YouSaid · the spoken record

Vic Gundotra

lines on the record: 137
first: 2016-12-05
most recent: 2016-12-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Zynga came in. And in the meeting, Eric turned to Mark Pinkis and said, Well, Vic, I want you to work with Vic. Vic's running our social efforts. And then the meeting ended. Everyone left, and only Larry was in the room. And I said, Larry, what was all that about?”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, not quickly because I did mobile until we were about $8 billion run rate. And then we decided it was so important we were going to take all the mobile pieces and reintegrate them into the desktop teams. And so essentially, at that point, I was out of a job And Eric said, let's talk about Facebook. He brought all the vice presidents together and said, you have an assignment Tomorrow, you're all going to present for five minutes on what you're going to go do. And so I sent him a mail, him and Eric and Larry and Sergei, a note at 130 in the morning and said, if I was king, here's the ten things I would do. And so we presented the next day in about a week later we had a meeting with Mark Pincus.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, when I was running the mobile teams for maps, it was pretty aggressive and offering turn by turn directions for free was a very aggressive thing to do.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said, I don't have time for this and walked out Alan Eustace pulled me aside and said, Let me offer you some coaching. He said, this is in Microsoft. You should probably let people finish their thoughts And I went home. My wife said, How'd your first day go? I go, I got in trouble on my first day.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I got in trouble my first day. Yeah. My first eye was in Alan Eustace's office, Andy Rubin walked by. Alan interrupted Andy. So, Andy, come in. Come in, sit down. And tell Vic what you're working on. He's working on the secret project called Android. Andy didn't get five minutes into his conversation I interrupted him. And I said, Andy, why would Google build an operating system? And I pushed on it really hard. Andy got frustrated.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to Nokia. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the reason we had a mobile team. Was because the desktop teams just didn't think mobile was big enough It's amazing now mobile traffic exceeds desktop. Yeah. In most areas. Those were an amazing, amazing number of years. The Gmail team was four or five people. The Google Maps team was five people. It was very, very small teams of people. It's hard to imagine that a few years later”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did. The first thing they asked me to do was run all of their developer relations effort at the time. They really didn't have any developer relations group. There was no Google IO. It was nothing like that. They didn't really even have a platform. And then about six weeks into my job, they asked me to run all of mobile. And so I ran all of the mobile applications. Andy ran the Android. But I was responsible for mobile applications across iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Nokia devices, Gmail, Google Maps, search, everything. And that was quite an amazing”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I'm a platform guy, and I really believe in investing my personal efforts into what is the successful platform or will be the successful platform. And Windows Day had passed. The internet really was the new platform. And Google had a deep understanding of the type of architecture, software that was built for the cloud, for the internet would be based on. And that's where I felt I needed to be.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so she made me reconsider. And I called Google back up Alan Eustace, actually. I called up Alan. I said, Alan, I know I said no, but can you give me a few more hours to think about this? And he laughed, he said, Vic, take your time. We know how difficult this is And I decided to go to Google, and I was nervous and scared.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't a great reaction. It wasn't a great reaction. It was a very sad reaction. In fact, the truth is interviewed at Google for a year. And then called up Google and said, I'm not going because I was offered a really great vice president position on the MSN team and I was going to stay at Microsoft. And we went on vacation to Hawaii, and I made my decision. I called Google, so I'm not going. I'm going to stay at Microsoft, and I went on vacation, and I was walking along the beach in Hawaii. My wife said, you look really sad for someone who got a dream. Started off as a systems engineer, now a vice president at Microsoft. You look I said, why do you think I look sad? She goes, You just look like you're afraid. You're not the vic I know. You look like you took the safe bet. I said, I did take the safe bet”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've spent so many hours with Steve Bomber. And he is an incredibly passionate man The most violent thing I've ever seen him do. Is slap his hands together That's it”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the chair I never believed actually happened. In fact, I think the chair came from a story from Mark Lukowski, which even Mark says Steve never threw the chair.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cooperation and everyone can win. I spent a lot of years with Satya when I was at Microsoft, and I'm not sure that Bill and the board could have picked anyone better. The right personality at the right time”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's also the incorrect belief that everything is a zero sum game. That if I win, you have to lose. And that's we live in a world of abundance”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right Right. It shouldn't have. It really shouldn't have. The aggression was so, you know. I think it's the, we'll talk about this later, but it's the idea that you're not powerful and you're so powerful, like the concept. It's sort of like, again, like this election that all these. Sort of this white rage. They think they've had all this privilege and equality feels like oppression.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly By the way, I tried helping people at Google understand that we had gone through this trajectory so that when Google faced regulatory pressure, we could avoid that. In fact, I wrote a famous email that was widely circulated. About how not to do what Microsoft did. In many ways, this Trump thing that just happened has many similarities. People just didn't see it coming. And certainly in Microsoft, it caught us off guard.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. If you just tell them that there's conversation. Then you go into anger, which is no, people are out to get us. And we're going to fight them and prove them that they're on”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was kind of shocking. I mean, imagine waking up every morning and you hear the United States of America versus Microsoft. That's how the courtroom opened up every morning. And when you spend a 10 years building something, you can't believe you go through different stages. The first stage you go through is, look, they just don't understand.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm sure I learned a lot from that. In fact, I probably had some deprogramming I had to go through when I went to Google. I'm not sure that one culture is better than the other.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and we were much more of a start up, a very aggressive culture. And Bill, his personality, really was reflected in the rest of the culture.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do have that reputation in the sense that people at Microsoft, and I think I share the same trait, really are very clear in terms of a vision of what we're trying to pursue and are very vocal about it. And that is different than some companies where the culture is much more consensus oriented. And at the time, competing against IBM, there was no time for consensus. Bill said, this is what we're going to build. And we execute”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I had the most amazing time. I think Steve liked the fact that I was a developer who enjoyed talking to other developers. And truthfully, I was probably better at driving adoption of developers than writing code.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Seattle Redmond. Actually, I lived in Bellevue. Actually, wait, wait, that's not true. When I was a kid, I actually lived in Redmond and then later moved to Bellevue. It's right across the street.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Initially, it was working on something called the, it was a VA contract that Microsoft was trying to win. I was the engineer on the project doing the RFP. I remember the head of the Veterans Affairs after I did my demo and tried to convince him that this was the right platform. He put his hands on my shoulders and he said, young man, you did a really great demo, but we are never buying three thousand dollars color typewriters. Because remember at the time, a GUI and a graphics car, it wasn't a foregone conclusion that graphical user interfaces were going to win. Right. And at the time, it seemed like a crazy expense.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I got in and I met the greatest people, Bill I learned so much from Bill and Steve, had the most amazing fifteen year career there, ran their developer relations group, which I later applied in driving Android adoption, but learned about what it took to have a developer ecosystem. Remember, Windows was the underdog. OS2 was going to win. That's right. And so the first challenge I got from the leadership team in Microsoft was how do you get developers to write for Windows when they're all writing for OS too? Right.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is a decade before a decade before. This is when Microsoft was very small. And I got in, I don't think I would have been hired at Microsoft later.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think I got in at a time period during those couple of months when they would take any engineer. And I had the right background”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happened was they were just starting up their federal group. And I think honestly This is 1991. The crew was really starting to grow. But what happened was it was concurrent with when IBM was breaking up with Microsoft. And the headlines in the press were very negative on Microsoft. And I think they lowered the hiring bar. They were desperate to find people.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said, Mom, I think it's going to be okay. When they offered me a position, they said, let's talk about your options. I assumed that meant they were going to give me two or three different jobs to choose from. Didn't even understand that meant stock options”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a refuge. It was a refuge. And control. I had an ability to control. Exactly. And then when I went to college, I decided”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did it on my own. I studied every book I could get. I couldn't understand Byte magazine when I was 11. And one day about when I was about 18, I realized I understood every article from programming the databases. I did it all.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to school for the first time, Mr. I was cool. Everyone looked over and said, How did you do that? And then I remembered everything I'd learned in the machine learning language programming class, understood how to read the memory buffer, and I was hooked. I was hooked.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was 10 years old at my school, there was a principal who had the insight to pull about ten kids out and said I'd like to teach you computer programming. Actually, machine language work. And I somehow was selected. I did the class, I found it exceptionally boring. Until one spring I ran across an article in a magazine called Byte Magazine. And they showed you a trick on the Apple computer you could hit control break and you would drop into the memory buffer and you could look around and see what was going on. In fact, the trick was you could redirect the graphics buffer to a printer. And it just dawned on me that I could interrupt my video games and take what was in the graphics buffer, redirect it to the printer, and now my school books, my covers for my books had loadrunner, who was a popular video game, screens on them.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there were some bad things that were happening in my life, in my personal life, that I couldn't have, I had no control over But when I sat down as a 12, 13 year old in front of a computer, I had control. I learned programming allowed me to build beautiful things. I could compile them, fix the bugs, and they were mine.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I loved programming at a very, very early age, about 11 years old. And it was far easier to program than talk to girls. So that's what I did, my teenage years. I coded nonstop.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, when I was a kid, I was a hardcore nerd at a time when that wasn't super cool. Right outside of Washington, D.C. in Maryland.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So you've had quite a history. So let's talk a little bit about you because I think it's where you came from is super interesting. Talk like how you got to tech in general and then to a live core in the end.”
2016-12-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Vic Gundotra, CEO, AliveCor · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT