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

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, 'cause 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. 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. 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 the work doesn't necessarily have to be hard.

Today, my guest is Sam Scilacci. Sam has an incredible resume that is very hard to summarize succinctly. I'll give it a shot. 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. Sam is most known for basically inventing Google Docs 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. As you'd suspect, we had 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 Bret Berson for making this introduction. With that, I bring you Sam Skilache, after a short word from our sponsors. This time of year is prime for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth. I always like to spend this time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hope to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity. That's where today's sponsor, Teal, comes in. Teal provides you with the tools to run an amazing job search. With an AI-powered resume builder, job tracker, cover letter generator, and Chrome extension that integrates with over 40 job boards, Teal is the all-in-one platform you need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market. There's a reason nearly 1 million people have trusted Teal to run their job search. If you're thinking of making a change in the new year, leverage Teal to grow your career on your own terms. Get started for free at tlhq.com/lenny. That's tlhq.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Vanta, helping you streamline your security compliance to accelerate your growth. Thousands of fast-growing companies like Gusto, Calm, Quora, and Modern Treasury trust Vanta to help build, scale, manage, and demonstrate their security and compliance programs and get ready for audits in weeks. not months. By offering the most in-demand security and privacy frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA, and many more, Vanta helps companies obtain the reports they need to accelerate growth, build efficient compliance processes, mitigate risks to their businesses, and build trust with external stakeholders. Over 5,000 fast-growing companies 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/lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com/lenny to learn more and to claim your discounts. Get started today. 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 apparently you have the very first Google Doc file. 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, you might, if you're on YouTube, you can see the Rightly thing in the background. That's 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? Like it's been, so we started off 2005, wrote this thing in C, which is little known. in, you know, 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 sys admin 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. We never lost anybody's stuff. So it's still there and moved across. And then that's one backend migration, and there's another one at Spanner, and then 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 and back end have been written. 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 after, so I might have gone back and pasted that in. I'm not sure when we must have been testing pictures or something. So I don't, 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 October of 2005 or something like that.

I love that this philosophical answer of is it still the same Google Doc considering all the code has been redone?

Well, 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, 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, I don't like, how do you curate this?

Like, so yeah, I think it needs to be on the blockchain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you made the NFT of it, that would be more, more authentic, I think, than the document almost.

It's kind of funny. That's amazing. And it's amazing that it still works.

That's a testament to, I don't know, you slash Google. Well, I'll tell you a quick Google story. Like we, when we migrated in to Google, we were very sneaky about it. And we like, 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 and he's like, so when are you guys gonna move over to Google infrastructure? And I got to tell him, oh yeah, we did it this weekend. No one noticed. Some blogger in Germany noticed the IP address changed and that was it. Nobody noticed it at all.

So we were really good about it. Man, I love these sneaky stories. I'm hoping we hear more. There's a bunch of stuff I wanna cover. The first is, this broad idea of disruptive innovation. I know that you spent a lot of time thinking about this. Google Docs is a great example of this. It 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. So let me just kind of ask a broad question. Why is this important to you? Why do you spend a lot of time thinking about this? And then just what are some tools you've found to help you and other people think more innovatively, more originally?

It's an interesting question. Like, why it's important part, like, I don't know, it just is like everything you're wearing, eating, using, listening to, sitting on was a disruptive innovation at some point. Like that's how everything happens, right? Like I think there's this really interesting thing where 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 like tribe mates for making a chair. Like, you know, it's like an, 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. Like, you know, so a 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, you know, it's just threatening and irritating and you come up with a why not question. We heard a bunch of these with Google Docs, with rightly in the early days about like, the browser wasn't ready, people wouldn't, you know, 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? I heard the no connectivity on an airplane story like a hundred times from journalists. Like, what if I'm on an airplane? I'm going to write stuff. I'm like, I don't know, like they'll be connectivity on airplanes soon, like, you know, which there is. 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? What if 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, but I feel like I've missed out more by being pessimistic than I have by, by being too optimistic too early. So I have this kind of mantra now that, like, it's, 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 I just, I 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. So disruptive innovation is just seems natural to me. But I think it's not an exaggeration to say like literally, you know, 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, 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. And I found this quote from Steve Jobs, 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, but the disruptive, the more disruptive they are, kind of the more dumb you're going to feel they are. 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, 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 was like, oh, this little toy in the browser. Yeah, we got all this stuff. I mean, and the real interesting thing, like I said at the beginning, like there's this, 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 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 GDX, we got this thing with GDX that was really confusing in the early days to me, we're like, there was a small group of people that really liked it. Some of them liked it more than we liked it. Like, Nate Torkington over at O'Reilly Lake was this super huge early provide, early booster for it. And, like, I did not understand what he saw in it at first, 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, whether you have impact in what you're building. If you get, like, the more of the bell curve of, like, kind of moderate indifference and maybe mild like and mild dislike or whatever. 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 ChatGPT, 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, 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 no denying that that's a disruptive technology.

That's an awesome framework. Basically, if it feels like people sort of like it, some people, mostly people don't care, some very few people love it or hate it, 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, add them, it's not voting, right? Like in the early days, like we had like, I don't know, a couple million users, 5 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, you know, I, who cares or whatever, you know, like it's fine. Like as long as you, like, as long as you don't run out of the people who love it, you know, that's fine.

Is there another example of you using this what if 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. Like, 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 I like right now, you know, there's a lot of why not stories, right, around generative AI. So it's expensive, it hallucinates, you know, you can't necessarily try, it's sarcastic, it's random, it doesn't do the same thing twice. Those are- yeah, they're real, they're actual issues to solve, but I think, like, you know, I look at it and think, well, what if, like, what if we get, you know, what if we can build software around it? You know, 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. Like, 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 wheels, and now we have a surplus of cognitive energy beyond just our brains, right? And like, that's a really transformational idea. And like, I think so, you know, I'm completely in that mode right now, honestly. Like, I think that's just like, the right mindset for something that's obviously this disruptive, right or wrong. Tesla is a great example. SpaceX is a great example where people are like, that doesn't make any sense. And Elon's like, well, what if you could land rockets and reuse them and they get really cheap? That's pretty amazing. What if I can fix the battery problems and the car is basically a software product? Those are pretty amazing what if questions of those products.

Yeah, so in this work on understanding what first principles Actually looks like when you're thinking from first principles, the steps are essentially figure out what you want to do, figure out the levers that keep you from achieving that thing, and then basically question every assumption that stands in the way of making this possible. So I think Elon's a great, like the classic example. You can't talk about first principles thinking without quoting Elon, telling stories of Elon.

But essentially it's just, okay, how much would it cost to make this if we were to start over and not? The, why not? There are actually problems you need to pay attention to eventually to build stuff, but It's once you have the what if, right? Like, like just to pick on space X for a second, right? Like, you know, if you have the what if of like, if I could make, you know, weight to space caught, 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 the all the why not? So why not? Why isn't it as cheap as it could be?

And you can start to do like break the problem down and think about it that way. It's like, like that is a good, it's a good model. this connects to something else that I know you're big on, which is optimism, being optimistic. There's this feeling that pessimism, you're often right. There's all kind of growing pessimism in the world in a lot of ways, especially in technology. I know you're a big proponent of staying optimistic. 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, like, a proponent for optimism per se. Like, it's just a conscious choice. Like, I don't think you get very much for being pessimistic, necessarily. You definitely don't get a lot for being careless. Like, there's, like, you know, you can be. You can be optimistic to the point of being careless and causing harm, for sure. But, like, you know, I think it's a. It's like, maybe a better way to say this growth mindset, right? Like, you want to look at the possibilities rather than the limitations and, like, suspended 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 kind of 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. And so I'm just personally 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, 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 not understanding that I was actually in a career and thinking that it was a temporary thing where I had to go back and 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 is like kind of related to doing these disruptive things like G Dox. I think, like, you know, going back to this idea of, like, all the, all the, 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, you know, if it's, you and the very early story of DDoS when I had the idea for Rightly, like my two co-founders who were both deep domain experts in both app building and where processors were like, the browser is 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 couple of days to like get it on its feet and see how it feels. It's like kind of a form of optimism, right? Like, you know, if you're super pessimistic, be like, even that's not worth it. Like two days is a waste of time. So there's like always a little bit of a leap of faith and then you kind of wanna make those. as consumable as possible. You want to be able to try things out quickly and learn things and do these experiments. Now, lots of people have said that before, but I think it kind of all those pieces connect for me in this idea of being optimistic and open to trying stuff. Because stuff always is different. You're always wrong about products. That's one of my other rules is like, you're just always wrong. 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. no one can really design products in their head completely, as far as I can tell. Awesome.

There's a few threads I want to follow there, but this is also a tool that I found came up again and again in first principles thinking, people that are really good at this is just trying it. There's a lot of just like, nah, it's not going to work. And exactly as you just described, you often find out you're completely wrong when you actually try it out. And you have this quote, I think, in one of your newsletter posts talking about building Google Docs. You describe it as just fuck around.

Yeah, kind of.

Get to the edge of something and fuck around.

Yeah, that's the strategy. Yeah, get to the edge is only get your tools as sharp as you can get them to be, make it so that you can try lots of cheap experiments, right? Like, and just mess around and see what happens, like see what pops out and just be, try to be observant. I think the other part of optimism too is like, there's a receptiveness to it, right? Like if you're very pessimistic, 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, 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, you won't notice that, oh, this thing didn't work, but it didn't work in an interesting way. And you're more receptive to that kind of surprising thing, I think, when you're in an optimistic frame of mind. Let's see how far I can get with this. Oh, it's not working, but why isn't it working? Well, that's kind of interesting, like with broke here. We've done stuff like that on some of the things, the projects I've got going in Microsoft right now. We've got a chatbot thing we've been working on for a while and with memory, long running memory, so that you can have long conversations with it. And they work okay, but they don't work great in some ways. And we were trying to get multiple versions of them working together, like multi-agents working together. And we gave them whiteboard working memory as a shared working memory thing to fix this problem. And that turns out to make them much smarter. I don't know why. Like, it just makes them smarter. So, 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, 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, like, another example of, I think, that mindset along this thread. I was going to ask about this earlier, but there's a lot of 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 winter time. Is there anything you've learned that gives you a signal that let's keep working.

I'm going to stay optimistic about this thing? 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 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 op 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 is valuable here. even in the best case. So I feel like the pessimism is justified. That's one of my other root principles. It's just like 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 making their life easier. We're all cynical at heart. some level. So if you can't point at user value, significant user value, it's not going to work. It doesn't matter. Shove all the marketing dollars into it you want. You can write all the articles you want, but it's got to actually solve a problem, a real problem at the end of the day. I just never saw that with crypto. Yeah.

So I think the lesson there is truly understand if the value is real versus like, this sounds really cool or you think a lot of, like, would you want it? I think is a nice exercise there.

We pick on poor Elon, but like, you know, I feel like with a lot of his products, at least he are, you know, he's got lots of other issues, but like he articulates clear user value, even in the beginning when he's hyping things up like Tesla's, right? Like, okay, so electric cars weren't ready. He did the roadsters, like whatever, but like he at least articulated this idea that like 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 real range. We're going to figure out the charging problems, like, you know, that, like, as an end user, I'm like, okay, that's great. Like, now I have a car that works like a car that solves some problems. It's way cheaper to operate because the 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 or, you know, believe it the way he did it.

Like, at least the end user value proposition makes sense.

Right?

You have this other great quote in your newsletter. People are lazy. look beyond cool to, 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 end user at all. And like, if there's one thing I've learned about product, you know, particularly in the consumer space, but just kind of in general, is that people are just 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 there's two things about it that I think are interesting that follow from that principle. One is like, I think products almost follow these like, thermodynamic rules where 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 ChatGPT 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 AI stuff that people are doing that's just like not bad, but not great and sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and kind of slowly lumbering along and maybe it's going to collapse under its weight. That's kind of the, you know, one thing I like 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. Look, it runs backwards all the time on the, 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 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, 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. 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. That's all effort, not to mention the fact that the actual use of your feature might have friction on the way in. It might be hard to sign up for it. When we did rightly at the beginning, 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, 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, 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, you know, the number of seconds you have, you know, 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 your, you know, so. that's the other part of it. It's just like, you know, users will only adopt what you're doing if that sum total of energy that they have to expend is less than the, you know, resulting ease in their life that they get, usually by a factor of at least a couple, right? So it has to make your life a lot better, hopefully a really a lot better, like 10x better than what you spend to use it.

What I think of as you're describing this is, Microsoft Excel had a billion toolbars and buttons and options, which allowed Google Docs essentially to come in with a much simpler experience. 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 cuz I'm kind of the enemy, right? Like I'm the guy who like messed them up a little bit. So there's, there's some friction around that. Yeah. I mean, 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 So it's a little hard to remember, right? Cause 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? Had to be shipped around, it had to be bought and installed. It was like 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, we're easy to use. We're 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 deal file servers. But we're going to take away most of the features because we don't care about them that much. and we took away a little bit more than we should have. Like in the early days, we get all these complaints about people who want word count, which I thought was a really weird, I thought that was gonna 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 page count or word count came in. Of course it was students, it was one of our early adopter. 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 trade off, but we were. And, 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, usefulness, like they're adding stuff. Whenever they added stuff, it wasn't really that much more valuable. And then, you know, we were this like small thing that came in to a market that they didn't care that much about, that they didn't understand that well, which is the internet stuff was kind of this disruptive new thing. we just kind of chipped away from the bottom, like, you know, the innovators doing that. And, you know, it was, I think it was hard for Microsoft to respond to it. I think it took them a while to even have a, like, a clear idea of how they were going to respond to it. 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, 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 in the story there. A couple questions. How long did it take from starting on it to feeling like it's working, like whatever you consider product market fit?

Almost immediately, honestly. It was weird. The process of it was, I had this idea, we set this thing up, we started working together, we're like, ah, that's actually pretty cool. So basically, the history is like, I noticed content editable, So like the browser would do some editing for you. And then I noticed JavaScript, like I'd never realized JavaScript is out there. And like we had done word processors in the past, this team and like for a long time. In fact, like my co-founder Steve, the other person on that document, like wrote this thing called Full Write way back in like 1987 or something like that. That was like a direct competitor, 85, I think even though it was like a direct competitor to Word One. 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're just like these things on the server. We hadn't built the thing that would lock somebody out yet. So there was just like, here's a document. Like you can edit these two things, 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, we're like, 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, like, so that's cool. So let's build that out. But, like, oh, Bummer. Like, collaboration is a problem. Like, we'll have to go fix that. And, like, naively, like, figured out that, like, that's a problem. It took forever to get that working. That was really, really hard in the time because we didn't have. 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 because the browsers, 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 like alphabetization can change, the order of attributes can change, the tree structure can change. Like, you know, Firefox would do a blank paragraph with a singleton BR tag and IE would do it with an open, close paragraph tag. And so like, you know, even the tree doesn't match. And like, so it's a really hard merge problem. So that turned out to be like a gnarly hard problem to solve. But once we had seen the value of working together, we were motivated to do that. Kind of the interesting thing too with that is, 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 could collaborate on would be. 'Cause if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would have been first without understanding that value, you might have been like, eh, it's not worth it. It's gonna be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a useful app. I think it's a good little counter example of that optimistic, pessimistic perspective we were talking about. 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. That is really interesting actually, that you need to be pulled to the what if, getting you so excited that you're going to spend however many years it took you to solve that problem. Because you are so excited about this what if. That's a really good. That's what, 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 and like, but it's still very relevant. It's got a couple billion users now, I think. big thing. But I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years, you know, just thinking about, like, what? 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. I. The first week I was at my, at Google, like, an executive there refused to give me Hardware because he thought that Google was a app company, not. It was a search company, not an app company. And, like, literally, like, the guy in charge of Hardware at the time, like, refused to give me Hardware for this service, and I had to threaten. either sue him or haul him in front of Eric Schmidt because I had a contract and I contracted earnouts. And like, you know, so like that was like another one of these like interesting lessons of like sometimes the opposition is enormous and like, you know, if I had just been like a random Google employee with this idea and no legal protection and the CEO wasn't, you know, a fan of the project, it would have died. Like there's no way it would have made it through that, that negativity and that pessimism and that, you know, that person being either challenged or afraid of the idea or just not able to imagine it or, or what? I'm not sure what, but, like, we'll keep coming back to this idea of optimism. But, like, I have this very strong feeling about that. Like, most of the reason people don't do really Innovative good products is my, this kind of mindset. Like, 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, you know, all the engineering best practices. That stuff is pretty 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 good pushback, some, some are bad. I always think that like product builders and entrepreneurs, You have this really hard problem 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 gonna go there because the world doesn't care. It's gonna push back. But you also have to be really flexible about feedback. Like, you might not be, you probably aren't gonna 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. like it's never been the other way around, I think. But like, you know, it's like there's this hard thing you have to do as an entrepreneur. And I think it's like the real core of building really great products is like finding that balance and really listening to those signals, being open to it.

And also knowing how long to commit to it versus time to move on to something else. So along those lines, 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 of months, there was a lot of energy around it. We wound up, it's a weird ride because we built this thing kind of on a whim and 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. Like, we'll just be some engineers and we'll have like a little subscription SaaS business thing and like chill out. So let's see what it costs to acquire customers. So like, let's go advertise on Google and see how much it costs to like get people to sort of show up and then we'll figure out if we have a subscription business or not. And that just got us noticed. Like that got us noticed by Google, it got us noticed. We were like, I think like one of the first 10 articles at TechCrunch, like Michael Arrington, like there's another funny Brightly story is that like we had I did a breakfast with Michael Arrington at Bux 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 he should go do that and like maybe join forces with us cuz we were cool. Or if he should like continue to work on this blog thing he had gone called TechCrunch. I'm like, so I might be partially responsible for TechCrunch cuz we turned him down and said, you should go to TechCrunch instead. You know, every time I would bump into him, I would laugh about that one. But when we got noticed, we really got noticed. There was just this period where we were like the hot thing for a couple months where every VC wanted to talk to us and everyone's trying to figure it out. Because I think we were like, when you see one point on the line, like Gmail, which came before us, you're like, oh, that's kind of cool. That's an interesting quasi app, but it's a weird kind of app. It's serialized. You can't really interact with it that much. And then you see this as 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 gonna go? With, you know, so like, we, 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 tension pretty quickly. And then the rest of it was like feeling our way through. Like, what does it actually mean? Like how much of it, 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 get spent a bunch of energy on offline, which was miserable. which never turned out to matter that much. Now that team has spent a long time replicating all these features that we abandoned by the wayside, which I think 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 wood pulp and ink pressed by metal type. We're building linear documents that are fixed. that are static. So like one of the things we've been doing with these chatbot things is they're also, they also serve as documents. I say bots or docs all the time. And so like you'll do these things where like you, I do this all the time. Like we'll interview, have one, we'll create a new one as a, it has a, you know, separate identity as a separate document. And then you tell it like, I'm gonna 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 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 semantically encoded virtual synthetic memories in this inspector database. So you can come in and say, show me a diagram of this. Draw this diagram for me. Change it in the following way. If I change this, what if I change that? Summarize this part of it. So you can start to interact with it. That's still accreting stuff at the bottom of this linear artifact. the next step that we're working on now is just making that dynamic where you just come to something and you talk to it and interact with it. I think one of the things that's going to happen is just like it seems 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. It's anachronistic and weird if something's not connected. I think we're going to feel the same way about intention and interactivity in our products very soon. 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, I'm like, make the trans, you know, like he's like, he's pissed off 'cause he can't talk to the computer. Like we're all gonna be like that in like five years, I think, about, and it's gonna seem really weird that we have these applications that like, I, you know, I can't collaborate with the application. Like, why can't I collaborate with the applications? Like it's like the applications locked on a file server, just like the pre Gdocs days. Like, why can't I just like interact with it and have it configure itself the way I want to configure itself and like show me the data the way I wanna see this and let me build the workflow the way I want it and remember it for me and bring it back later and, you all that stuff. So 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. I want to follow that thread. Before I do, I found the first Tech Crunch post about you guys starts.

With, imagine word, but as an Ajax browser application. Yeah, yeah.

Ajax wasn't even JavaScript.

It was Ajax.

Ajax so hot back then.

It's also funny too, 'cause like, I'll talk to young front end developers these days. I'm like, 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 little network stack at the bottom of the JavaScript that like in theory, XML HTTP, 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 IE. And so I wrote this little network queue that would keep track of whether there were requests in flight and kill them in a way that didn't break everything. And it was hard to do because it's this weird asynchronous programming. And that piece of code, when I went to Google, they made me reformat it for the JavaScript readability standards, and I could not get it to work with their formatting. There was some bug in the JavaScript compiler of the time that whitespace mattered. And so I wound up like checking it in, broken, got the readability badge and immediately fixed it. It's like, that was another one of our little hacks to get this 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. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools will show you keywords that you rank for and backlinks that you can get. 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/awt, set up a free account, connect your website, and start improving it. That's ahrefs.com/awt. 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. It feels like with this example, it was, you just think this is a cool technology. Let's see what happens. 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 delete somewhere versus like, you should 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, 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. 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 a nice domain to test that out in is programming, because you don't have a whole lot of, you just give something a Python 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 the I in Python. 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. It's a thing you could expect a reasonably competent programmer to do mostly independently. And so it should be possible for the system, if it's independent at all, to go do that. So is that useful by itself? No, because we already have VI, it doesn't matter. But 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. It's kind of interesting too, because like that system already, 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 and debugger agent watches stuff and like when there's a problem somewhere, it goes and figures out what the problem is and then gives you a nice explanation of like what you broke and what needs to be fixed. And like we haven't turned it loose on actually fixing things yet because we don't trust it, but you know, like, it's, like, very helpful as an assistant. It sits there and does this. 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. So, like, 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, like, just playing, you know, just playing with Tech without being focused doesn't tend to produce anything that's super valuable, but picking these kind of. Even if they're kind of arbitrary goals, as long as they're real goals that you're trying to get to, that's useful, right? Where you're like, I wonder if I can get this to work. Like, you know, I wonder if I can build this thing. Let me grind away at that for a week and see how close I can get, see what I learn about why it's hard. That's probably better than just like, let.

Me poke at JavaScript for a while. 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, the, 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, right? It was like, I have content editable. I have Ajax or JavaScript. Like, can I put these together in something that feels like a word processor? Like, let's go do that. It's, you know, it's kind of half messing around with tech, but it's also half, like, an actual goal, like an actual goal. So I don't know. Like, I think that's, I, 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. Like if you understand two or three things, like I'm at Google, like 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 backend language, which is the monitoring language, Borgmon, a middle tier language, which was Java and 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.

Sam the Renaissance Man of all languages.

ADD more like it, but yeah.

I wanted to follow this thread a little further around being good at these what if questions. It feels like you've built this, or maybe you were born with this skill of thinking in the future, thinking about what's possible. Think about where things are going. 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'm like, 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 will be interesting to see. I think there's like, there's this weird thing that I've noticed. I could talk to university kids and stuff like that. And like, there's this weird thing I noticed where, 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 this 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. And now when I talk to kids, I actually had a slide up at Michigan when I was talking recently that was titled, okay, dumber. The professor actually put it up there. Cause the, the, like, the generation is very pessimistic and doesn't seem to be quite as like engaged and energetic about solving problems. And I've been puzzling through it and I think maybe the re, 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, and to fail, honestly. I think that's really where it comes from. So I think there's like, 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 $100 million in their startup in the first three months. Like, so if your startup isn't making $100 million, you're an idiot. Like there's that stuff. There's also you're living out loud. So like, and when you fail in that context, it feels very painful. But I think there's also like, you know, for elite students, like who, you know, people at these elite schools, they're hard to get into. I went to Michigan. 'Cause quote, you're kind of smart. Michigan's a good school. You live nearby. Go apply to that one. Like, you know, 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, right? Like those students, like I didn't do sports and I didn't do extracurricular. I was just like a weird nerd at, 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 curationist part of it. And then I think just like, you know, in about the mid 80s 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, it was like the faculty ghetto for this small university my dad taught at. And like, We just ran wild. It was like on the estate of the 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-raisingly dangerous things that my parents never knew about and like really explored and had fun. I think like if you put all those pieces together, I think like there's much less of an ability and willingness and skill set about around experimenting to the point of failure, like making a fool of yourself. like having bad ideas. I send like 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 send 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, you know, you just have, like you cannot dance if you can't, if you're, you know, afraid to embarrass yourself, or you cannot succeed if you're afraid to fail. Like there's just, that's just how it is. You have to have that sense of play. You have to have that sense of, you know, 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. Cause I'm a maker, I make stuff and I fuck it up all the time. Like I'm poor motor skills. So I make mistakes constantly and then I just like, figure out how to make the mistake into virtue somehow. So, like, I think it's a really good skill to have. Like, I, 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 virtue from air.

Amazing. On this topic of failing, I think a lot of people hear this advice and they're like, yeah, okay, I need to fail more. It's hard to do, and oftentimes your performance as a company is Is negatively impacted is, and it feels like for you, it was just having, you've done it enough times where fine, okay, it's gonna be fine. I launch this thing, no one cares. I email Satya this thing, he ignores it, or he doesn't, like, it's gonna be okay. 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 return on your effort if you manage things in a linear way, which is, I think that managing, you know, tightly managing okay, nothing's going to be surprising. I'm gonna be within this boundary. I'm gonna kind of slowly or create 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 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. You have to take bigger risks and have kind of more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result. in your career. I feel like I always tell people, I think, I mean, I pitch this because I've observed myself and thought about what has been successful in my career. 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 pretty immature and like to mess around with stuff and play with things. So not everybody can do it, but I think there's like, 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, that you did with a lot of intensity that wound up having impact. 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 that you feel guilty to get paid for if there's a thing like that. And do the hell out of it. 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, Do the hell out of that. 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 isn't. The most impact you'll ever have is where you're in that mode where you're just in the flow and doing your thing and you're happy to do it and you can't 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. At least that's what I've done. who, you know, who knows? Like, it's all luck sometimes, so it's hard to replicate these. Everybody has a different path. Amazing.

