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

Podcast: Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
Source: whisper-tiny
URL: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/140332944/0ba8908c2b995d54f3816a9d8b122e73.mp3
Fetched: 2026-03-05 01:27:03

We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so something is easy and fun. We don't tend to think it's valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is like, you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for. If there's a thing like that and do the hell out of it, right? Do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it. The best you can do it is hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, I do the hell out of that. Like, that work doesn't necessarily have to be hard. Today, my guest is Sam Skillach, Sam has an incredible resume that is very hard to summarize to Sinkley. 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 with Senior Vice President of Engineering at Box, through their IPO. He's also worked it into it, 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, add a come-up with original ideas, why optimism is so important and powerful, and also a ton of career advice. Sam is hilarious and not what I imagined a corporate vice president at Microsoft would be like, which gives me even more respect for Microsoft. A big thank you to Brett Bursin for making this introduction. With that, I bring you Sam Skillach, after a short word for our sponsors. This time of year is primed for career reflection and setting goals for professional growth. I always like to spend the time reflecting on what I accomplished the previous year, what I hoped to accomplish the next year, and whether this is the year I look for a new opportunity. That's where today's sponsor Teele comes in. Teele 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, Teele is the all-in-one platform you need to run a more streamlined and efficient job search and stand out in this competitive market. 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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 slash Lenny. That's V-A-N-T-A.com slash Lenny. To learn more into cleaner 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. It doesn't still work in today's Google Docs and what is in this doc? Yeah, it does actually still work. It's pretty funny. Actually, if I move my camera for a second, if you're on that YouTube, you can see the right way. Hang in the background. That's right. It was the company that did Google Docs. Yeah, it's still works. It's kind of funny, though, because it's the document of DCS, right? It's been, so we started off 2005 wrote this thing in C-Charp, which is a little known, in our own. There was pre-cloud, so we had three file servers that we rented that were Windows Machines in a data center in Texas with a system in the Philippines running them. So that's started there. And then when we moved to Google, we poured everything to Java. We moved all the data over in a big table, and we didn't lose anything. I never lost anybody. Stuff's so it's still there and moved across. And then that's one back end 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 end back end have been written. It's not much. It's just me saying something to Steve about is collaboration working, are recoliding on each other, because we were trying to figure out 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. And 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 a October of 2005 or something like that. I love that this philosophical answer of this still the same Google Doc considering all the code has been re-done. Well, a computer history museum wants to curate it. Like I talked to these guys and they were like, we look, oh, that's so cool. We'll take that and like, how, like, I can make it with PDF. Now it's not the document. I can share you into it, but please don't edit it. Like, you know, it's like, I don't, like, how do you curate this? Like, so yeah, that's a point to be on the blockchain. Yeah, yeah. If you made the NFT, that would be more authentic. I think than the document almost is kind of funny. That's amazing. And it's amazing that it still works. That's a testament to, and then I use slash Google. Well, I'll tell you a quick Google story. Like, when we migrated in to Google, we were very sneaky about it and we like, but 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 survey was in a meeting with me and he's like, so when you guys been like, move over to the Google infrastructure and I got to tell him, like, oh, yeah, we did it this weekend, no one noticed. Some blogger and Germany, like, noticed the IP address changed and that was it, like, nobody noticed it at all. So we were really good about it. Panam, I love these sneaky stories that I'm hoping we hear more. There's a bunch of stuff I want to cover. The first is this broad idea of disruptive innovation. I know that you spend a lot of time thinking about this. Google Docs is a great example. This feels like Microsoft increasingly is getting really good at this. Just 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, the why it's important part, like, I don't know what you just did, 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 just, like, tried mates for making chairs. Like, you know, it's like, but like, and they're all like obvious and retrospect, right? Like, everything is obvious and retrospective. But there's, I think there's this really deep thing that people have where, you know, if something is disruptive of your world view, it feels threatening. And you kind of have this very stark choice to make that's either your wrong or it's wrong. And humans or storytellers, like, it's very easy for us to tell stories about why something is right or wrong if we're motivated to. And so I think I call these why not questions, but people ask these by not questions a lot. Like, you know, so the new thing pops up, and if you're not ready to receive it for some reason, like, you're not kind of already half there, or you don't have a problem that it solves, or whatever, you know, it's just threatening and irritating and you come up with a why not question. We heard a bunch of these with some, like, Google Docs, right, we in the early days about, like, browser wasn't ready. People wouldn't, you know, the whole model of the cloud and it 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 on a right stuff? I'm like, I don't know, like, they'll be kind of going to be on an airplane soon, like, you know, which there is. Like, and those are all just why not, sorry, why not questions? Like, I think the more interesting ones are the what if questions, like, what if this does work? What would it just, like, use your imagination, think about, like, what, 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 who wants to tell me, like, engineers come into the world broken. They just, like, look at everything as a problem to be solved. And 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 know, let's, like, I, I just, I, and I'm, like, an impatient person, I'm a creative person. I'm a messy person, like, I just like, to create and explore and find stuff. So, like, disruptive innovation just seems natural to me. But I think it's not an exaggeration to say, like, literally, you know, that, that we, you had in your, spread this morning, if you, spread is like, you know, some weirdo, like, was messing around with plants a thousand years ago, and everybody thought it was a nut. She was a nut, and, like, you know, that we had, you know, because somebody just, you know, everything, right? Everything is like that. Along the same lines, I was actually just working on a poster around first person, first principles thinking. And I found this quote from Steve Jobs, surmine dearest 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, I, when the other ones that I like to keep in mind is every new idea looked dumb at first. Unfortunately, the dumb idea is also looked dumb at first, so it's not a perfect model, you're not. But like, 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 a practical, or it's stupid, or I don't get it, or whatever, like, those are often, like, toy is a good key. Or 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, he was like, oh, this little toy in the browser. Yeah, we got all this stuff. I mean, and it, well, they're really interesting thing, like I said at the beginning, like, there's this, you know, you'll this very binary reaction that's possible, right? Like, either you understand it, 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, it was really confusing in the early days, to me, we were like, there was a small group of people that really liked it. Some of them liked it more than we liked it. Like Nate talking to him over at a Riley, like, was this super huge, early, provide, really 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 flyer, 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 in difference, and maybe mild light, and mild dislike, or, like, that's sort of, I mean, that's an incremental product. Like, that's not really disrupting anything, but if you look at something like GDBT, you're 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 very good signifier of, if being, like, truly impactful and disruptive. Whether it's actually a 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, get some people, mostly people don't care, some very few people live at our hate it, probably not disruptive, if some people absolutely love it, and a lot of people really hate it and get signed. Wait, yeah, actually, nearly 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, five million users, and there were still executives at Google telling me that it was a stupid idea, and that it should stop, and, like, we should be doing it. So, like, you know, like, for a long time, the haters outnumbered the people who were fans, and, you know, I can't, 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 a approach either on a product you worked on, or something you've seen, and it's working out? I'm doing it a lot, 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 gender VI. So, it's expensive. It hallucinates, you know, you can't necessarily try a sarcastic, it's random, it doesn't do the same thing twice. Like, those are, yeah, the real, the 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 when 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 the, really the second industrial revolution where in the first one, we get a surplus of physical energy beyond just our bodies and things like water reels. 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 I, you know, I'm completely in that mode right now, honestly. 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. You know, when Elon's like, well, what if you could land rockets and reuse them and they get really cheap? Like, that's pretty amazing. What if I can fix the batteries, problems, and like, the car is basically a software product, right? Those are pretty amazing. What if questions, right, 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. You figure out the levers that keep you from achieving that thing and then to basically question every assumption that stands in the way of making this possible. So I think Elon's a great, like the classic example. Like, you can't talk about first principles thinking that I quote a 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 or not? That's, I mean, the why not? There are actually problems you need to pay attention to eventually to build stuff. But once you have the what if, right? Like, just to pick on SpaceX for a second, right? Like, if you have the what if of, like, if I could make, you know, wait to space caught, you know, payload to space cost 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, 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. So 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 always, 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, like, it's a choice. Like, I'm not an optimistic person by nature. Like, I just not, like, be that all the people 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 like 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 optimistic at the point of being careless and causing harm for sure. But like, yeah, I think it's a, like, maybe a better way to say this growth mindset. Or like, you want to look at the possibilities rather than the limitations and like suspend some disbelief and just kind of work on these problems. That's just, I just personally feel like I've missed out on more than I've protected myself from. Like, if I just kind of sum up both sides of that equation or 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 like choosing to do that, try to do that as a habit. Nothing, nothing deeper than that. I just think it's a better place to be. Particularly, like, it's kind of funny. Like, when I came out here, like, I was pre-medid dropped out of school. Like, came out to be a computer scientist sort of with my friend. I didn't think of that way. I came out to have a job at Ashton Tate with a friend of mine. And spent 10 years, like, not understanding that I was actually in a career and thinking that it's a temporary thing or I had to go back and like, go back to med school and get my degree in the adopter or something more than 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 and in this computer industry, that's like, this technical industry is constantly growing and constantly inventing things and constantly, coming up 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-Docks, 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 if you're gonna 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 wanna 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 know, a very, very, really story of D-Docks when I had the idea for rightly, like, my two co-founders who were both deep domain experts in both app-building and were processors were like, the browsers never gonna support this, it's a bad idea. It'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 and that, like, the world is gonna change and evolve. And 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, you're like, even that's not worth it, like, two days is a waste of time. So, like, always a little bit of a leap of faith and then you kind of wanna make those as consumable as possible. You wanna be able to try things out quickly and learn things, you know, and do these experiments. No, lots of people have said that before, but I think it kind of, all those pieces connect for me, you know, in this idea of being optimistic and open to trying stuff, because stuff always is different. You're always wrong about products. This is 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 understand it. Like, no one can really design products in their head completely as far as I can tell. Awesome, there's a few threads I wanna follow there, but this is also a tool that I found came up again and again in first principle thinking, people that are really good at this, is just trying it. There's a lot of just like, not, it's not gonna work. And exactly as you just described, you often find out, you're completely wrong when you actually try it out. You have this quote, I think, when you're in use letter posts, talking about building Google Docs, you describe it as just fuck around. Yeah, kind of. Get to be, I just something and fuck around. Yeah, that's the strategy. Yeah, get to the edges. And when you get your tools as sharp as you can get them to be, make it so that you can try lots of cheap experiments, right, 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, the pops out of an experiment. Like, you might force yourself to do a bunch of experiments from crudgingly, but you're like, I hate this. I'm doing four experiments today, because I have to do it, because I wanna be an entrepreneur but it sucks, and everything's miserable and black. And then like, you know, you won't notice that like, oh, this thing didn't work, but it didn't work in an interesting way. And you know, you're more receptive to that kind of surprising thing, I think when you're in an optimistic frame of mind, like, oh, let's see how far I can get with this. Like, oh, it's not working, but why isn't it working? Well, that's kind of interesting, like, with Procure. We've done stuff like that when some of the things, the projects I've got going in Microsoft right now, like we've got a chatbot thing we've been working on for a while, and with memory, long running memory, so that you can like have long conversations with it. And, you know, they work okay, but they don't work great in some ways. And we gave, we were trying to get multiple versions of them working together, like, the multi-easions working together. And we gave them a whiteboard working memory, like, as a share-working memory thing, to fix this problem. And that turns out to make them much smarter. 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. It's like, give up on it. More optimistic frame of mind is like, well, let's try to, like, give them a whiteboard, just like a person, and like, see if they cooperate better in it, and they terms that they really do. So another example of that mindset. Along this thread, I was gonna 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 wintertime. Because there's anything you've learned, they give you a signal that, let's keep working, I'm gonna stay optimistic about this thing. I spent a lot of time really thinking hard about crypto, and like, whether I was just reacting to your, because it threatened some part of my identity or whatever. And I never kind of, 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 a crypto, I was always like, well, what if it works? Like, then I have to run up-sec on my personal finances. That sounds dystopian, I don't want that. Like, I can't think of anything as a user that I think actually like, is valuable here, even in the best case. So I feel like the pessimism is justified. Like that's, so that's like one of my other kind of route principles is just like, it's all that 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 gonna do something really in their lives for any other reason other than it makes their life better. When he cares that you're friendly, you're not used to the logo is pretty or whatever. Or like, they care about, you know, making their life easier. We're all cynical at heart at some level. So, you know, if you can't point at user value, significant user value, it's not gonna work. You know, it's not gonna, it doesn't matter. Show all the more king dollars and do it you want. You can write all the articles you want, but like, you know, it's gotta 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's truly understand if the value's real versus like the sounds really cool. You think a lot of, like, would you want it because 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 got lots of other issues, but like he articulates clear user value, even in the beginning when he's typing 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 gonna put a lot of batteries in these things. They're gonna really be real cars. They're gonna have real range. We're gonna 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 that'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 gonna do it, or, you know, believe that 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 in your tool to take 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, that, I mean, that is the thing. Like, I think, I think it's product builders. You know, it's hard to not love what you're doing. Like, you build a product because you love it. You build it because you understand some problem. You build it because you want to paycheck maybe sometimes. But like, you know, we build for all these reasons that just do not matter to the end user at all. And like, if there's one thing I've learned about product, you know, particularly in consumer space, just kind of general is like, people are just lazy about stuff. And like, don't care about anything other than it making their life there. The thing that's complicated with that is, there's two things about it that I think are interesting. They follow from that principle. One is like, I think products almost follow these like, so-called dynamic rules. We're 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 Chatchee BT is a great recent example of something that was just like added a ton of new value to the world and got this explosive growth. And then you see lots of other AI stuff that people are doing. It's just like, not bad, but not great. And it's sort of kind of adding a little bit of value and kind of slowly long, you know, longer and longer, no longer, maybe it's kind of claps and hurts weight. That's kind of the, you know, one thing about the users or 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 it'll be like, which is not real, like it runs backwards all the time on Earth, like life gets more complicated, like, what is the deal of 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 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, really. 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, like, the user has to hear about it. The user has to remember it in the moment, the user has to learn how to use it. They have to build the habit, like, that's all effort, right? Not to mention the fact that, like, the actual use of your feature might have friction on the way in, right? It might be hard to sign up for it. When we did rightly at the beginning, 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 really find it again. So, like, you know, we were super focused on that. Like, as little friction as possible. And I think it's well-known in the consumer space. You don't have, you know, the amount 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 going to like hang out and grind their way through a bunch of high friction stuff to sign up for your thing, like you're, you know. So, like, that's the other part of it. It's just like, you know, users will only adopt what you're doing if that's some total of energy that they have to expand 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, I'll really lot there, like, 10x better than what you spend to use it. What I think of as you're describing, this is, except Microsoft Excel, add a billion toolbars and buttons and options, which allow 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 because I'm kind of the enemy, right? It's like, I'm the guy who messed them up a little bit. So, 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 a similar opportunity, but we made this choice with, so, it's a little harder to remember, right, because it's like, 18 years, something years ago now, 18 years ago almost. Like, you know, in that era, like, office was impregnable, right? 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 1,000 features or the thing with 995 features? I don't know if those last five are, but I might as well have all of them. And so, like, 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-installed, you don't have to ever deal with. It's super convenient. Plus, you get this one new feature that's really, really used for which is collaborating with each other, and not having to send attachments around the old file system, file servers. But, you know, we're gonna 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 could get all these complaints about people who want to work 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 a rulers, like, we didn't have any kind of formatting at that point. And any kind of real pagination, we just had, like, these basic documents, but we're a count came in. And of course, it was students, it was one of our early adopted. So, they really wanted to know if they were at the word count for the essay that they had just had to sign to them. So, there was this dance with Microsoft that we could literally made this trade-off, and I think it's kind of all. It's almost like a classic innovators don't want a model, right? Like, we took this, you know, the other thing common that was, like, asymptotically approaching, you know, useful is 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, it's kind of this disruptive new thing. We just kind of chiped away from the bottom, like, you know, the innovators don't want it. And, you know, it's, I think it was hard for Microsoft to respond to. I think it took them a while to even have a, like, a clear idea of how they were going to respond to it. And, 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, like, we have all the money I guess now. I would have spent more time on Google Docs in the story there. A couple of questions. How long did it take from starting on it to feeling like it's working, like, whatever you consider, product market fit? Almost immediately, honestly, like, it was weird. Like, 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, so we basically, like, the history is like, I noticed content editable. So, like, the browser would do some editing for you. And then I noticed JavaScript. Like, it never realized JavaScript is that 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 rate, way back in, like, 1987 or something. Like, 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 word processor? And, like, the fact that you could collaborate on them was kind of an accident, like, there's just, like, these things on the server, where 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, you know, a immediately realized was really cool. Like, we could both work in the same document at the same time. And then, be realized, like, a 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, it's a pretty quickly, like, oh, that's kind of cool. Like, that feels good as a development team to have, like, be shared documents and stuff to send stuff around and stuff. So, that's cool. So, it's built that out, but, like, oh, bummer, like, collaborations, 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 out. It 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 to the browsers. The logical document of a, you know, a document can be rendered differently in each and all, there's not a canonical representation. And so, you're doing merge is 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 single-toned BR tag, and I would do it. It's like, open-closed paragraph tag, and so, like, you know, even the tree doesn't match, like, so it's a really hard merge problem. So, that turned out to be like a not really hard problem to solve, but, like, once we had seen the value of, like, working together, we were motivated to do that. It kind of the interesting thing to with that is, like, I think if we got in it in the other order, we might not have done it. Like, it's a good example of why not, and what is, right? We're like, we got really lucky that we saw the wet-if part, that we saw how cool, like, a document in a browser that you can collaborate on would be, because if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would have been first, without understanding that value, we might have been like, eh, it's not worth it. Like, it's going to be so hard to solve that problem. It's probably not a, you know, useful app. So, I think it's a good little counter example of, like, that optimistic pessimistic perspective, we're talking about, like, you know, we could easily have missed that idea, easily have missed that idea. And we just got lucky, I think, in the order that presented to us. That is really interesting, actually, but you need to be pulled to the wet-if, getting you so excited that you're going to spend, however many years it took you to solve that problem, because you, because you are so excited about this wet-if. Yeah, and that's really good. That's what, I mean, I've spent a lot of time. It's kind of like, you know, I keep expecting people to just be like, Grandpa, stop talking about your docs, it's been a long time. Like, 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 of billion users now, I think. Like, it's a big thing. But I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years, you know, just thinking about like, well, why did that work? Like, what worked about that? Like, what lessons kind of draw from it? Like, it was, there was a lot of energy around it, positive and negative. Like, the first week I was at Google, like an executive there refused to give me hardware, because he thought that Google was an app company, not it. 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 it. Either suit him or haul him in front of Eric Schmidt, because I had to contract, and I had to contract it, it earnouts, and like, you know, so like, that was, like, another one of these, like, interesting lessons, 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 in 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 negativity. And that has to do some of that, you know, that person being either challenge, 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, we'll keep coming back with this idea of optimism. Like, I have this very strong feeling about it. But like, most of the reason people don't do really innovative good products is this kind of mindset. Like, you're just not seeing opportunities. There's a lot of hard work for sure. There's a lot of stuff that you can read about and a bit 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 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 going to go there because the world doesn't care it's going to push back. But you also have to be really flexible about feedback. Like, you might not be, you probably aren't going to be right about a bunch of it. It's like, you have to, like, blend these two things together. Somehow, like, it's, like, a samurai sword that's, like, hard on the back, but softer on the edge so it doesn't break. And, like, it's, you know, with that other way around the thing. 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, defining 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. Like, I've been continually surprised at the adoption of G-Docs. I think, we knew there was something there pretty quickly, like, probably in the first couple of months, like, there was a lot of energy around it. Like, we wanted to, that is a weird ride because, like, we built this thing kind of on a whim and, you know, as an experiment. We liked it. We decided to go, just advertise on Google. At the time, 37 segments was kind of, like, the cool company. And, you know, 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. 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 of tech crunch, like, my clarington. Like, there's another funny, rightly stories that, like, we had a breakfast with my clarington at Bucks in that era where he was, like, trying to decide, he had this, like, spreadsheet idea he wanted to work on. And he was trying to decide if he'd go do that and, like, maybe join forces with us because we were cool. Or if he should, like, continue to work on this blog thing, he had going called tech crunch. And, like, so I might be, partially responsible for tech crunch because we turned him down, so he should go do tech crunch instead. You know, every time I bump into him, I was laugh about that. But, like, when that, when we got noticed, like, we really got noticed. There was just this period where we were like, the hot thing for, you know, a couple months, like, we're every VC wanted to talk to us and everyone's trying to figure it out. Because I think we're, like, you know, you see one point online, like, Gmail, which came before us, like, oh, that's kind of cool. Like, that's an interesting, quasi app. But it's like, a weird kind of app. It's like, serialized, you can't really interact with it that much. And then you see this as, like, another point on the curve, you know, like, oh, that's a real app. Like, oh, crap. Like, I wonder, you know, is there anything stopping us from doing the rest of office? Oh, probably not. Like, how far is this going to go with, you know, so, like, I think we were that second point that, like, showed that there was actually this totally different paradigm. And so we just got, like, this enormous amount of attention pretty quickly. And then the rest of it was, like, feeling our way through, like, what does it actually mean? 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 its collaboration, where you get a bunch of energy on offline, which was miserable, which never turned out to matter that much. You know, now the team has been a long time, like, replicating all these features that we abandoned by the wayside, which I think I'm not that interested in. And I think the future of documents looks very different than what we have. Now, I think it's kind of funny, you know, that we're spending billions of dollars on GPUs to emulate windpulp and ink pressed by, you know, metal type, right? Like we're building linear documents that are fixed, that are static. So, like, one of the things we've been doing with these, these chatbot things is they're also, they also serve as documents. Like, say bots are docs all the time. And so, like, you'll do these things really 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 going to write a technical document. Here's roughly what it's about, once 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, like, semantically encoded for traumatic, synthetic memories in this, in the spectra database. So, you can come in and say, like, show me a diagram of this, draw this diagram for me, change it in the following way. Like, what is, what is this, if I change this, what I change that summarizes part of it. So, you can start to interact with it. That's still, like, a creating stuff at the bottom of this linear artifact. But, the next step that we're working on now is just making that dynamic. Where you just, like, come to something and you talk to it and interact with it. I think one of the things that's going to happen is, you know, just like, it seems, well, in the early days of detox, like, people would, we'd say, like, what if I don't, what if I'm not connected? And one of the things I would say is, like, in three or five years, if you get handed a device that's not connected to the internet, your word for it is going to be broken, which is true, right? Like, 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 and intelligent way, have it converses with me, whether that's a device or a piece of gooey, you know, you act 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 trance, you know, like, he's like, he's pissed off because he can't talk to the computer. Like, we're all going to be like that in like five years, I think, about around, and it's going to 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-Guedox 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 want to see this and let me build the workflow the way I want it and remember it for me to bring it back later or, you know, all that stuff. So that was a long-day aggression, but I was just like, you know, you're kind of asking about features and functionality. 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 it's an Ajax browser application. Yeah. Yeah. What's in your JavaScript? Where's Ajax? Ajax. So hot back then. It's also funny too because, like, I'll talk to young friend and developers these days. I'm like, I don't want to scare you too much, but like, Jake, where you didn't even exist when I wrote this thing. You know, this is like bare metal in the dom and there were bugs. Like when I went to Google, like, I had to write this, um, a little network stack at the bottom of the JavaScript that, like, in, in theory, X and I, C, P, you could interrupt. You could have multiple requests in flight, and you could 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, like, network queue that would, like, keep track of whether there were, were questions flight and, like, kill them in a way that didn't break everything. And, you know, it was hard to do, like, because it's this weird asynchronous programming. 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, with their formatting. Like, there was some bug in the JavaScript compiler of the time that, like, white space mattered. And so I wound up, like, checking it in, broken, got the readability badge and immediately fixed it. And so, like, that was another one of our little, I will hack to get this working. I love it. This episode is brought to you by atrefs. Many of you already know atrefs 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 atrefs webmaster tools. It's free and it can help you bring more traffic to your website. Atrefs 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 detective issue comes with a detailed explanation and advice on how to fix it. Visit atrefs.com slash awt, set up a free account, connect your website, and start improving it. That's ahrfs.com slash 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 it the edges. You said, and maybe it'll lead somewhere versus like, and 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 the tech 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. Like what's a cool thing that I think might be billable with this. So right now we're doing these multi-agent systems or 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 like, you just like give something to Python and environment to file system and that's it and like that's all it needs. And so you're not like, you know, distracted by connectivity issues or whatever. So one of the problems right now is like, go right the eye in Python. Like, you know, that's a problem I could give you an intern and it would take them a summer to do some halfway decent job of it. You know, it's a thing you could expect a reasonably competent programmer to do mostly independently. And so like it should be possible for like the system if it's independent at all to go do that. So is that useful by itself? No, because we already have the eye, it doesn't matter. But like if we build a system of programming agents that can self-monitor and self-correct and bug themselves, that can build things that are roughly that scale of complexity, that's valuable. Like that would be a valuable thing to have. And 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 it 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 you don't trust it. But, you know, like it's like very helpful as in the system, it's there and just like we had one of documented itself too. It'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, we aim things that. 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, they're trying to get to, that's useful, right? Or you like, I wonder if I can get this to work. Like, you know, wondering if I can build this thing, they 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 a JavaScript for what? It's also different, I think, at a bigger company, where you need to achieve something versus, I think, as a just an engineer at a college, just playing around. Like, you know, go for it, right? It's just like, that's the worst thing I can happen. Even that early days of rightly, 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 a problem statement, right? There's like, I have content edible. I have age-ax 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, good, natural goal. So I don't know. Like, I think that's, I like playing around. I think a lot of the good product that he has most of the good product that he has 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 also often be useful. Like, if you understand two or three things, like, I'm a Google, like, I was one of only two people in the company with code readability, which is like the right to check and code in this language. And both a back end language, which is the monitoring language, board mod, a middle tier language, which is Java, and a front language, which is JavaScript. Like, no one else would do that false that. I think it's useful to have, like, that broad perspective sometimes. Sam, the Renaissance man, of all languages, 80D, more like it, but yeah, I think a bunch of the things. I wanted to follow this through a little further around being good at these what-of questions. It feels like you've built this or maybe you're born with this skill of thinking in the future, thinking about what's possible, thinking 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 actually right. 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 would be interesting to see. I think there's, like, this weird thing that I've noticed, I could talk to a 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 the stupid toy, like, you know, whatever, it's not real computing, go go on a mainframe or whatever. And my attitude is, like, out of the way old man, like, just, like, you're relevant. 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, I was talking recently that was titled, okay, Numer. That one of the professor actually put it up there. Because the, like, the generation is very pessimistic and doesn't seem to be quite as, like, engaged in dramatic about solving problems. And I've been puzzling through it. And I think, maybe there's, like, a bunch of different things that kind of intersect. And 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 are normal. So you see, like, everybody makes $100 million in their startup out 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 your living out loud. So, like, in winning 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 because, quote, you're kind of smart. Michigan's a good school. You live nearby. Go apply to that one. Like, you know, nothing, nothing serious about, 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, those students, like, I didn't do sports. I didn't do extra curricular. 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 spent a lot of your life thinking, everything I do has to have a reason and an output. It's very hard to just mess around and do something that might, you know, lead down a surprising path, right? So that's the curation is part of it. And then I think just like, 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, uh, it was like the faculty together for this small university, my dad taught at. And like, we just ran wild. It was like, on the, on the state of the widow of Dodge Motor, founder of Dodge Motor, so we had like a couple hundred acres of swamp and fields to run around. And we did heroising like 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 full, making full of yourself, like having bad ideas. I send like stupid emails to such a, at Microsoft all the time, or I'm just like, I don't know what the hell he thinks of me at this point, because I still have all these new ideas. I think he actually like gets it and he's like, he likes it, because I don't think people usually do that for him, but I'm just like, man, this is an awesome email like a week later, I'm like, yeah, that was a dumb idea. Sorry about that, you know, like, I've decided that was not very good on. 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. 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, because I'm a maker, I make stuff and I fuck it up all the time. Like, I'm, I'm poor motor skills, so I make mistakes constantly, and then I just like, figure out how to make the mistake and to virtue somehow. So, like, I think it's a really good skill to have. Like, I, it's a, it's a saying, I took on this year, and I really, really like it as my, I never had a personal motto before, and I think it would be my personal motto. I think virtue from error. 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 negatively impacted is, and it feels like, for you is just having, you've done it enough times or you find, okay, it's going to be fine. I want just thing known cares. Email sought you this thing, ignores it or he doesn't. Like, it's going to be, okay, is that maybe the key to this or there's 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, in a linear way, which is I think that managing, you know, tightly managing, okay, nothing's going to be surprising. I'm a view within this boundary. I'm going to kind of slowly, your quick value, I'm going to play this game, whatever. I think you can have a nice linear boring return to your career, you know, climb a ladder, it takes 30 years and whatever. I don't have the patience for that, and I think the way you get extraordinary returns is to do extraordinary things, right? You know, you have to have, you have to take bigger risks, and, you know, have kind of more, and a more more interesting shots to have this kind of extraordinary result in your career. I, I feel like I always tell people, like, I think, I mean, I, I, I, I pitched this because I've observed myself and thought about, like, what has been successful in my career. It's not, it's not a thing everybody can do. Like, I've just kind of like this. I'm, I've 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, you know, like I'm still pretty mature and like like to mess around with stuff and play with things. So, not everybody can do it, but I think there's like, yeah, at the end of the day, what you get, 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 with, because you picked something that you're good at that you did with a lot of intensity that wanted to be having impact, right? Like, and so I think the good at part of it is hard to, like, we tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant, and so something is easy and fun. We don't tend to think it's, you know, very valuable. So I think lots of people like gravitate in this direction of like, let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because like, that's the way to like make it. But the reality is like, you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for. There's a thing like that and do the hell out of it, right? Like, do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, like, do the hell out of that. Like, 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 is, the most impact you'll ever have is where you're in that mode or you're just like, in the flow and, you know, 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 anyway. It's right. Like, I think that's the, that's the career thing that makes sense to me. At least that's what I've done. You know, who knows, like, it's all luck sometimes. So it's hard to replicate these, everybody has a different path. 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 Buffet and Charlie Munger's whole philosophy is, when you find an advantage, just go huge, just go big, like, like, like, like, make one better year. But when you find that go, go for it and 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, so I'll lean over and 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 moment we had with the cat eyes, well, the reason it's got these weird cat eyes, by the way, this is a virtue from error right there. Like, I dug this piece of wood out of the forest. It's been sitting on the forest for 80 years, trying to not rot and doing a pretty big job of it because it's redwood. And there were knots in it. So there's two cat eyes over the knots, where there's another knot, like, right here that I couldn't get out. But like, 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 pickets, the top, because the strings get a little bit closer to the top. So like, that's something 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 out of the wall. You know, like, nothing, not everything works. Like, you know, clearly I don't have a career as a loser 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 you 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 the rent. They're family. I know, I realize what I'm saying is very privileged. And I like, I'm sorry about that 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 accepted about this work. Is do you recommend trying to get out of that as soon as you can? Is it enjoyed as much as you can? I mean, 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 only is this 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, you know, 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 was joking. I'm like, an engineer, like, two is a prime number. It's like, I kind of a programmer, but not real. Like, I'm this weird non-linear person. Like, only barely fits in the programming world. But like, you know, it's okay. Like, I took me a long time to figure out that I could do that, that I could that I could be comfortable with that part of myself. And like, I'm fortunate enough now that I've done enough things and I have enough of a connection network that people understand who I am and the value I can bring. And so I get, I get a way with doing that stuff that I like doing that. So, 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 ready to code. Because all of my energy was attached to, like, I could produce a lot of lines to 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 ready anything. It's like, I don't know what you're doing. Like, everywhere you go 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're going to 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 I 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 hear. Like, doesn't feel like it's the thing you quote 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. You have to be receptive, you know, at 10 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 Gauden as 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 and being a waitress at this place. I'm just going to do the best of greeting people entering the apple store. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Like, I think, you know, or 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 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'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 are about me are probably less happy, but make stuff happens. Anyways, I get things done. Speaking of getting things done and being intense and working 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 of 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. And 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 treated as a true platform. Yeah, I think both of those are really, 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 something that you're 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 makes a model player. And 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 an app builder on 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 start with Microsoft, I started working on GP4 with Microsoft in September of last year. Like my me 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 looks to cast your function. It just like takes it 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 to state and we need control flow and orchestration and call out. So it's like that just kind of started me down this rabbit hole of thinking about building the semantic kernel, which we built and then building the infinite chatbot, which was next and these other projects we've been working on. And like more I think about this stuff, like more do you think like those two quotes are are good quotes, like I think what's going to 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, like they take program hours and they take lots of infrastructure and like putting a pixel on front of the user as a hardware is a hard thing. We do lots of software is predicated on that. Lots of businesses. The way lots of business we're predicated on it, being hard to distribute information 25 years ago. But like 