YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Muglia

lines on the record: 66
first: 2023-09-08
most recent: 2023-09-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I mean, I think it's multiple things, right? I mean, first of all, I think it's being at the right place at the right time. I mean, you couldn't build Snowflake today. It's just fact. You know, people are trying to introduce technologies that have characteristics like Snowflake. Good luck. You've got well-established players in the business, all of whom have a whole lot more money than you have if you're a small company. We were competing against companies that always had a thousand times more capital than we did. I mean, they had names like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. And, you know, how do you compete with them? Well, the answer is you have a better product. I said many times that if we were just a little bit better, like 20% better than Amazon's competing product redshift, we would have been totally wiped off the face of the earth. But in fact, Snowflake was effectively infinitely better because it solved problems that Redshift couldn't solve. We were also fortunate in the sense that I mentioned Redshift. Redshift is the data warehouse that Amazon built. It's still available. It's a good product, always been a good product.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Size of data. And because of the architecture that Benoit and Terry had created with Snowflake, leveraging characteristics of the cloud, which were not available before because of the way the cloud works, it was possible to build a database that separated storage and compute and allowed those to be scaled independently, essentially letting you put in any amount of data you want and work with as many users as you want. I mean, remarkably, a single Snowflake system can scale to essentially any size. And the way they describe what they were doing made total sense to me. And so they seem like pretty smart guys. And so I decided to take a bet on the fact that they would make it work. And fortunately, that was a good bet.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I decided I want to build something new, which is what led me to small companies. And I started looking around. I was connected through, I had a contact at Sutter Hill, which was the founding VC of Snowflake. And that created the connection that when I met Benoit and Terry. And when I first met with them, they had this, what they would do is the way they would interview people is they would ask them to do a presentation in front of a group of them. So I came in as a CEO candidate and they essentially asked me to talk about what I was doing at Juniper and some of the things I was trying to do from a pricing perspective there. And so I had a presentation that I essentially had to do in front of them. And then they talked to me about what they were building at Snowflake. And I recognize that although the product was early and it was still not fully functional, if it did, though what they said it was going to do, that it would revolutionize the industry. That in fact, databases had always been limited in the number of users they can support.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I left Juniper in late 2013, I decided I wanted to work at a much smaller company than I had been working at. At Juniper, I had an amazing realization, which was that Microsoft, I was building new businesses all the time, and Microsoft was able to do that. And I realized that part of the reason it was able to do that is had this cash cow called Windows in Office that was throwing off a lot of profitability. I joined Juniper and Juniper had stagnated shortly after I joined. It wasn't growing. And I realized that it is almost impossible. I was trying to build a software business in a hardware company. And I learned that it was almost impossible to build a new business at a company that wasn't growing because there just simply isn't enough cash to feed both the primary products that are generating the revenue and to build these new businesses. And I want to, and while many people love fixing broken things, and there's certainly a lot of joy that can come in that, I had seen a lot of that at Juniper. I was fixing a bunch of broken things.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Impact businesses of all sizes. Certainly, when I was at Microsoft working on SQL Server, but also because very early on, Bill started an initiative called Information at Your Fingertips, which was really about using technology together, business information, and to be able to bring that to people. I mean, ultimately, it has turned into the actual implementation of it is turned into the internet and Google for all practical purposes search. But that vision that Bill said in 1990, which I do talk about in the book, was very much a big driver of all of the things that happened. It was a big driver in shaping my focus on the importance of data.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think really very early, you know, when I started working at Rome even, I was working on collecting data. We were selling PBX systems, business telephone systems. Rome built the first digital PBX, which was very innovative back in late 1970s and early 1980s. And at that point, even then, we were collecting information about customers that we were having to put into these systems. So I recognize how important it was. When I joined Microsoft, I was focusing on collecting data and working on information with SQL Server. And SQL Server really did change the industry in that it brought business computing to businesses of all sizes. If you go back to the early 1990s, most small businesses kept their books on pencil and paper. And that all changed largely because of the work we did at Microsoft with the products that we built that were specifically targeted at those industries, whereas most of the other companies were targeting larger, larger businesses. So, you know, I recognize that data had an ability to”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And difficult, frankly. They're all difficult. Find one that isn't difficult. All these brilliant founders, Mark Zuckerberg, I think he's easy. Jobs was difficult. Bomber's a pain in the tail. I mean, they were all fairly difficult. But as part of what makes them what they are, really.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different than that. Steve could be very aggressive and sometimes disrespectful in meanings. I always tried to be respectful and things like that. But I do think that pushing people to do more than they expect they can do is an important thing. And that's certainly something that I learned from both of them.