I love that advice. It's exactly where I was going to take our conversation. So I love that you took us there. It makes me think of, I'm reading, Charlie Munger's Almanac, which just came out through Straight Press. And Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's whole philosophy is when you find an advantage, just go huge. Just go.

Big.

Like, right. Like, make one better year. But when you find that, go. Go for it. Don't, like, buy a little bit at a time. And I love that. That's exactly what you're saying.

Sometimes things don't make sense either. Like, I'll. 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's a piece of redwood. This one right behind me 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 floor for 80 years, trying to not rot and doing a pretty good job of it because it's redwood. And there were knots in it. 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. top because the strings get a little bit close to the top, stuff 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 nothing, not everything works. Like, you know, 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 like a good example of the like, I don't know, sometimes I don't even understand why I do stuff.

Like 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 through their family. I know. I realize what I'm saying is very privileged.

I'm sorry about that, but 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.

Do you recommend try to get out of that as soon as you can? Is it enjoyed as much as you can? I mean, get the most out of it. 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 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 just like I'm kind of a programmer, but not real, like I'm this weird, weird non-linear person that like only barely fits into the programming world. But like, you know, it's okay. Like it took me a long time to figure out that I could do that, that I could be comfortable with that part of myself. And like, I'm fortunate enough now that I've done enough things and have enough of a connection network that people understand who I am and the value I can bring. And so I get away with doing that stuff that I like doing that I'm so it's like, it is kind of privileged, you know, 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, right? When you're working, like what makes you happy? What is the stuff that you feel guilty for getting away with? Like when I started managing people, I couldn't understand why people were paying me and I wasn't writing code. 'Cause all of my energy was attached to like, I can produce a lot of lines of code every day. And then, and, you know, I asked my boss at the time, like, why are you so happy with this? 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 could do something else. And it's kind of fun. I like talking to people all day. Like, that's great. They were gonna pay me for talking to people all day. You know, 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 look for those moments, like when somebody is willing to let you do something that you feel 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, the optimism that we're talking about, like you have to be receptive in a attentive to those moments when they show up. 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 do these pivots.

When you talk about that, that makes me think of Seth Godin has this really important advice that's always stuck with me that no matter what job you're in, just try to enjoy it and do the best version of that job you can because you'll enjoy it more. You'll end up being more successful 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. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Like, I think that, you know, or, and even more than that, just like find a way to bring yourself to it, right? Like, what is the thing that you can do in this role that is, you know, unique to you that you're comfortable, the most comfortable with, right? you know, that like where you really have high impact. 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 it with 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.

Speaking of getting things done and being intense and working on things that are really interesting, you're responsible for some of the cutting edge work happening at Microsoft in AI. You're spending a lot of time in AI. I'm curious 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 quotes that you Put out somewhere that I have here that I think are cool. One is AI isn't a feature of your product. Your product is a feature of AI.

I love that one. Yeah.

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, that treat it as a true platform.

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 create models. I consume them, right? I want to build things around them. And so like when I started with Microsoft, started working on on GP4 with Microsoft in like September of last year, like my immediate reaction to it after the picking my jaw up off the floor, which we were all doing in the early days was, okay, this is cool, but like in some computer science sense, it's just this function, this like stochastic pure function that just like takes a character array and rearranges it and hands it back to you. Like that's not much of a building block for building programs. Like we need state, and we need control flow and orchestration and callouts. And so like that just kind of started me down this rabbit hole of thinking about building the Semantic Kernel, which we built, and then building Infinite Chatbot, which was next, and these other projects we've been working on. And like more I think about this stuff, more I do think like those two quotes are good quotes. Like I think what's gonna happen over time, I actually think we're at the beginning of this just gigantic disruption in the software industry. I think the way that the internet made 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 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 gonna start to happen everywhere. So you can draw, like, this is what if, like, let's go ask some what if. So what if the agents get really, what if the models get really, good at planning 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 personalize something so it knows you really well and you trust it with confidential information? If you have all of those things, you're just going to spend a lot of time talking to that. agent. It's like, what would you do if you imagine you're the richest person in the world, you've got 100 of the best people working for you and a chief of staff, and they're tireless and they never fight with each other, they do everything you want. With that staff supporting you, what are you doing with software? 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, either entertainment or some of the products of that intent. And that's about it. You're not like messing around with like 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, you know, things are going to get more dynamic, more intentional, more semantic, more fluid, they're more personalized. I think there's a ton of problems to be solved to make that vision 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 gonna get interesting. Like, that's a new device. Now we gotta go do a whole bunch of engineering before they actually are, like, as useful as they are today.

Right?