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 drawing, like those skills up. Like that's a lot of work to produce those pixels. Now it's like I want to picture of a cat riding a bike, eating a banana, like dodging, right? Like those pixels got really free. But in that similar things are happening in the business world as well, then I think it's just going to start to happen everywhere. So you can draw like this is what if? Like let's go to the last somewhat 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 multi-modal 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 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. Like it's like, you know, what would you do? If you imagine you're like 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 to do everything you want. Like with that staff supporting you like what are you doing with software? With that staff supporting you like what are you doing with software? Like how much time 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 in 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, and 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, I found where you're just like, okay, I get it. Like we're going, you know, phones are going to get interesting. Like that's a new device. Now we've got to do a whole bunch of engineering before they actually are like, as useful as they are today, right? So I think I get it. Like I think software is going to change radically now. I decide the same feeling when I, when I, when we started doing, this is going to come back to a G-docs again. It's another lesson. Like it's another one of these categories shifts. Like the second we got, right, lay up on its feet. And when 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 going to change. And we had a kind of enough 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 do security, like all kinds of hard-for-all the, the development patterns had to shift from waterfall to agile to CICD. Like all this stuff had to change to fully realize that world. But like I remember back in 2005, like, you know, this very, 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 gender everyday. Like, yep, software is going to totally change. Like these businesses are going to totally change. I might take 10 years to like really work through all of it. Like, yep, like door open, new room, like new game, like feeling like starting, coloring in the blanks, right? Like, you know, let's go. So I bet 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, 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 an anticipated 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 don't know, I think it's just incontroverable that it is. Well, it's kind of funny like when, um, Gemini came out, all the press take was like, oh, it's not that different from GPE4. I guess we're done with AI now. We can go back to bed. And like, that's the dumbest possible interpretation of that story that you could come up with. I think, like, 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, 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 would, is whatever everyone was always saying, just like, play with it, run use chat to be to use all use bargain, always think, is there any advice you give listeners for how to approach thinking about AI, how to integrate 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 going to 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 it 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, 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 going to mess around with GPT, which had GPT for an hour, this 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 calm 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 did something really big is going on, right? It was 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 tweak, like at the beginning of the year that I saw that somebody was like, yeah, it took like the AI grows like a week to come up with as many use cases as, you know, crypto came up with in that decade, which definitely feels true, right? It's just like, so much stuff going on. And, you know, I think you, you just have to try to keep track of it. I, I, one of the other things I think is, is going on in the moment, which feels a lot like the cloud moment, to me, is like, it's, it's hard to get the first idea. The zero to one is hard. Like, understanding that there's something there at all is the really hard part because you have to be lucky and you have to be talented and you have to look in the right place and like do some very hard work. But once you understand that there's something there, like the cloud model works or their gender 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 and parallel it happens really quickly. Many, many, many, many people can do it. There's a lot of energy. It'll just go really fast. So I think we're in that phase. We're just like, we're in the elaboration phase. We're like, we understand this step and people are just filling in all the way it's based 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, it's a hard time. It's hard for professionals, even. Like, I think you just have to re-laught. You have to think a lot. You have to play with stuff. You have to choose your battles. You have to pick good targets. You know, 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. Like, maybe pick the technology based on how popular it seems if you want to learn something lots of people know. Because they're 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 like 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 know, like, you're going to be out of breath, run hard. Like, it's just what it is. I love that advice. And I love it connects everything else you've been talking about is find some problems. So when I have to find kind of some value, you could provide, and then think about how can I 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 Satsya is known now as like the most innovative best executing Sia 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 what 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, very highly of Satsya or I wouldn't be there. I really, really like Satsya. He is very much where 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, you know, caring individual with ton of empathy. He's really motivational. In a way that is not destructive, you know, he's very, he believes very strongly that the leaders, you know, job is to raise the energy that organization and he really lives that. And like, you know, I watch him in meetings where I am a domain expert and I cannot believe how engaged he is in stuff and how much he understands about something that I know. He's not, 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 in many, in many ways. That's one thing. I think another is like, that culture is very humble, honestly. 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 companies. And I think one thing that just stands out with Microsoft is it's a humble culture. It does, you know, 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, you know, I've written more patents this year by a lot than the rest of my career combined. And I commented on the number of like, I've written like 15 patents this year is coming to do my the patent attorney that I work with. He's like, ah, that's nothing that you science officer wrote 700 up in one year during the mobile booth. Like, it's like, whatever you feel about patents, if I don't necessarily love patents, all of 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 fantastic. Like, talented people with just really deep experience. It 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 a leadership in Windows and Office is pretty fantastic. So it's just a lot of good people. I'm a lot of good attitude and a good leader, I think is, you know, kind of the answer. And luck, you know, it's always luck too, right? Like, Kevin and Sasha made a bet on Open AI, you know, a few years back, you know, and they're, and they're doing some extraordinary things with with capital rays 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 didn't know any very general there. I hear it's calm. I think it's possible. Most of them to the radar start up out there. Amazing. Sam, is there anything else you want to share before we get to a very exciting lightning round? Is there anything you want to leave listeners with? I mostly I think probably like take all of this is more 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, you know, build stuff. Like, solve problems, build stuff. Like, that's what it is, right? Like, you know, job, that job's put around. Well, that job's put around. Well, that job's put around. Like, the world is built. Like, people just like you. Like, that's the, that's the thing. Like, you know, and like, it's really true. You know, you don't have to have permission if you just have to have energy. With that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I probably not. Great answer. Sam, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people? I like weird book. Like, I like business 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, read it to college and it just like blew all the circuits in my brain when I went to Venice. So that was pretty cool. The other one, I recommend two people with some caution is this very intense and disturbing book called The Wasp Factory by In 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 like business advice, I think the business advice one is probably work good ideas come from, Steven Johnson. I really like that book. I think some of the stuff about the adjacent possible. I think it's, it's an old book now, but I think it's pretty pretty timely, like still I can get some good stuff in there. What is a favorite recent movie or TV show that you really enjoy? My favorite one right now, my guilty pleasure is watching Gary Oldman be 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 Mark and stuff like that's kind of fun to watch. I don't know. I have like absolute junk food taste when it comes to be a lot of creepy, creepy monsters and bugs. Yeah, I love it. Science, shitty science, things of blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to be. By the way, if you seen a scavenger, this is a rain scavenger, rain scavenger is rain. Okay, you love it. It's an HBO, it's incredible. It's an animated sci-fi thing and it's very creepy, slimy kind of alienity things and it's so beautiful. Do you have a favorite interview question that you'd like to ask candidates when you're interviewing them? I have one that got banned at Google and I like it. I still think it's a fun question. It's how many zeros are at the end of 100 factorial and the reason I like it, yeah, it's like you've made the face, right? It's like an Ask Jackie B. T for the Samsung. Well, there's nothing. Well, don't, though, because like it's like 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 but I'm not going to tell you how to reason through it but like 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 like back off and refuse to engage with it and some people are just like, I don't know when we roll my sleeves up to see how far I can get into this thing and if you do that, you can actually get through it. Now, this is, I just think it's interesting. Like 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 be honest. I was zeroes at the end of 100 factorial in decimal and then why didn't they get banned? I think you got known and like, you know, I'm aware of it. So like, I actually, the funny thing is like, one of the more senior directors, actually, he's a SPP now, I think. 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. Like, they have this policy where like, one veto is actually a good signal. Like, if you're controversial as a candidate, they would like take a hard look at you. And so my veto may have gotten him higher. So I was like, I don't know, you would answer this question. That's like a red flag for me. So don't hire him. I need to get that to be a great person. So it's maybe not a good question anyways. That comes back to winner or other lessons of the best ideas have some people that are just very anti that I do. And all circles back next question. What is the favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love? My father-in-law work and my brother-in-law work for the American Car Companies. 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 Machie, the electric Ford Mustang. And I just love this 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 that really I'm enjoying this video. Next question. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often repeat yourself. I need to 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 have the more I say it, more I like it. I just, you know, I just like this idea of like you're going to fuck up. Like make something from it and be creative 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. All right. 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 for you. Final question. Apparently you're the only person who has sold both that company to Google. I like to cheer you now. I'm going both the company and also 200 pounds of blood sauce. Yes. Yeah. Just Google. Tell. Tell us the story story. So I have friend who dropped out of the tech industry to start a company up in San Francisco called Vocal on a which was like an artisan-seller-me-thing in the fairy building. And so you'd make blood sausage and stuff. So there was this wonderful insane chef back in the day when Google had like really high-end cuisine in the campus. It's 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 this chef, J.C., had the word fog raw, tattooed onto his knuckles. So that's, you know, that's the kind of guy he was just super awesome. And so like I had Mark show up to like talk to J.C. about buying some of those products because I was an investor in that company. And he showed up with a bag of blood sausages that was he's like, here, you should take this one and put it in a refrigerator and like, why? He's like, it's dripping. I'm like, it's all right, it's fine. He's like, it's dripping blood. You know, like, because they hadn't get the packaging right. So we like showed the blood sausages to J.C., he kicked some of it up. It was really good. And he was like, yeah, it's awesome while by a couple hundred pounds of it. And like, so technically because I was an investor in that company, I sold both the company rightly and 200 pounds of blood sausage to Google, which I think is a unique accomplishment. And I would just absolutely love to meet anybody who has also done that. Well, I have a party. Did you get stock though for that blood sausage? No, I did not get started anything. In fact, I was crazy. Like at one point, just a quick J.C. story. Like at one point, Google rented some goats to like graze the hillside across the way. And J.C. was a very non-politically correct non-woke kind of guy. And he did not like all the, you know, sort of attitude at Google. So when these goats were across the hill, he bought a goat carcass from somewhere else and roasted it over a spit and carried it whole through the line for a lunch one day to serve up, which is like completely tweak people. So that was a different time at Google. We did all days. Yeah. Amazing. Sam, that's it. We did it. Two final questions. Working folks, I need if they want to potentially follow up on any of this. And then how can listeners be so cute? Well, I was up 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. So I've been writing, 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 publicly. 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 spam. Smart. Smart man. Little last funny story at Google. My email address at Google got leaked somehow and he's spammer. I was kind of a little bit notorious during the early days of rightly. And so his spammer used it for what's known as a Joe job where you send something out. Fakes emails out with somebody else's email address is the return to reply to you. So like several hundred million emails went out and all balanced. 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 can answer the final question. How can listeners be useful to you other than not? Oh, spamming team. I guess I like the thing I guess I'm interested in is 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, but you'd like to have somebody pay attention. I tend to, you know, I entertain weird ideas all the time. I do my best entertain weird ideas and kind of live what I preach. So if you think you have something that's really resonating that you think want to have somebody pay attention to, can I? Can I? Can I 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, you know, I don't care. I'm not going to review like the 27th like memo writing AI chatbot thing that plugs into outlook or whatever account here. I think that's a final good takeaway is that's a litmus test for, are you working in something innovative, which I think has been a great theme of this conversation. For me, something that'll piss me off. That'd be more, yeah. Sam, thank you so much for being here. My pleasure. Bye everyone. 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