give them a whiteboard just like a person and like see if they cooperate better. And it turns out they really do. So another example of that mindset. Along this thread, I was going to ask about this earlier, but there's a lot of. [21:58] Technologies, people get optimistic about crypto comes to mind. Not that there's nothing there, but a lot of people got really optimistic. And then it turned out there wasn't really a lot of business to be built and then things kind of entered wintertime. [22:10] Is there anything you've learned that [22:11] gives you a signal that let's keep working, I'm going to stay optimistic about this thing. [22:15] I spent a lot of time really thinking hard about crypto and like whether I was just reacting to it because it threatened some part of my identity or whatever. And I... [22:24] I never came down to anything that seemed valuable. I mean, that was always the thing for me is just like there has to be a what if that I can say, you know, what if this works? Like how valuable is it? For crypto, I was always like, well, what if it works? Like then I have to run up sec on my personal finances. That sounds dystopian. I don't want that. Like I can't think of anything as a user that I think actually like is valuable here, even in the best case. So I feel like the pessimism is justified.

[22:54] That's like one of my other kind of root principles is just like, [22:57] It's all about user value. Users are lazy, right? We're all lazy. We don't really care that much at the end of the day. No one's going to do something really in their life for any other reason other than it makes their life better. Nobody cares that you're friendly or nice or the logo is pretty or whatever. They care about... [23:11] you know, making their life easier. We're all cynical at heart at some level. So, [23:17] If you can't point at user value, significant user value, it's not going to work. It doesn't matter. [23:23] shove all the marketing dollars into it you want. You can write all the articles you want, but like, you know, [23:28] It's got to actually solve a problem, a real problem at the end of the day. I just never saw that with crypto. [23:34] Yeah, so I think the lesson there is [23:36] truly understand if the value is real versus like the sounds really cool. You think a lot of like, would you want it? I think is a nice exercise there. [23:43] We pick on poor Elon, but I feel like with a lot of his products, at least he's got lots of other issues, but he articulates clear user value, even in the beginning when he's hyping things up. Like Tesla's, right? [23:57] Okay, so electric cars weren't ready. He did the roadsters, like, whatever. But, like, he at least articulated this idea that, like... [24:04] We're going to put a lot of batteries in these things. They're going to really be real cars. They're going to have a real range. We're going to figure out the charging problems. Like, you know, that, like, [24:12] As an end user, I'm like, okay, that's great. [24:14] Like now I have a car that works like a car that solves some problems. It's way cheaper to operate because fuel is cheaper. Like he's solving all the end user problems for me. Like that at least makes sense. Even if you don't believe that he's going to do it.

[24:25] or believe in the way he did it, [24:28] at least the end user value proposition makes sense, right? You have this other great quote in your newsletter. People are lazy. [24:35] Look beyond cool too. [24:37] on how much easier a new tool or tech makes someone's life. Convenience always wins. You talk about that, just this realization people are just lazy, and that's the key. Yeah, well, I mean, that is the thing. I think as product builders, it's hard to not love what you're doing. You build a product because you love it. You build it because you understand some problem. You build it because you want a paycheck maybe sometimes. But we build it for all these reasons that just do not matter to the end user at all. And if there's one thing I've learned about product, [25:05] particularly in the consumer space, just kind of in general, people are just [25:10] lazy about stuff and like don't care about anything other than it making their life better the thing that's complicated with that is [25:17] there's two things about it that I think are interesting that follow from that principle. One is like, [25:22] I think products almost follow these like, [25:24] So one dynamic rules were like if you add a little bit of value, your adoption goes slowly. And if you add a lot of value, your adoption goes really quickly. Right. I think chat GPT is a great recent example of something that was just like added a ton of new value to the world and like got this explosive growth. And then you see lots of other stuff that people are doing. That's just like. [25:44] not bad, but not great. And it's sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and kind of slowly, you know, lumbering along and maybe it's going to collapse under its weight. That's the that's kind of the the, you know,

[25:56] So one thing about the users are lazy part of this. And then the other one, I think, is, again, it's almost like physics. I kind of think of this as entropy or people who are confused about entropy or will be like, entropy is not real. Like it runs backwards all the time on Earth. Like life gets more complicated. Like what is what is the deal with entropy? And like, well, no, you have to consider the whole system, right? Like the entire system of the solar system, including the sun, is increasing in entropy. [26:22] all the time we're just making use of some of it and i think the same thing is kind of true about user laziness where like people are like [26:27] "This tiny thing that I'm focusing on, this feature that I added, is better. Therefore, users should adopt it." But you forget all the stuff around it. Like, the user has to hear about it. The user has to remember it in the moment. The user has to learn how to use it. They have to build the habit. Like, that's all effort, right? Not to mention the fact that, like, the actual use of your feature might have friction on the way in, right? It might be hard to sign up for it. When we did Rightly at the beginning, [26:53] We didn't even ask for an email address because it was such a novel thing. We didn't want any friction at all in the onboarding process. So you could just come in and make a document and start using it without telling us anything at all about yourself. And after about two minutes of typing, if you were still there, we'd very gently just say, [27:09] please give us your email address. No password, no anything. Just give us your email address so we can send you a URL of this document in case you care about it later. Because if you leave, [27:19] we'll never know where, you know, we'll never be able to find it again. So like, you know, so, but like, you know, we were super focused on that, like as little friction as possible. And I think, you know, it's well known in the consumer space. You don't have.

[27:31] The number of seconds you have... [27:34] is not many, like 15 seconds, 30 seconds, right? To convince somebody that there's some value there. They're not gonna like hang out and grind their way through a bunch of high friction stuff to sign up for your thing. Like you're, you know, so like, that's the other part of it is just like, you know, users will only adopt what you're doing if that sum total of energy that they have to expend [27:56] is less than the resulting ease in their life that they get, usually by a factor of at least a couple. So it has to make your life a lot better, hopefully really a lot better, like 10x better than what you spend to use it. [28:09] Thank you. [28:10] What I think of as you're describing this is [28:12] Microsoft Excel... [28:15] add a billion toolbars and buttons and options, which allowed Google Docs essentially to come in with a much simpler experience. [28:22] Now you're on the other side of that, which is I never I didn't think about. Yeah, it's a really funny place to be. Like, you know, I did like and it's funny to be at Microsoft because I'm kind of the enemy. Right. It's like I'm the guy who like messed them up a little bit. So there's some friction around that. Yeah, I mean. [28:37] I think there are similar trade-offs to be made right now, by the way, with AI. I think there's similar opportunities, but we made this choice with AI. [28:44] So it's a little hard to remember, right? Because it's like 18 years, 17 years ago now, 18 years ago almost. Like, you know, in that era, like office was impregnable, right? Like, so software had to be distributed physically. Right. [28:57] It had to be shipped around, it had to be bought and installed, it was hard to use. And so there's a very high transactional cost. Because there's a very high transactional cost, the buyers would always make this decision, like do I want the thing with a thousand features or the thing with 995 features? I don't know what those last five are, but I might as well have all of them. And so that was just like the lock-in for Microsoft, right? So we made this trade-off, we're like, look.

[29:21] We're easy to use. [29:23] where zero install, you don't have to ever deal with it, it's super convenient. Plus you get this one new feature that's really, really useful, which is collaborating with each other and not having to send attachments around your file system, file servers. [29:35] but we're gonna take away most of the features, 'cause we don't care about them that much. And we took away a little bit more than we should have. [29:42] In the early days, we get all these complaints about people who want to [29:45] What, WordCount? Which I thought was a really weird, I thought that was going to be like way at the end of the list. I thought like we didn't have rulers, like we didn't have any kind of formatting at that point, any kind of real pagination. We just had like these basic documents, but WordCount came in. Of course, it was students was one of our early adopters. [30:01] So they really wanted to know if they were at the word count for the essay that they had just had assigned to them. So there was this dance with Microsoft that we deliberately made this tradeoff. And I think it's kind of it's almost like a classic innovators dilemma model. Right. Like we took this, you know, this incumbent that was like asymptotically approaching, you know, useful as like they're adding stuff. Whenever they added stuff, it wasn't really that much more valuable. And then. [30:27] We were this small thing that came into a market that they didn't care that much about, that they didn't understand that well, which is the internet stuff. It's kind of this disruptive new thing. We just kind of chipped away from the bottom like the innovator's dilemma. [30:41] I think it was hard for Microsoft to respond to it. I think it took them a while to even have a clear idea of how they were going to respond to it. [30:48] In retrospect, they did fine. Like, we took a bunch of market share, but they kept all the money, basically. So, you know, we being Google, like, you know, so, like, they survived it. Like, you know, they survived. They did a good job surviving the challenge. Like, it's, you know...

[31:01] We have all the users now, but they have all the money. We have all the money, I guess, now. I want to spend more time on Google Docs and the story there. [31:10] A couple of questions. How long did it take from starting on it to feeling like it's working, like whatever you consider product market fit? [31:16] Almost immediately, honestly. It was weird. The process of it was... [31:22] I had this idea, we set this thing up, [31:25] We started working together. We're like, ah, that's actually pretty. So basically, like, the history is like, I noticed content editable. [31:31] So the browser would do some editing for you. And then I noticed JavaScript. I could never realize that JavaScript was out there. And we had done word processors in the past, this team, and for a long time. In fact, my co-founder, Steve, the other person on that document, [31:47] like wrote this thing called Fulbright way back in like 1987 or something like that. It was like a direct competitor, 85 I think even, that was like a direct competitor to Word 1. So like we knew word processors and so we decided to just like try it. Like what's it like to build a word processor? And like the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident. Like they were just like these things on the server. We hadn't built the thing. [32:08] that would lock somebody out yet. So there was just like, here's a document, like you can edit these two things. [32:13] Which we have, you know, A, immediately realized was really cool. Like we could both work in the same document at the same time. And then B, realized like, oh, crap, like we're colliding with each other because there's no presence or anything like that. And there's no collision detection or anything like that. So like, so pretty quickly, really, oh, that's kind of cool. Like that feels good as a development team to have like these shared documents, not to send stuff around and not. So that's cool.

[32:35] So I spelled that out, but like, oh, bummer, like... [32:38] collaboration is a problem. Like we'll have to go fix that. And like naively like figured out that like, [32:43] that's a problem. It took forever to get that working out. It was really, really hard in the time because we didn't, [32:48] We didn't do operational transform. I don't think that technique had been quite invented yet. And so we did three-way merge, which doesn't work that well to the browsers. [32:57] The logical document of a document can be rendered differently in HTML. There's not a canonical representation. And so you're doing merges where alphabetization can change, the order of attributes can change, the tree structure can change. Firefox would do a blank paragraph with a singleton BR tag, and IE would do it with an open-closed paragraph tag. And so even the tree doesn't match. So it's a really hard merge problem. So that turned out to be a gnarly, hard problem to solve. [33:27] Thank you. [33:27] Once we had seen the value of working together, we were motivated to do that. Kind of the interesting thing, too, with that is... [33:35] I think if we'd gotten it in the other order, we might not have done it. It's another good example of why not and what if. We got really lucky that we saw the what if part, that we saw how cool a document in a browser that you can collaborate on would be, because if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would have been first, [33:56] without understanding that value, you might have been like, "Eh, it's not worth it. It's going to be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a useful app." So I think it's a good little counter example of that optimistic, pessimistic perspective we were talking about.

[34:09] We could easily have missed that idea, easily have missed that idea. And we just got lucky, I think, in the order it got presented to us. [34:16] That is really interesting, actually, that you need to be [34:19] pulled to the what-if [34:21] getting you so excited that you're going to spend however many years it took you to solve that problem. What? Because you are so excited about this. Yeah. I think that's a really good point. That's why I mean, I've spent a lot of time. It's kind of funny. Like, GDocs, I keep expecting people to just be like, all right, Grandpa, stop talking about GDocs. It's been a long time. So it has been a long time. It's been 17 years, but it's still very relevant. It's got a couple billion users now, I think. Like, it's a big thing. [34:45] But I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years, you know, [34:49] Just thinking about like, why did that work? Like what worked about that? Like what lessons can I draw from it? Like it was, it was, there was a lot of energy around it, positive and negative. The first week I was at my, at Google, [35:01] Like an executive there refused to give me hardware. [35:04] because he thought that Google was a search company, not an app company. And literally, the guy in charge of hardware at the time refused to give me hardware for this service. And I had to threaten to either sue him or haul him in front of Eric Schmidt because I had a contract and I had a contract at earnouts. So that was another one of these interesting lessons of sometimes the opposition is enormous. And if I had just been a random Google employee, [35:29] with this idea and know [35:31] legal protection and the CEO wasn't a fan of the project. [35:36] it would have died. There's no way it would have made it through that negativity and that pessimism and that person being...

[35:42] either challenged or afraid of the idea or just not able to imagine it or what. I'm not sure what. But like we'll keep coming back to this idea of optimism. Like I have this very strong feeling about that, like most of the reason people don't do [35:56] really innovative, good products is this kind of mindset. You're just not seeing the opportunities. There's a lot of hard work for sure. There's a lot of stuff that you can read about and best practices of doing iteration and user testing and user interviews and really listening and all the engineering best practices. That stuff is pretty... [36:15] mechanical like once you know where you're going you can do that it's not that hard to learn and to master it i think the hard stuff is this mindset of like being open in the right ways and understanding that some some kinds of pushback are are good pushback some some are are bad i always think that like product builders and entrepreneurs you have this really hard problem [36:37] of like you have to be you know very rigid about your mission like I know where I'm going I know what my mission is and like I'm going to go there because the world doesn't care it's back but you also have to be really flexible about feedback like you might not be you probably aren't going to be right about a bunch of it and so like you have to like blend these two things together somehow like you know it's like a samurai sword that's like hard on the back but softer on the edge so it doesn't break and like it's never back the other way around but like you know it's like

[37:07] building [37:08] really great products is like, [37:10] finding that balance and really listening to those signals. [37:14] being open to it. [37:15] and also knowing how long to [37:17] commit to it versus time to move on to something else. So along those lines, [37:22] What was the moment where you finally felt product market fit for what became Google Docs? And how long was that from the beginning of starting to work on it? It depends on what market we're talking about. I've been continually surprised at the adoption of GDocs. I think we knew there was something there pretty quickly, probably in the first couple months. There was a lot of energy around it. [37:43] That is a weird ride because we built this thing kind of on a whim and [37:48] as an experiment, we liked it. We decided to go just advertise on Google. At the time, 37 Signals was kind of like the cool company. And we're like, that looks cool. We'll just be some engineers and we'll have a little subscription SaaS business thing and chill out. So let's see what it costs to acquire customers. So let's go advertise on Google and see how much it costs to get people to show up. And then we'll figure out if we have a subscription business or not. And that just got us noticed. That got us noticed by Google. It got us noticed. We were, I think, [38:18] crunch like michael errington like this another funny rightly stories that like we had i did a breakfast with michael errington at bucks in that era where he was like trying to decide he had this like spreadsheet idea he wanted to work on he was trying to decide if you should go do that and like maybe join forces with us because we were cool or if he should like continue to work on this blog thing he had going called tech crunch

[38:41] I'm like, so I might be partially responsible for TechCrunch because we turned him down and said he should go to TechCrunch instead. You know, every time I would bump into him, I would laugh about that. But like when that when we got noticed, I. [38:53] Like we really got noticed. There was just this period where we were like the hot thing for, you know, a couple months, like where every VC wanted to talk to us and everyone's trying to figure it out. Because I think we're like, you know, when you see one point on the line, like Gmail, which came before us, like, oh, that's kind of cool. Like, that's an interesting thing. [39:09] quasi app, but it's like a weird kind of app. It's like serialized. You can't really interact with it that much. And then you see this as like another point on the curve and you're like, oh, that's a real app. Like, oh crap. Like I wonder, you know, is there anything stopping us from doing the rest of Office? Oh, probably not. Like how far is this going to go with, you know, so like, I think we were that second point that like showed that there was actually this totally different paradigm. And so we just got like this enormous amount of attention pretty quickly. And then the rest of it was like feeling our way through, like, what does it actually mean? [39:39] much of it. [39:40] how much of the functionality do we need to build? What's the really important part about it? How much of it's collaboration? Well, you spent a bunch of energy on offline, which was miserable, which never turned out to matter that much. You know, now that team has spent a long time, like, replicating all these features that we abandoned by the wayside, which I think [39:57] I'm not that interested in. I think the future of documents looks very different than what we have now. I think it's kind of funny now that we're spending billions of dollars on GPUs to emulate wind pulp and ink pressed by metal type. We're building linear documents that are fixed, that are static. One of the things we've been doing with these chatbot things is they also serve as documents. I say bots or docs all the time. You'll do these things where I do this all the time. I'm like, we'll interview, we'll create a new one. It has a...

[40:27] you know, separate identity as a separate document. And then you tell it like, I'm going to write a technical document. Here's roughly what it's about. Why don't you interview me? So it interviews you for an hour. And now you've got this nice, like, [40:39] linear artifact, which you can read. It's very readable because it's conversational. But at the same time, you've been building all these like semantically encoded virtual synthetic memories in this inspector database. So you can come in and say, like, show me a diagram of this. [40:53] Draw this diagram for me. Change it in the following way. Like what is this? If I change this, what have I changed that? Summarize this part of it. So you can start to interact with it. That's still like accreting stuff at the bottom of this linear artifact. But the next step that we're working on now is just making that dynamic where you just like come to something and you talk to it and interact with it. I think one of the things that's going to happen is [41:15] You know, just like it seems... [41:17] In the early days of GDOCS, people would say, "What if I'm not connected?" And one of the things I would say is, in three or five years, if you get handed a device that's not connected to the Internet, your word for it is going to be broken, which is true, right? It's anachronistic and weird if something's not connected. [41:33] I think we're going to feel the same way about intention and interactivity in our products very soon. [41:39] Like if I can't tell something what my intent is and have it configure itself in an intelligent way, have it converse with me, whether that's a device or a piece of GUI, you know, UX somewhere. I think that's like it's going to feel anachronistic. It's going to feel really weird. There's like that scene in one of the early Star Trek movies where Scotty tries to talk to the mouse. Right. He's like, computer, make the transfer. He's pissed off because he can't talk to the computer. Like we're all going to be like that in like five years, I think.

[42:09] applications that like [42:11] I can't collaborate with the application. Why can't I collaborate with the application? It's like the application is locked on a file server, just like the pre-Gdocs days. Why can't I just interact with it and have it configure itself the way I want it to configure itself and show me the data the way I want to see this and let me build the workflow the way I want it and remember it for me and bring it back later and all that stuff. [42:31] That was a long digression, but I would just like, you know, you're kind of asking about features and functionality. And I feel like where we are now with these like feature wars, it's just silly. Like, it's just, it's not the point at all. Like, I think documents are going to change radically in the next few years. [42:46] I want to follow that thread. Before I do, I found the first TechCrunch post about you guys. [42:50] Starts with, imagine Word, but as an Ajax browser application. Oh, yeah, there you go. Yeah, it wasn't even JavaScript, it was Ajax. [42:57] Thank you. [42:58] Ajax. So hot back then. It's also funny, too, because I'll talk to young front-end developers these days, and I'm like, [43:04] I don't want to scare you too much, but like jQuery didn't even exist when I wrote this thing. You know, this is like bare metal in the DOM and there were bugs. Like when I went to Google, like I had to write this, um, [43:14] little network stack at the bottom of the JavaScript that, like, in theory, XMLHGP, you could interrupt. You could have multiple requests in flight, and you can interrupt them and discard them and stuff. But the stack at the time was really buggy, and I think it was IEE. And so I wrote this little, like, network queue that would, like, keep track of whether there were requests in flight and, like, kill them in a way that didn't break everything. And, you know, it was hard to do, like, because it's this weird asynchronous programming.

[43:44] for the JavaScript readability standards, and I could not get it to work. [43:49] with their formatting. Like there was some bug in the JavaScript compiler of the time that like white space mattered. And so I wound up like checking it in, broken, got the readability badge and immediately fixed it. And so like that was another one of our little hacks to get this. [44:05] Working. I love it. This episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. Many of you already know Ahrefs as one of the top tools for search engine optimization. It's used by thousands of SEOs and companies like IBM, Adidas, and eBay. What you may not know is that there's a free version that was made with small website owners in mind. It's called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. It's free and it can help you bring more traffic to your website. [44:35] It also performs automated site audits to find what issues prevent your website from ranking higher on Google. Every detected issue comes with a detailed explanation and advice on how to fix it. Visit ahrefs.com slash awt, set up a free account, connect your website, and start improving it. That's ahrefs.com slash awt. [44:58] There's often this criticism as an engineer, you just want to work on interesting things and work on the technology before you find a problem that it's solving. [45:06] It feels like with this example, you just think this is a cool technology, let's see what happens. [45:11] Do you have any, I don't know, learnings or advice for when it's actually fine? Let's just play with this tech, be at the edge, as you said, and maybe it'll lead somewhere versus like you should...

[45:20] probably try to avoid that and first focus on a problem. I'm guilty of that. I mean, I like to play with stuff. Like I tend to think with my fingers as much as anything else. So I actually think there's a good place for just play with, play with attack a lot and like figure out what it's good for. What I've evolved to doing these days with my teams is, um, [45:39] I'll just like I pick what I call North Stars that I think are like interesting, useful things to get to rather than just messing around. Like what's a cool thing that I think might be buildable with this? So right now we're doing these multi agent systems. We're trying to figure out how much independent work they can do without a person holding their hand. And so. [45:57] A nice domain to test that out in is programming because you don't have a whole lot of like [46:02] You just give something to Python, an environment, and a file system, and that's it, and that's all it needs. And so you're not distracted by connectivity issues or whatever. So one of the problems right now is go write VI in Python. [46:14] Like, you know, that's a problem I could give to an intern and it would take them a summer to do some halfway decent job of it. You know, it's a thing you could expect a reasonably competent programmer to do mostly independently. And so, like, it should be possible for, like, the system, if it's independent at all, to go do that. So is that useful by itself? No, because we already have the I. It doesn't matter. But, like, if we build a system of programming agents that can self-monitor and self-correct and bug themselves, that can build things that are roughly that scale of complexity, that's valuable. Like, that would be a valuable thing to have. [46:43] It's kind of interesting, too, because that system already... [46:47] It's produced a bunch of good insights. One of them is it's kind of complicated and hard to debug it. It's this asynchronous system of stochastic agents. That's a lot of stuff to kind of deal with. So we wrote a debugger agent. A debugger agent watches stuff, and when there's a problem somewhere, it goes and figures out what the problem is, and it gives you a nice explanation of what you broke and what needs to be fixed. And we haven't turned it loose on actually fixing things yet because we don't trust it, but...

[47:13] It's very helpful as an assistant. We had one that documented itself, too. That's the other one that we did recently. Just turned it loose on documenting the code base and did a pretty good job of it. It's starting to produce interesting stuff, right? Because we have these north stars that we aim things at. And I think that's maybe a good antidote to this. [47:30] Like just playing with tech without being focused doesn't tend to produce anything that's super valuable. But picking these kind of... [47:38] even if they're kind of arbitrary goals, as long as they're real goals that you're trying to get to. [47:43] That's useful, right? Where you're like, I wonder if I can get this to work. Like, you know, what if I can build this thing and grind away at that for a week and see how close I can get, see what I learn about why it's hard. [47:53] Yeah. [47:54] that's probably better than just like [47:56] Let me poke at JavaScript for a while. [47:58] It's also different, I think, at a bigger company where you need to achieve something versus, I think, as just an engineer out of college just playing around, like, you know, go for it, right? It's just like, that's the worst thing that could happen. Even the early days of Rightly, like the very, I mean, we had a goal from the beginning. The beginning was like, can I write a word processor in the browser? Like, that was literally the problem statement. [48:17] It's like I have content editable, I have Ajax or JavaScript, can I put these together in something that feels like a word processor? Let's go do that. It's kind of half messing around with tech, but it's also half an actual goal. [48:33] I don't know. I like playing around. I think a lot of the good product ideas, most of the good product ideas actually come up from engineering. So I think there's a lot to be said for, you know, get familiar with tools, particularly like weird esoteric combinations of tools can often be useful. If you understand two or three things.

[48:52] At Google, I was one of only two people in the company who had code readability, which is like the right to check in code in this language, in both a back-end language, which is the monitoring language, Orgmon, [49:05] a middle tier language, which is Java, and a front language, which is JavaScript. Like, no one else would do that full stack. I think it's useful to have, like, that broad perspective sometimes. [49:15] Sam the Renaissance man. [49:17] of all languages. ADD, more like it, but yeah. A bunch of things. [49:22] I wanted to follow this thread a little further. [49:24] around [49:25] being good at these what if questions it feels like you've [49:28] built this, or maybe you were born with this skill of thinking in the future, thinking about what's possible, thinking about where things are going. [49:36] Is there anything that you could recommend to people listening to get better at the skill? Because for a lot of product people, this is really important to figure out where could we be going and let's work back. This is a really interesting question. I may actually write. I've been thinking about writing a book that's from some of my Sunday letters, and this is maybe the frame of it. So I'm curious to see how flamed I get from saying this. It'll be interesting to see. I think there's this weird thing that I've noticed. I go talk to university kids and stuff like that, and there's this weird thing I noticed where... [50:03] Like when I was in the university and like old guys, like I would talk to old guys like me, like they would all say like the PC is the stupid toy, like, you know, whatever. It's not real computing. Go, go on a mainframe or whatever. And my attitude was like out of the way, old man, like just like you're irrelevant. I'm going to go do this thing. It's awesome. Like go, go, go. [50:21] And now when I talk to kids, I actually had a slide up at Michigan when I was talking recently that was titled OK Doomer. Not what the professor actually put it up there because the generation is very pessimistic and doesn't seem to be quite as engaged and energetic about solving problems.

[50:36] And I've been puzzling through it, and I think [50:38] maybe there's like a bunch of different things that kind of intersect. I think one of them is, I think they all have to do with the willingness to take risk and to fail. Honestly, I think that's really where it comes from. So I think there's like, [50:50] you see a lot of filtered content and that filtered content presents low probability events like five and six sigma events as though they were normal. So you see like everybody makes a hundred million dollars in their startup in the first three months. Like so if your startup isn't making a hundred million dollars, you're an idiot like. [51:05] There's that stuff. [51:07] There's also you're living out loud. So like when you fail in that context, it feels very painful. But I think there's also like, you know, for elite students like, you know, people at these elite schools, they're hard to get into. I went to Michigan because, quote, you're kind of smart. Michigan's a good school. You live nearby. Go apply to that one. Like, you know, nothing, nothing serious about it. But like kids in the elite schools, like their lives are highly curated going up to getting into a school like that now. [51:37] just like a weird nerd, you know, having to be good at math. And so I think there's that as well. Like if you're highly curated, where you've spent a lot of your life thinking everything I do has to have a reason and an output, it's very hard to just mess around and do something that might, you know, lead down a surprising path. Right. So that's the curation is part of it. And then I think just like [51:57] you know, in about mid eighties, when I graduated from high school, we stopped letting kids just play on their own unsupervised outside with other kids. Like I grew up in this neighborhood full of, uh, it was like the faculty ghetto for this small university my dad taught at. And like,

[52:13] We just ran wild. It was like on a state of the... [52:17] widow of Dodge Motor, founder of Dodge Motor. So we had like a couple hundred acres of swamp and fields to go run around and we did hair raising like dangerous things that my parents never knew about and like really explored and had fun. I think like [52:29] If you put all those pieces together, I think there's much less of an ability and willingness and skill set. [52:35] about around [52:36] experimenting to the point of failure, like making a fool of yourself, like having bad ideas. I send like... [52:43] stupid emails to Satya at Microsoft all the time. I'm just like, I don't know what the hell he thinks of me at this point. Cause I sent him all these goofy ideas. I think he actually like gets it and he's like, he likes it. Cause I don't think people usually do that for him, but I'm just like, man, this is, then I'll send him an email like a week later. I'm like, yeah, that was a dumb idea. Sorry about that. You know, like I've decided that wasn't a very good one, but I think like, [53:03] You just have to, you cannot dance if you're afraid to embarrass yourself. You cannot succeed if you're afraid to fail. That's just how it is. You have to have that sense of play. You have to have that sense of, it's okay if this doesn't work, I'll iterate on it. I have this personal motto, which is like, from error comes virtue. Because I'm a maker, I make stuff. And I'm a maker. [53:25] I fuck it up all the time. Like I'm, I'm poor motor skills. So I make mistakes constantly. And then I just like, [53:32] figure out how to make the mistake into virtue somehow. So like, I think it's a really good skill to have. [53:38] Like I, it's a saying I took on this year and I really, really like it as my, I never had a personal motto before. I think it might be my personal motto. It's like,

[53:47] for True From Error. [53:49] Amazing. [53:50] On this topic of failing, I think a lot of people hear this advice and they're like, yeah, I need to fail more. [53:56] It's hard to do. And oftentimes your performance as a company is negatively impacted. [54:01] And it feels like for you, it was just having, you've done it enough times where you find, okay, it's going to be fine. [54:07] I launch this thing, no one cares. I email Satya this thing, he ignores it or he doesn't. Like, it's going to be okay. [54:13] Is that maybe the key to this, or is there anything else that you've done to allow you to be okay with failure? I think there's this... I feel like you can have a linear... [54:22] return on your effort if you manage things in a linear way, which is I think that tightly managing [54:29] Okay, nothing's going to be surprising. I'm going to be within this boundary. I'm going to kind of slowly recoup value. I'm going to play this game, whatever. I think you can have a nice, linear, boring return to your career, and you'll climb the ladder. It takes 30... [54:39] years or whatever. I don't have the patience for that. And I think the way you get extraordinary returns is you do extraordinary things, right? You have to take bigger risks. [54:48] and have kind of more [54:51] and more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career. I feel like I always tell people, like, I think, [54:59] I mean, I pitched this because [55:03] I've observed myself and thought about like what has been successful in my career. [55:08] It's not a thing everybody can do. I just kind of like this. I never really fully grew up. I'm kind of this weirdo. I still feel... I'm 57 now. I feel like I'm about 17. I'm still very mature and like to mess around with stuff and play with things. So not everybody can do it, but I think there's like...

[55:25] At the end of the day, the reason you get ahead in your career is because you had a lot of impact. And the reason you had a lot of impact was because you picked something that you were good at [55:35] that you did with a lot of intensity that wound up having impact, right? And so I think the good at part of it is hard, too. We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's very valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is you should go do the thing, [56:01] that you feel guilty to get paid for it. There's a thing like that. And do the hell out of it, right? Like, do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, like, do the hell out of that. Like, work doesn't necessarily have to be hard. It often is, but it doesn't have to be. And the best case is that it is. The most impact you'll ever have is where you're in that mode, where you're just, like, in the flow and, you know, doing your thing, [56:31] quite believe they pay you and you don't understand how you're getting away with this, but it's super cool anyways. I think that's the career thing that makes sense to me. [56:40] At least that's what I've done. You know, who knows? Like, it's all luck sometimes. So it's hard to replicate these. Everybody has a different path. [56:50] Amazing. I love that advice. It's exactly where I was going to take our conversation. So I love that you took us there.

[56:56] It makes me think of, I'm reading Charlie Munger's Almanac, which just came out through Stray Press. [57:01] And Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's whole philosophy is [57:04] When you find an advantage, [57:06] Just go huge. Just go big. [57:09] Make one bet a year, but when you find that, go for it. Don't buy a little bit at a time. [57:15] And I love that that's exactly what you're saying. [57:18] Sometimes things don't make sense either. Like I'll so I'll lean over and like show you for people with the video. That's an instrument I made. It's an instrument. So the top of that piece of redwood, this one right behind with the cat eyes. The reason it's got these weird cat eyes, by the way, this is virtue from error right there. Like I dug this piece of wood out of the forest. It had been sitting in the forest for for 80 years, trying to not rot and doing a pretty good job because it's redwood. [57:43] And there were knots in it. [57:44] So those two cat eyes are where the knots were. There's another knot like right here that I couldn't get out. But like, you know, there's two knots in there that I had to carve out of there. That's a very weird design that I did by hand. It doesn't quite work. It's kind of a failure. The arch of it's a little bit too high. So it's a little hard to play because the pick hits the... [57:59] top because the strings get a little bit close to the top. So like that, but like, yeah, that's an experiment that was playing around. I kind of wanted to do this thing. It was fun to do. Like it's a passion project. Now it's just hanging on the wall, you know, like, [58:11] Not everything works. Clearly, I don't have a career as a luthier either, so it's more just a fun thing to do. But that's just a good example of the... [58:20] I don't know. Sometimes I don't even understand why I do stuff. You just do it because you do it, because it makes some sense to you. Many people are kind of in the opposite boat where they don't like what they're doing. They're miserable, but they have to have a job. They need income. They need to pay their rent to their family. I know. I realize what I'm saying is very privileged. I'm sorry about that.

[58:37] from some perspective. But I imagine you were also in those situations occasionally. Is there anything you recommend to folks that aren't in that, like, I would do this for free, I'm so excited about this work? Is [58:46] Do you recommend try to get out of that as soon as you can? Enjoy it as much as you can? I mean, I like I've done plenty of things for money. Like I've done plenty of jobs to make money for my family, like things I did not enjoy doing. All I can say is really like I stopped doing those things as soon as I could. [59:04] stop doing them. Not always as fast as I physically could, because I definitely had that Calvinist, you know, oldest boy thing of like, must provide, must suffer kind of thing. So it took me a long time to realize like, no, actually, like, I'm really creative. I don't have to be like everybody else. I can have my own path. And like, you know, I can be this weird engineer. I always joke that I'm like an engineer, like two is a prime number. It's like a kind of a programmer, but not real, [59:34] But like, you know, it's okay. Like I took me a long time to figure out that I could do that, that I could, that I could be comfortable with that part of myself. And like, I'm fortunate enough now that I've done enough things and I have enough of a connection network that people understand who I am and the value I can bring. And so I get, I get away with doing that stuff that I like doing that. So I was like, [59:53] It is kind of privileged advice, and it's not something everybody can do at every stage in their career. Certainly earlier stages, you often have to make compromises. But I still think it's worth paying attention to. When you're working, what makes you happy? What is the stuff that you feel guilty for getting away with? When I started managing people, I couldn't understand why people were paying me and I wasn't writing code. Because all of my energy was attached to I can produce a lot of lines of code every day.

[1:00:20] And then, and you know, I asked my boss at the time, like, why are you so happy with us? Like, I'm not writing anything. He's like, I don't know what you're doing. Like, everywhere you go, it gets better. So like, just keep doing whatever it is you're doing. And like, you know, that was like one of these moments where I was just like, oh, I'm not [1:00:33] I could do something else and it's kind of fun. I like talking to people all day. That's great. They're going to pay me for talking to people all day. [1:00:40] They seem happy. I'm happy. Let me just like lean into this for a while and see where it goes. So I think you just like. [1:00:45] Look for those moments like when somebody is willing to let you do something that you feel like [1:00:49] happy to do, surprisingly happy to do, like doesn't feel like it's the thing you quote unquote should be doing. If you get those surprises like this, I think this goes back to this openness and optimism that we're talking about. You have to be receptive. [1:01:02] attentive to those moments when they show up. [1:01:06] So I think they're there in every career if you listen for them. Like you will see stuff show up where, you know, you don't think of it as who you are, but somebody else sees it in you. And, you know, if you can be open to it, you can. [1:01:19] through these pivots. [1:01:20] When you talk about that, that makes me think of Seth Godin as this really... [1:01:24] Important advice that's always stuck with me that no matter what job you're in, [1:01:28] Just try to enjoy it and do the best [1:01:31] version of that job you can because [1:01:33] You'll enjoy it more. [1:01:35] you'll end up being more successful [1:01:38] And it's just a good habit to just like, I'm just going to do the best I can at being a waitress at this place. I'm just going to do the best at greeting people entering the Apple store. Absolutely. [1:01:46] Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And even more than that, just find a way to bring yourself to it. What is the thing that you can do in this role that is...

[1:01:56] you know, unique to you that you're the most comfortable with, right? [1:02:01] you know, where you really have high impact. [1:02:04] I don't know. I tend to be very like it's kind of a joke because I'm a programmer. I tend to be a very binary person. Right. I'm like either all in or all out on something. So whenever I do something I do is it's just a ridiculous amount of intensity for better or for worse. So, you know, like I find the ways to do stuff. I tend to be very unhappy if I can't be intense in something successfully. And then if I can be intense in it successfully, I'm happier and the people around me are probably less happy. But like stuff happens. Anyways, I get things done. [1:02:34] Speaking of getting things done and being intense and working on things that are really interesting. [1:02:38] You're responsible for some of the cutting edge work happening at Microsoft in AI. [1:02:43] You're spending a lot of time in AI. [1:02:45] I'm curious... [1:02:47] to get your take on just what you find interesting, where you think things are going, what people should know about AI. I'll share a couple of quotes that you wrote, [1:02:54] put out somewhere that I have here that I think are cool. [1:02:57] One is AI isn't a feature of your product. Your product is a feature of AI. I love that one, yeah. [1:03:02] Another is it'll be possible to add some value by building AI into your product, but really transformative massive value will come from building apps and solutions that won't work at all without it. [1:03:12] that treat it as a true platform. [1:03:14] Yeah, I think both of those are really, are really true. Like I, so I'm like, what I'm working on is I, most of the industry right now is focused on when you talk about somebody who's working in AI, it's somebody who's creating models, right? It's somebody who's figuring out how to do some new open source model or somebody who's doing some new training or make some model bigger. And like, I think that's very, it's valid, useful work. It's just not the kind of work I like to do very much. And a lot of people are doing it. And so I'm a, I'm an app builder. I'm a tool builder. And so I don't,

[1:03:42] create models, I consume them, right? I want to build things around them. It's like when I started with Microsoft, started working on GP4 with Microsoft in like [1:03:50] September of last year, my immediate reaction to it after picking my jaw up off the floor, which we were all doing in the early days, was, "Okay, this is cool, but in some computer science sense, [1:04:03] It's just this function, this stochastic pure function that just takes a character array and rearranges it and hands it back to you. [1:04:11] That's not much of a building block for building programs. Like we need state and we need control flow and orchestration and call outs. [1:04:19] And so like that just kind of started me down this rabbit hole. [1:04:22] of thinking about building the semantic kernel, which we built, and then building the infinite chatbot, which was next, and these other [1:04:28] projects we've been working on. And like more I think about this stuff, the more I do think like, [1:04:33] Those two quotes are good quotes. I think what's going to happen over time... I actually think we're at the beginning of this gigantic disruption in the software industry. I think the way that the Internet made... [1:04:45] distribution of information free, I think AI is going to make pixels free. So pixels are expensive to produce now. They take programmers and they take lots of infrastructure, and putting a pixel in front of the user is a hard thing to do, and lots of software is predicated on that. Lots of businesses, the way lots of businesses were predicated on it being hard to distribute information 25 years ago. But you can see this already with things like, [1:05:08] Just images, right? Like, you know, two years ago, if you wanted a piece of digital art, you had to go invent Photoshop, learn to use Photoshop, use Photoshop to do the drawing, like build the skills up. Like that's a lot of work to produce those pixels. Now it's like I want a picture of a cat riding a bike, eating a banana, like done, right? Like so those pixels got really free. But in that similar things are happening in the business world as well. And I think it's just going to start to happen everywhere. So you can draw like this is what if like let's go last somewhat.

[1:05:38] So they get more independent, they can do longer complicated things. What if the multimodal stuff gets really good so that they can both consume and produce dynamic UI like I was talking about? What if we figure out a good way to store state? This is my bots or docs thing. So like what if we figure out a good way for you to like really highly personalized something so it knows you really well and you trust it with confidential information? If you have all those things, [1:06:01] you're just going to spend a lot of time talking to that agent. It's like, what would you do? [1:06:07] If you imagine you're like the richest person in the world, you've got 100 of the best [1:06:10] people working for you and a chief of staff and they're tireless and they never fight with each other, do everything you want. Like, [1:06:16] with that staff supporting you like, [1:06:18] what are you doing with software? Like how much time are you, what are you doing when you're sitting in front of a screen where you're probably communicating intention and you're probably consuming some, [1:06:26] in either entertainment or some of the products of that content. And that's about it. You're not like messing around with like, [1:06:32] pokey static apps and stuff that doesn't work right. You're just telling your staff to deal with stuff for you. So I think that's kind of where we're headed. I think in the world of software, at least, um, [1:06:42] Things are going to get more dynamic, more intentional, more semantic, more fluid, more personalized. I think there's a ton of problems to be solved to make that vision possible. [1:06:53] real but I think you know this feels to me a little bit like seeing the palm maybe or the early iPhone where you're just like okay I get it like we're going you know phones are going to get interesting like that's a new device [1:07:04] Now we've got to go do a whole bunch of engineering before they actually are like as useful as they are today. Right. So I think I get it. Like, I think software is going to change radically now. I had the same feeling when I, when I, when we started doing this, going back to Gdocs again, it's another lesson. Like,

[1:07:19] It's another one of these category shifts. The second we got rightly up on its feet, and I was like, ah, the browser is actually a platform that you can actually build real apps in. I get it. The world's going to change. And we had a ton of stuff to do. Nobody really understood distributed systems. Nobody understood how to build stuff in multiple places at once, how you deal with replication, how you do security. Right. [1:07:41] all kinds of hard problems. All the development patterns had to shift from waterfall to agile to CICD. All this stuff had to change to fully realize that world. But I remember back in 2005, this [1:07:54] The people who were the strong proponents, I think, all saw this, instantly saw that the world had changed. And there was this new category. And I have exactly the same feeling about generative AI. Like, yep, software is going to totally change. These businesses are going to totally change. It might take 10 years to really work through all of it, but yep, door open, new room, new game, start coloring in the blanks. Let's go. [1:08:19] So that's where I think we're going. And, you know, that sounded really certain. It's probably sounded more certain than I should sound. [1:08:28] I think there's a lot of probably a quarter at least, if not a half of what I just said is wrong in some way. So like we're going to learn a bunch of stuff along the way. [1:08:36] And there's a lot of work to do, like a whole lot of work to do and a whole lot of unanticipated side effects are going to pop out. And, you know, there's just a whole lot of stuff to get that to be real the way there was with all of the last transformations. But I think this is a.

[1:08:50] just a giant category shift. Like, I don't, I think it's just incontrovertible that it is. It's kind of funny. Like when, um, [1:08:57] Gemini came out, the press take was like, oh, it's not that different from GPT-4. I guess we're done with AI now. We can go back to bed. That was the dumbest possible interpretation of that story that you could come up with, I think. Of all the takes you could have had on that, I think that was the dumbest one, honestly. [1:09:18] I don't think it's like could say many things about either company. It could say many things about the science, but like, guess there's nothing here to see. It's not one of them. [1:09:28] For somebody listening that [1:09:29] Okay. [1:09:30] wants to [1:09:31] not fall behind on this [1:09:33] and or find opportunity for their product. [1:09:35] Other than just playing with it, which is what everyone is always saying, just like play with it, run, use chat, GPT, use BARD and all these things. [1:09:41] Is there any advice you'd give listeners for how to... [1:09:45] approach. [1:09:46] thinking about AI, how it integrates into the stuff they're doing. Yeah, I agree with you. Just play with it is not really great advice. I think the best technique I've really seen [1:09:54] for learning things is to pick a thing to do with the thing you're trying to learn. Right? Like even if it's an unreasonable, even if it's a goofy, weird thing, right? Like, you know, I'm gonna figure out how to like, draw funny pictures with this programming language or whatever, like, [1:10:09] Even if it's a dumb thing like that, picking some arbitrary goal and being a little bit stubborn about trying to get yourself to it is a good way to learn stuff. And then the question is, what goals are you picking?

[1:10:21] So try to pick goals that are [1:10:23] you know, [1:10:25] lead somewhere maybe at least a little bit interesting. So if your goal is just like, I'm going to mess around with chat GPT for an hour, that's not really much of a goal. If it's like, I'm going to go try to build a GPT that can do this part of my job, [1:10:37] let's see how close I can get, that's more interesting, right? [1:10:42] And I do think, unfortunately, one of the other ways in which this is very reminiscent of the early dot com era, and I think plenty of people have said this, is [1:10:51] this sense of exhaustion and keeping up. There's so much stuff going on right now. And that's, I think, another good strong indicator... [1:10:58] that something really big is going on, right? Where it's just like very, very difficult to keep track of all the stuff that's happening. [1:11:04] It's kind of interesting because I remember just to kick crypto's corpse one last time, there was some tweet at the beginning of the year that I saw that somebody was like, yeah, it took the AI bros a week to come up with as many use cases as crypto came up with in a decade, which definitely feels true, right? It was just so much stuff going on. [1:11:25] I think you just have to try to keep track of it. One of the other things I think is going on in the moment, which feels a lot like the cloud moment to me is like, [1:11:35] it's hard to get the first idea. The zero to one is hard. Like understanding that there's something there at all is the really hard part because you have to be lucky and you have to be talented and you have to look in the right place. And like... [1:11:46] do some very hard work. But once you understand that there's something there, like the cloud model works or their generative AI matters and like scale works and stuff like that,

[1:11:56] Once you're there, like... [1:11:57] the one to many, all the optimization stuff, like that happens in parallel, it happens really quickly. Many, many, many people can do it. There's a lot of energy, it'll just go really fast. So I think we're in that phase, we're just like, we're in the elaboration phase where we understand [1:12:11] this step and people are just filling in all the white space as fast as they can. So that'll slow down eventually, hopefully. We'll see what the next year brings. But yeah, it's a hard time. It's hard for professionals even. I think you just have to read a lot. You have to think a lot. You have to play with stuff. You have to choose your battles. You have to pick good targets. Pick a goal in your domain that would matter to you if you can get to it and then go try to solve that problem with some specific technology and get to know that technology. [1:12:41] on how popular it seems if you want to learn something lots of people know. Those are all good. I think you just have these kind of mundane... [1:12:47] I don't think it's really secret. I don't think they're kind of mundane strategies, but you just kind of have to like... [1:12:53] pick some stuff and do some homework and [1:12:55] Thank you. [1:12:56] There's no magic single bullet to learning this stuff. You just have to run. [1:13:00] It's like, how do I run this sprint without getting out of breath? You don't. You're going to be out of breath. Run hard. [1:13:07] It's just what it is. I love that advice. And I love it connects to everything else you've been talking about is, [1:13:12] Find some problems someone has, find some value you could provide, and then think about how can AI potentially provide that. [1:13:18] I think that's really practical, great advice. [1:13:21] Maybe a last question just around Microsoft. [1:13:23] It feels like Microsoft is firing in all cylinders. It feels like it's become one of the most innovative platforms.

[1:13:29] companies out there. It feels like Satya is known now as the most innovative [1:13:33] best executing SEO out there potentially. [1:13:36] That's just kind of what it feels like. [1:13:37] Being on the inside, I'm just curious, what is it that you think Microsoft is doing so right or what? [1:13:42] how they think [1:13:44] that enables them to be so innovative and continue to [1:13:48] be such a behemoth as so much has changed in tech? There's a couple of things. First of all, I think very, very highly of Sacha or I wouldn't be there. I really, really like Sacha. He is very much what he appears to be from the outside. I've had plenty of candid private conversations with him and watched him in meetings and stuff like that. He's a very decent, genuine, honest, high energy, caring individual with a ton of empathy. He's really motivational in a way that is not [1:14:18] He believes very strongly that a leader's job is to raise the energy of the organization, and he really lives that. I watch him in meetings where I'm a domain expert, and I cannot believe how engaged he is in stuff and how much he understands about something that I know. He's not as deep an expert as some of the people in the room are, and he's fully in there. He is a really incredible leader in many ways. That's one thing. [1:14:48] Oh. [1:14:49] Honestly, like, I mean, it's interesting going from Google to Microsoft and I don't want to like [1:14:53] draw comparisons or anything like that. But like, I think there are definitely similarities and differences between companies and I think one thing that stands out with Microsoft is it's a, it's a humble culture does, you know, unglamorous work all the time to make businesses be successful. So it's got that, that sort of mindset of just like hard work and humility, which I, I value a lot. And then I think there's just

[1:15:14] I mean, honestly, there's just a fantastic number of really talented people working there. It's kind of funny. Like this year, I've been writing a lot of patents because there's just a lot of stuff going on. [1:15:24] in the world and like you know I've written more patents this year by a lot than the rest of my career combined and I commented on on the number I feel like I've written like 15 patents this year he's coming to my the patent attorney that I work with he's like ah that's nothing the chief science officer wrote 700 of them one year during the mobile boom like it's like whatever you feel about patents and I don't necessarily love fans although it's part of my job to write them but like [1:15:49] that's the kind of people that are there. It's just fantastically talented people with just really deep experience at a lot of different levels. I think that's part of it, too. There's just a lot of really good folks there. Kevin Scott, who I work for, is [1:16:04] He's probably the smartest person I've ever been fortunate to work directly with. He's definitely one of the smartest I've ever met. So he's pretty fantastic. And the group around him is pretty fantastic. And the leadership in Windows and Office is pretty fantastic. So it's just a lot of good people and a lot of good attitude and a good leader, I think, is kind of the answer. And luck. You know, it's always luck, too, right? Like Kevin and Sajid made a bet on OpenAI, you know, a few years back.

[1:16:34] stuff like that and so there's yeah that that doesn't happen by accident either [1:16:38] No drama there. [1:16:40] By the way. [1:16:41] I didn't know anything. I hear it's calm. I can stay as far away from it as possible, honestly. Most under the radar startup out there. [1:16:50] Amazing. [1:16:52] Sam, is there anything else you want to share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Is there anything you want to leave listeners with? [1:16:58] Mostly I think probably like, [1:17:00] take all of this as more my personal opinions and not Microsoft official stands. Like this is just me being an engineer. I it's not I'm not here as a Microsoft representative necessarily. [1:17:12] But yeah, I don't know. B is built stuff. [1:17:15] Like solve problems, build stuff like that's what it is, right? Like, you know, job that job is quite around. Fuck around. Well, that job is quite as right. Like the world was built by people just like you. [1:17:25] Like that's the thing. Like, you know, like it's really true. [1:17:28] You don't have to have permission. You just have to have energy. [1:17:32] With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. [1:17:35] Are you ready? Probably not. Great answer. Sam, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? [1:17:44] I like weird book. I like this book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, which is this very beautiful meditation on the nature of cities and the nature of Venice. And I read it the first time I was in Italy right after college. And it just like blew all the circuits in my brain when I went to Venice. So that was pretty cool. [1:18:02] The other one I recommend to people with some caution is this very intense and disturbing book called The Wasp Factory by Ian Banks, which is probably the creepiest and hardest book I've ever read. But it's a very interesting psychological deep dive.

[1:18:17] Those are both fiction. If you're looking for business advice, I think the business advice one is probably where good ideas come from. Steven Johnson, I really like that book. I think some of his stuff about the adjacent possible. I think it's an old book now, but I think it's pretty... [1:18:33] Pretty timely. Like still, I can get some good stuff in there. [1:18:36] What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoyed? My favorite one right now, my guilty pleasure, is watching Gary Oldman be a completely disgusting, over-the-hill British spy in Slow Horses, which is pretty fun. And I'm actually... [1:18:53] Having a little fun with like the retro monster stuff, like Monarch and stuff like that. It's kind of fun to watch. I don't know. I have like absolute junk food tastes when it comes to it. [1:19:02] Yeah. I love creepy, creepy monsters and bugs. Yeah. I love it. Science, shooty science things that blow up a lot. I'm not very deep. [1:19:11] By the way, have you seen Scavenger's Rain? You'd love it. It's on HBO. It's incredible. It's an animated sci-fi thing, and it's very creepy, slimy, alien-y things, and it's so beautiful. [1:19:29] Do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? I have one that got banned at Google, and I like it. I still think it's a fun question. It's how many zeros are at the end of 100 factorial. And the reason I like it, yeah, it's like you've made the face, right? I'm going to ask ChatGPT for this answer. Well, don't, though, because the reason I ask it is it seems like an unreasonable and impossible answer. And if you sit down and think about it a little bit, I'm not going to tell you how to reason through it, but you can figure out the answer to it in a few minutes.

[1:19:59] get to the answer, it's because I just want to see how people react when I give them something that seems impossible and unreasonable. And some people just like back off and, you know, refuse to engage with it. And some people are just like, I don't know, let me roll my sleeves up and see how far I can get in this thing. And, you know, if you do that, you can actually get through it. And those are the, I just think it's interesting. Like that's, [1:20:19] Because that's building stuff, right? Like, you know, that's... [1:20:22] good signal of like, [1:20:24] When somebody tells you you can't write an app word processor on the app, [1:20:27] browser and you can't do collaboration. Do you roll your sleeves up and deal with it, or do you fall over? And what was the question again? Just to make sure... How many zeros are at the end of 100 factorial in decimal? And then why did it get banned? I think it got known, and like, you know, [1:20:43] I'm aware. So like, I actually, the funny thing is like one of the more senior directors, actually he's a SVP now, I think. I interviewed Dave Bezris. I interviewed him when he came in and I asked him that question. And his response was, I'm like, [1:20:55] I don't do math, next question. And so I failed him. I was the veto. And they have this policy where, we're friends now, they have this policy where one veto is actually a good signal. If you're controversial as a candidate, they would take a hard look at you. And so my veto... [1:21:09] may have gotten him higher because I was like, I don't know, he wouldn't answer this question that's like a red flag for me. So, [1:21:15] Don't hire him. And he turned out to be a great person. So it's maybe not a good question anyways. That comes back to when your other lessons of the best ideas have some people that are just very anti that idea. Yeah. It all circles back.

[1:21:29] Next question. [1:21:30] What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? [1:21:33] My father-in-law and my brother-in-law worked for the American car companies, and I've never had American cars. I just drive Japanese cars because I grew up in Detroit and just hated that culture. And so recently we bought a Ford Mustang, Maki, the electric Ford Mustang, and I just love the shit out of that car. I don't know why. It's just like a really fun car to drive. It's very surprising to have this American muscle car that I'm just really – it's an electric American muscle car that I really like. So that's probably the current product that really I'm enjoying most right now. [1:22:03] Question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat to yourself, find useful, share with friends or family, either in work or in life? [1:22:10] Virtue from error, yeah. I think that's like, it's become one for me, and the more I say it, the more I like it. I just like this idea of like, [1:22:20] you're going to fuck up. [1:22:22] like make something from it and be creative with your mistakes. Like, um, I like that a lot. So I've been, um, [1:22:29] I think that's at least my current one. Say it again just so people get it. There's lots of different ways to say it, but virtue from error is probably the cleanest way to say it. [1:22:39] Or from error virtue. Final question. [1:22:43] Apparently, you're the only person who has sold both a company to Google. I like that you already know where I'm going. [1:22:49] both a company and also 200 pounds of blood sausage. Yes. Tell us the story. Story. So I have a friend who dropped out of the tech industry to

[1:23:01] start a company up in San Francisco called, uh, Boca Lone, which was, uh, like a, uh, [1:23:06] artisan salumi thing in the fairy building and so you'd make blood sausage and stuff so there was this wonderful insane chef back in the day when google had like really high-end cuisine in the campuses like probably like 2005 or something i know sorry probably 2008 something like that and like so my friend mark shows up the the chef jc had the word foie gras tattooed onto his knuckles so that's you know that's the kind of guy he was he was just super awesome and so like i had mark show up to like talk to jc about buying some of those products because i was an investor [1:23:36] company and he showed up with a bag of [1:23:39] blood sausage that was he's like here you should take this one and put it in the refrigerator and like why he's like it's dripping i'm like it's all right it's fine he's like it's dripping blood like they hadn't get the packaging right so we like showed the blood sausage to jc he cooked some of it up it was really good and he was like yeah it's awesome i'll buy a couple hundred pounds of it and like so technically because i was an investor in that company i sold both the company rightly and 200 pounds of blood sausage to google which i think is a unique accomplishment and i would [1:24:06] Just absolutely love to meet anybody who has also done that. We'll have a party. [1:24:13] Did you get stock, though, for that blood sausage? No, I did not get stock for it or anything. That guy was crazy. Like, at one point, just a quick JC story. Like, at one point, Google rented some goats to, like, graze the hillside across the way. And JC was a very non-politically correct, non-woke kind of guy. And he did not like all the, you know, sort of attitude at Google. So when these goats were across the hill, he bought a goat carcass from somewhere else

[1:24:43] through the line for a lunch one day to serve up just to like completely tweak people. So that was a different time at Google. I get all days. Yeah. Yeah. [1:24:53] Amazing. Sam, that's it. We did it. [1:24:56] Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to potentially follow up on any of this? And then how can listeners be useful to you? [1:25:02] Well, I have a sub stack, which is Sunday letters from Sam that I write a letter roughly every Sunday that I've been doing for about 10 years. Not that particular. Well, I've been writing letters to my engineering team on Sunday since I was the head of engineering at Fox and I think that's like 12 years now or something. I just kind of started doing it to keep myself accountable and people liked it so I just kept doing it. So now I do it in public. I repost them on LinkedIn. You can find me there. You can message me on LinkedIn if you want to. [1:25:29] I'm hesitant to give out my personal email address because this is probably going out to a lot of people and I don't want to get spammed. [1:25:36] Oh, smart, smart man. [1:25:38] The last funny story at Google, my email address at Google got leaked somehow. And he was kind of a little bit notorious during the early days of Rightly. And so he used it for what's known as a Joe job, where you send something out, fake emails out with somebody else's email address as the reply to. So, like. [1:25:57] Several hundred million emails went out and all bounced. And so for a while, I had my own Gmail front end server that would filter them out for like a couple of weeks till that died down. Let's make sure no one does that to you right now. Oh, yeah. [1:26:11] You didn't answer the final question. How can listeners be useful to you other than not? Oh, I guess I like the thing I guess I'm interested in is, you know, people making interesting progress in the direction of that product vision that I talked about, you know, independent action, you know, the UI part of this stuff, generating UI, consuming UI, like all that stuff. I think I'm curious about that. I mean, an interesting idea is like, you know, anything surprising that seems, you know,

[1:26:40] that you'd like to have somebody pay attention to. I tend to, you know, I entertain weird ideas all the time. I do my best to entertain weird ideas and kind of live what I [1:26:48] preach. So if you think you have something that's really resonating that you think you want to [1:26:53] have somebody pay attention to. You can connect me. I'll take a look at it. I'll do my best. [1:26:58] I won't look at stuff that's incremental and boring. It has to be actually interesting and disruptive. So I don't care. I'm not going to review like the 27th like memo writing AI chat bot thing that plugs into it. [1:27:09] Outlook or whatever. I don't care. I think that's a final good takeaway. That's a litmus test for are you working on something innovative? [1:27:16] which I think has been a great theme of this conversation. Tell me something that will piss me off. [1:27:21] Sam, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Bye, everyone.