The Steve Ballmer Interview

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]

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

Oh-ho-ho.

Keep it there, up north.

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

Great.

Perfect. All right, let's do it.

Let's do it.

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?

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.

I'm David Rosenthal.

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.

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

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-

Of course

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

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

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.