So, like, I think I get it. Like, I think software is going to change radically now. I just, I had the same feeling when I, when I, when we started doing this, going back to G docs again, it's another lesson. Like, it's another one of these category shifts. Like, the second we got G rightly up on its feet, and I was like, ah, the browser is actually a platform that you can actually build real apps in. Like, I get it, like the world's gonna change. And we had a ton of stuff to do, right? Like, nobody really understood distributed systems. Nobody understood how to build stuff in multiple places at once, or, you know, how you deal with replication, how you use security, like all kinds of hard, all the development patterns had to shift from Waterfall to Agile to CI/CD. Like, all this stuff had to change to, like, fully realize that world. But like, I remember back in 2005, like, you know, this very quick and like the people who were like the strong proponents, I think all saw this, like instantly saw that the world had changed and like there's this new category. And I have exactly the same feeling about generative AI. Like, yep, software is gonna totally change. Like these businesses are gonna totally change. It might take 10 years to like really work through all of it, but like, yep, like door open, new room, like new game, like fill in start. coloring in the blanks, right? Like, you know, let's go. So, like, I, that's, that's where I, I think we're going. And, you know, that sounded really certain. It's probably sounded more certain than I should sound. 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. 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 just a giant category shift. I think it's just incontrovertible that it is. It's kind of funny, like when 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. I'm like, that is the dumbest Possible interpretation of that story that you could come up with, I think, like of all the takes you could have had on that, I think that was like the dumbest one, honestly. Like, you know, I don't think it's like, could say many things about either company, could say many things about the science, but like, guess there's nothing here to see is not one of them.

For somebody listening that wants to not fall behind on this, and/or find opportunity for their product other than just playing with it, which is what everyone's always saying, just like play with it, run, use chat GPT, use Bard, and all these things. Is there any advice you'd give listeners for how to approach thinking about AI, how it integrates into the stuff they're doing?

Yeah, I agree if you like just play with it is not really great advice. I think the best technique I've really seen 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, you know, even if it's a dumb thing like that, like picking at some arbitrary goal and being a little bit stubborn about trying to get yourself to it is a good way to learn stuff. And like, then the, and then the question is like, well, what goals are you picking? So try to pick goals that are, you know, lead somewhere, maybe at least a little bit interesting. So like, you know, if your goal is just like, I'm gonna mess around with GPT, ChatGPT 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, let's see how close I can get, you know, that's more interesting, right? And I do think, like, unfortunately, one of the other ways in which this is very reminiscent of the early.com era, and I think plenty of people have said this, is this sense of exhaustion and keeping up. Like, there's so much stuff going on right now, and that's, I think, another good, strong indicator 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. It's kind of interesting because like, I remember going just to pick on, just to kick crypto's corpse one last time. Like there was a tweet, like at the beginning of the year that I saw that somebody was like, yeah, it took like the AI bros like a week to come up with as many use cases as, you know, crypto came up with in a decade, which definitely feels true, right? There's just like so much stuff going on and you know, 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, 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, 'cause you have to be lucky and you have to be talented and you have to look in the right place and 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. Once you're there, like 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 where just like, we're in the elaboration phase where like we understand this step and people are just filling in all the white space as fast as they can. So like that's, 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. Maybe pick the technology based on how popular it seems. If you want to learn something that lots of people know. those are all good. I think you just have these kind of mundane, 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 pick some stuff and do some homework and, you know, it's not, there's no magic single bullet to learning this stuff. You just have to run. It's like, it's like, how do I run this sprint without getting out of breath? Like, you don't, like, you're gonna be.

Out of breath, run hard. Like, it's just what it is. I love that advice. And I love it connects everything else that you've been talking about is, find some problems someone has, find kind of some value you could provide, and then think about how can AI potentially provide that. I think that's really practical, great advice. Maybe a last question just around Microsoft. It feels like Microsoft is firing in all cylinders. It feels like it's become one of the most innovative companies out there. It feels like Satya Nadella is like the most innovative, best executing CEO out there potentially. That's just kind of what it feels like. Being on the inside, I'm just curious, what is it that you think Microsoft is doing so right or how they think that enables them to be so innovative and continue to 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 Satya or I wouldn't be there. I really, really like Satya. 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. He, in a way that is not destructive. He believes very strongly that a leader's job is to raise the energy of the organization and he really lives that. And I watch him in meetings where I'm a domain expert and I cannot believe how engaged he is and stuff and how much he understands about something that I know He's not, you know, as deep an expert as some of the people in the room are, and he's like fully in there. So like, he's really, he is a really incredible leader, like in many, in many ways. That's one thing. I think another is like they, that come, that culture is very humble, honestly. Like, I mean, it's interesting going from Google to Microsoft, and I don't want to like draw comparisons or anything like that, but like, I think there are definitely similarities and differences between the companies. And I think one thing that stands out with Microsoft is it's a, It's a humble culture. It does unglamorous work all the time to make businesses be successful. So it's got that sort of mindset of just like hard work and humility, which I value a lot. And then I think there's just, 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 in the world. And like, I've written more patents this year by a lot than the rest of my career combined. And I commented on, on the number of, I've like, I've written, like, 15 patents this year. I commented 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 patents, although it's part of my job to write them. But, like, you know, that's the kind of people that are there. Like, 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. Like, you know, there's just a lot of really good folks there. Kevin Scott, who I work for, is one of the smartest. 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, he's pretty fantastic. And the group around him is pretty fantastic. And the leadership in Windows and Office is pretty fantastic. And so it's just a lot of good people and a lot of good attitude and a good leader, I think, is, you know, kind of the and luck, you know, it's always luck too, right? Like Kevin and Sacha made a bet on OpenAI, you know, a few years back, you know, and they're doing some extraordinary things with capital raise and the support of that technology and stuff like that. And so there's, you know, that doesn't happen by accident either.

No drama there, by the way.

I wouldn't know anything there. I hear it's calm. I think it's smart way from it as possible, honestly.

Most under the radar startup out there. Amazing. 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?

Mostly, I think probably like take all of this as more of my personal opinions and not Microsoft's official stands. Like this is just me being an engineer. Like it's not, I'm not here as a Microsoft representative necessarily. But yeah, I don't know. B, B is not, Build stuff. Like solve problems, build stuff. Like that's what it is, right? Like, you know, that job is quote- Fuck around. Fuck around. Well, that job is quote is right. Like the world was built by people just like you. Like that's the, that's the thing. Like, you know, like it's really true. You don't, you don't have to have permission.

Like you just have to have energy. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? Probably not. Great answer. Sam, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people.

I like weird books. There's 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 blew all the circuits in my brain when I went to Venice. So that was pretty cool. 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. So 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 timely. Still, I think he had some good stuff in there.

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 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 I have, like, absolute junk food taste when it comes to Yeah.

I love creepy monsters and bugs.

Yeah.

I love it.

Science, shooty science things that blow up a lot. I'm not very deep.

By the way, have you seen Scavenger's Rain? Scavenger Rain's Scavenger's Rain. Okay, you'd love it. It's on HBO. It's incredible. It's an animated sci-fi thing and it's very creepy, slimy kind of alieny things and it's so beautiful. 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 liked 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? Like, gonna ask ChatGPT for this answer. Well, there's the thing. 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 gonna tell you how to reason through it, but you can figure out the answer to it in a few minutes. And so the only reason I ask is not to 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 back off and 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 if you do that, you can actually get through it. And those are the, I just think it's interesting. That's because that's building stuff. Right. Like, you know, that's a good signal of like, when somebody tells you, you can't write an app word processor in the browser and you can't do collaboration, like, do you roll your sleeves up.

And deal with it or do you like fall over?

And what was the question again? Just to mention, how many zeros are.

At the end of a hundred factorial in decimal?

And then why did it get banned? I think it got known and like, you know, somewhere. So like, I actually, the funny thing is like one of the more senior directors, actually he's a, as VP now, I think. I interviewed Dave Bezruch, I interviewed him when he came in and I asked him that question and his response was, 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 may have gotten him higher because I was like, I don't know. He wouldn't answer this question that's a red flag for me. 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. Next question. What is a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love?

My father-in-law worked 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 like hated that culture. And so recently we bought a Ford Mustang Mach-E, 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 like very surprising to like have this American muscle car that I'm just really, it's an electric American muscle car that I really like. So that's my, probably the current product.

I really am enjoying the most right now. Next 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? virtue from error. Yeah, I think that's like, it's become one for me. And I, the more I say it, the more I like it, but I just, you know, I just like this idea of, like, you're going to up, like, make something from it and be creative with, with your mistakes. Like, I like that a lot. So I've been that's, I think that's current, my, at least my current one.

And say it again just so people get it.

I, I, there's lots of different ways to say it, but I just like, virtue from error is probably the cleanest way to say it. Or from error virtue.

Final question. Apparently you're the only person who has sold both a company to Google. I like that you already know where I'm going. Both a company and also 200 pounds of blood sausages. Yes. Post to Google. Tell us the story.

So I have a friend who dropped out of the tech industry to start a company up in San Francisco called Boccalone, which was a, like a artisan salumi thing in the ferry 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, it's probably 2008, something like that. And, like, so my friend Mark shows up. The, the, the chef, JC, had the words flagra 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 in that company. And he showed up with a bag of blood sausage that was, he's like, here, you should take this one and put it in the refrigerator. And I'm 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, we hadn't get the packaging right. So we like showed the blood sausages to JC. He cooked some of it up. It was really good. And he was like, yeah, that's awesome. I'll buy a couple hundred pounds of it. And 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 just absolutely love to meet anybody who has also done that. We'll have a party.

Did you get stock though for that blood sausage?

No, I did not get stock or anything. That guy was crazy. At one point, just a quick JC story, at one point Google rented some goats to graze the hillside across the way. And JC was a very nonpolitically correct, nonwoke kind of guy, and he did not like all the attitude at Google. So when these goats were across the hill, he bought a goat carcass from somewhere else and roasted it over a spit and carried it whole through the line for lunch one day to serve up, just to completely tweak people. So that was a different time at Google.

Make it all days.

Yeah.

Amazing. Sam, that's it. We did it. 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?

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 sub. Well, I've been writing letters to my engineering team on Sunday since I was the head of engineering at Box, 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. 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.

Smart, smart man.

The last funny story, at Google, my email address at Google got leaked somehow and they spammed me. I was kind of a little bit, notorious during the early days of Rightly. And so he spammed or used it for what's known as a Joe job, where you send something out, fake emails out with somebody else's email addresses that returned the reply to. So like 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.

You didn't answer the final question. How can listeners be useful to you other than not doing that?

Spam. Thanks to you. 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, 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 preach. So if you think you have something that's really resonating that you think you want to have somebody pay attention to, you can connect me. I'll take a look at it. I'll do my best. 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 the 27th memo writing AI chat bot thing that It plugs into Outlook or whatever.

Like, I don't care. I think that's a final good takeaway is that's a litmus test for are you working on something innovative, which I.

Think has been a great theme of this conversation.

Let me something that'll piss me off. That'd be more, you know.

Sam, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure.

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