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2,500 numbers on one piece of paper. I swear to God. And you would look at this thing and Steve would get presented to this in a meeting and he would stare at it for about 30 seconds and he would go, this is all wrong. I know it's wrong because that number is wrong and he would point to a number in the middle of this page of numbers, which I'm like, I could, to me, it was just all a bunch of numbers. I could barely see the thing. And at that point, the finance guy would start, you know, blizzard's papers. It'd be a 10-minute period where there'd be a discussion about whether that number was wrong. And honestly, I swear, eight out of ten times Steve was right. And it'd be real the meeting and maybe it wasn't counterproductive even, but it's still, it created a set of expectations, if that makes sense, that everyone knew when you presented that spreadsheet to Steve that he was going to look at it and if there was something wrong, he was going to find it. And it really drove the company in a lot of senses. My style is very”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A relative spreadsheet of the Microsoft revenues by product by country and have a really good understanding of that, a stunningly good understanding of that, like literally to the point where, I mean, this is a notorious thing at Microsoft, is there was this thing called the Rev sum. It's a brilliant, brilliant idea, this idea that there's so much share of wallet, and you want to understand what you're getting across all of your different markets and things. And what Steve would do is he would focus on key drivers like a socket, like a PC is a socket. You know, it's a something you can sell into. So when a PC is sold, it's something that you could then, you know, Microsoft would earn revenue on Windows, but there was also opportunity for office and all sorts of other tag-on products. And Steve would build these spreadsheets to have the finance build these spreadsheets that had all of the products and all of the regions and countries and would literally be this giant sheet of paper, this 11 by 17 sheet of paper, which Microsoft loved.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because I think Bill is about as good at that as anyone was. Although he could sometimes be, Bill can be pretty aggressive sometimes and sometimes relatively dismissive of people. I try and be respectful, a little bit more respectful than that. Bill's one of Bill's, one of the things Bill is known for saying is that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And he used that line so often it started to lose its effectiveness because eventually you've decided that once you've heard something's the dumbest thing you've ever heard a hundred times, it must not be that dumb. But from Steve, on the other hand, Steve is an incredible businessman, probably one of the most multidimensional, smart mathematical thinkers I've ever seen. Steve could”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I learned from Bill and Steve. Bill is technically one of the strongest people I've ever met. He's a brilliant guy, also very good with people and recruiting technical people. Bill has a great ability to build strong technical relationships with people. And that, I think, has really guided him on his career. And I think maybe if I want to say if there's one thing I learned from Bill, it's that building these relationships with people, the technical people, is so critical. If you look at my career, I've mostly assisted brilliant technical entrepreneurs to build their technology and their product. It's really where the idea, the data protrex came from, this idea of data entrepreneurs. And even when I was at Microsoft, I had the recognition that I was working with data entrepreneurs while I was at Microsoft and then, of course, subsequently have done so at places like Snowflake and the things I've done since then. But I learned an enormous amount about how to work with those technical people from business.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About those things, but you knew of servers was being talked about that it meant that they wanted to highlight something back then. I left Microsoft in 2011, spent a couple years at Juniper, which reintroduced me to the Bay Area and then took the Snowflake job in 2014, May of 2014, and ran the company for five years. Subsequently, since I left Snowflake in 2019, I've been working on boards on five boards of small private companies. And I really act as an advisor to CEOs of small companies, helping them, helping them build their business model. We've got a lot of brilliant technical people out there, and yet they don't necessarily have the business side of things. And I picked all of that up. I mean, I was fortunate to learn at the hands of people like Bill Gates and Steve Balmer, who are as brilliant a businessman as I've ever seen. And so I was able to help a lot of small companies and their CEOs as they start to build their business. So that's what I'm focused on now.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of business for like two years or so. I helped to build Windows NT and the Windows Server business. I ran the early server products and actually ran the tools part of Microsoft, brought together Visual Studio. That was in 1996 when we first created Visual Studio and I was running the division at the time. Did a whole bunch of things that were really solving problems at Microsoft, new problems, and then spent my last seven years running the server and tools group at Microsoft, which was Windows Server, SQL Server, System Center, and the developer tools, the developer tools products. So I brought that division to about $17 billion in revenue, $9 to $17 billion. It was interesting back then. We never got mentioned the server business was growing 15% a year, constantly just 15%, 12%, 18%. We would never get mentioned in the earnings report unless something bad was happening in Windows or the office because they would always talk.”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On PCs back in the early 1980s. And that led me to Microsoft. My wife and I actually had a desire to move up to the Seattle area. And she was the one who really found Microsoft. She's a Stanford MBA and a pretty smart cookie in. She was the one that spotted Microsoft in like 1985. And I joined Microsoft in early 88. My wife actually joined six months later and was there for five years. I spent 23 years at Microsoft. My first job was on SQL Server. I was the first technical person on SQL Server. We had a product manager and I was the technical program manager helping to work with SciBase who actually built the product down in the Bay Area and helping to deliver it on PCs running OS2 at the time initially was running OS2 back in these crazy days. And then I wound up working at Microsoft doing a series of real sort of startup kind of things inside Microsoft for really throughout the 1990s staying on”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. So, I mean, it's interesting because when I was in college, I was sort of studied computer science degree at the University of Michigan, and I sort of was focused on networking and communications, because this was the early 1980s, and I felt like that would grow tremendously. And I joined my first, you know, when I was at Ann Arbor, was in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan, my first technical job was at a company called Condor Computer, which is in the late 1970s. It was an actual true relational database. It ran on incredibly early microprocessor system called a Chromemco. It was this big box with large, if you can believe it, eight inch floppy disks that held a tiny amount of data. It had just a tiny amount of memory in the machine. And yet it was a real relational database. And that's where I started building business applications with data. And then when I joined Rome, which is a communications company back in the 1980s, I want a building business applications there and working with databases. Some of the early networking databases that ran”
2023-09-08 · We Study Billionaires · TIP575: The Future of AI w/ Bob Muglia · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT