The Steve Ballmer Interview

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   All right, so David, Steve gave us the signed Clippers jersey with the name Acquired on it. There's only one jersey. What are we gonna do about this? [laughing]

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:10

   [laughing] Should we rock, paper, scissors for it? What-- Well, you know what? No, no, you keep it. There's no Seattle basketball team.

3. BGBen Gilbert0:20

   Oh-ho-ho.

4. DRDavid Rosenthal0:21

   Keep it there, up north.

5. BGBen Gilbert0:22

   All right, all right. It'll, it'll go in, uh, Acquired Museum North.

6. DRDavid Rosenthal0:25

   Great.

7. BGBen Gilbert0:26

   Perfect. All right, let's do it.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal0:28

   Let's do it.

9. SPSpeaker0:28

   Who got the truth? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you, is it you, is it you? Sit me down, say it straight, another story on the way. Who got the truth?

10. BGBen Gilbert0:45

    Welcome to episode one of the summer twenty twenty-five season of Acquired, the podcast about great companies and the stories and playbooks behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert.

11. DRDavid Rosenthal0:55

    I'm David Rosenthal.

12. BGBen Gilbert0:57

    And we are your hosts. Steve Ballmer is, among other things, arguably the very best investor of the last twenty years. It sounds a little funny to frame it that way, but here are the numbers: In twenty fourteen, when Steve left Microsoft, his net worth was $20B, almost entirely comprised of Microsoft stock. Today, eleven years later, it is a staggering $130B, according to Forbes. It is incredibly rare to reach this stratospheric level when you are, A, not the founder of the company, and B, no longer CEO or even employed by the company, and all of this comes from just one investment decision: just keep holding substantially all of his Microsoft stock.

13. DRDavid Rosenthal1:45

    Incredible. We, uh, chat about it with him in the conversation to come.

14. BGBen Gilbert1:49

    Now, as most of you know, we did a big two-part Microsoft series last year on the history of the company up through when Steve transitioned the CEO role to Satya Nadella. Steve listened to those episodes, and, uh, he had some thoughts that he wanted to share with his recollection of how things went down. You know, things like what made Microsoft so fabulously successful, what his missteps were as CEO. We wanted to share that as a recorded conversation with all of you, so we set up our cameras and our mics at his office, his philanthropy office, Ballmer Group, in Bellevue, Washington, and we pressed record. So we'll go into everything from the misses on mobile, search, social, the huge wins in enterprise and cloud. Steve also reflects on his business lessons learned. He goes into why he stepped down as CEO when he did, and he talks about his relationship with Bill Gates over the years. And of course, we had to talk with him a little bit about the Clippers-

15. DRDavid Rosenthal2:43

    Of course

16. BGBen Gilbert2:44

    ... and the new arena that Steve built and personally owns, too.

17. DRDavid Rosenthal2:48

    Yeah, Intuit Dome. Incredible place. A cathedral of basketball, as Steve would put it.

18. BGBen Gilbert2:54

    Listeners, if you wanna know every time an episode drops, check out our email list. It's the only place where we will share a hint of what our next episode will be. We'll share episode corrections, updates, and little tidbits that we learn from all of you about previous episodes. Come and join the Slack to talk about this with us and the whole Acquired community. That is acquired.fm/slack, and the email list is acquired.fm/email. If you want more Acquired between our monthly episodes, check out ACQ2. We just released one with Zach Perret, the co-founder and CEO of Plaid.

19. DRDavid Rosenthal3:27

    And we've got some banger ACQ2 episodes coming up.

20. BGBen Gilbert3:31

    Yes, we do. Well, as most of you know, we are doing a massive, massive live show at the six thousand-seat Radio City Music Hall in New York City on July 15th with our friends at J.P. Morgan Payments. There are just a few seats left, so get yours before they are gone at acquired.fm/nyc. The lineup for the night is gonna be something very special, and we cannot wait to see you there.

21. DRDavid Rosenthal3:56

    Yes, and speaking of, just like how we say every company has a story, every company's story is powered by payments, and J.P. Morgan Payments is a part of so many of their journeys, from seed to IPO and beyond.

22. BGBen Gilbert4:08

    So with that, this show is not investment advice. David and I may have investments in the companies we discuss, and this show is for informational and entertainment purposes only. On to our conversation with Steve Ballmer. Well, Steve, f- first of all, I, I noticed you, you prepared some [laughing] printed materials here for us. Listeners should know we didn't ask for this in any way, but at ten PM last night, you sent us a PowerPoint deck and said, "I, I made you some slides. Sorry it got here so late." And Dave and I are looking at each other like, we, we didn't ask you to, p- you know, prepare for this. Thank you for the materials.

23. SBSteve Ballmer4:42

    Oh, it's just some stuff that I've used kind of with thoughts about how businesses work, and I kinda think of this as a time to reflect on things I've learned, primarily at Microsoft, but also at the Clippers, about business. I figured, "Eh, I'll send them to you," and they're PowerPoint. [laughing]

24. DRDavid Rosenthal4:59

    Yeah. [laughing]

25. BGBen Gilbert5:00

    [laughing] So you mixed a few different templates.

26. SBSteve Ballmer5:03

    Paid promotional opportunity.

27. DRDavid Rosenthal5:03

    Yeah, yeah, yeah. [laughing]

28. BGBen Gilbert5:04

    Always a cheerleader.

29. DRDavid Rosenthal5:06

    Always.

30. SBSteve Ballmer5:06

    There you go. [laughing]

Episode duration: 2:59:19