Jason M. Lemkin and Michael discuss Satya Nadella's strategy at Microsoft, focusing on how he orchestrated the OpenAI partnership and navigated the challenges of executing major deals inside a massive corporation.
Versace, man, this is like the amount of meetings and orchestrations and stuff you got to do as a non founder, I give him credit because it's much harder. I'll tell you why you absolutely have to go for Satya over Zuck, like by far. It's a simple. It's, it's, it's more a structural reason. And this is certainly what I learned in my tenure as a VP at Adobe. As a, as a founder, this stuff's easy. It's stuff you just call the troops together. Satya having to get. I just watched Adobe just trying to go to the cloud. Took three years of convincing everybody. Okay, so what Satya's done, inviting, you know, inviting Sam Altman back in, doing the deal, managing the deal, investing them doing this kooky deal to buy 49% of OpenAI, investing all in on Azure for AI. He doesn't have the power to do this on his own. Right. For Satya, man, this is like the amount of meetings and orchestrations and stuff you got to do as a non founder, I give him credit because it's much harder. He's like a re founder. He's an, he's basically acts like a founder. He gets stuff done like a founder. He's just super impressive.
If you accept the constraint that you can't build the core technology internally, which is what Microsoft have to accept. And he accepted. Right? Execution since then has been perfect. You found the only other people that had the technology, you gave them a convoluted deal. You suck a lot of value out of them, you have the ability to resell it. Right? All those things are awesome. At some level, you must kind of wish, as the CEO, Michael, there must be a little party that says if my guys were only smart enough to build the shit that OpenAI was building, I wouldn't have to do all this crazy stuff. But maybe that's the nature of being smart enough to accept that this large bureaucratic company can't get it done and live with the. Maybe that's the answer why it's awesome. He's lived with the reality of I wish my people could do this, but they can't. And I'm not gonna keep banging my head against the wall. I'm gonna do this very hard thing for a non founder to do. I'm just gonna cut this weird deal with these other dudes, give them $10 billion, own 49%, and basically insert myself into the AI business without actually having the core model that you should have had to be able to do. It. It's kind of a one, man. It's like, literally. He must feel. Maybe the real soundboard in his head is. Thanks a fucking lot. The rest of you guys. I had to figure this out with one BD guy while all you guys were sitting on your ass. Not shipping AI.
