[upbeat music] Please welcome Swix, Saragoha, Aladhgil, and Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, Satya Nadella.

So the ability to have a, some end-to-end project like this complete is just pretty miraculous.

How do you think that impacts the different types of engineering roles that exist in the future? Because right now I think there's a dozen different types of engineers that you can be, from QA, front end, et cetera.

There's a big swath.

I've heard some people argue that in four or five years we'll basically end up with four engineering roles.

It'll be people who are managing agents, it'll be four deployed engineers or FDEs, it'll be security engineers, and then people working on large scale infrastructure for a small number of services, and then everything else just collapses into the agentic world.

But could you speak to either or both of those a bit? And if you wanna take it a different direction, I mean, it's really just boards writ large.

When founders pull together boards, often their early boards are investors because the investors ask for a board seat as part of it, or as part of the investment.

And sometimes the founders want somebody on board who's really committed to the company and will help out extra, and to some extent, when somebody takes a board seat, it really means, or it should mean that they're all in to help you versus, you know, you can have lots and lots of investors, but you have very few board members.

Reid Hoffman has this thing which is, like, a board member at its best is like a co-founder that you wouldn't be able to hire, and so you bring them onto your board, and they kinda...

It's somebody that you wanna spend more time with on specific issues related to the company.

But fundamentally, your board should be able to help with different areas of the company.

It could be strategic direction, it could be closing candidates, it could be product areas, it could be customer intros, it could be a variety of things.

How do you determineWhat is a good versus great market? Or just what is a great market? What do you look for? And the example you gave, I might be overreading this, but when you said that when Google shut down, I think it was Maven, that's an interesting kind of event-based approach as an input to investing, right? 'Cause you're like, "Okay, if they're not gonna build it, that suddenly creates a playing field for startups to play in that space." So could you speak to more of how you determine or look for great markets?

... humanoid?

Yeah, it's interesting.

It feels like, um, for a long time, robotics was one of those areas that was always gonna happen, and didn't quite, right? If you looked at the installed base of robots, it was in the hundreds of thousands of new robots per year, largely for automotive and very specific industrial applications.

And it seems like now we're going through a sea change, and I think, um, you know, it's kind of funny actually.

If you ask what's a robot, your dishwasher, to some extent, is a robot, right? Like, a lot of things that we kind of take for granted now are robots.

Um, in the modern era, the things that are really emerging now are obviously some of the things that were just mentioned relative to Amazon, but also even self-driving cars and Waymo and, uh, Tesla and what's happening there.

Those are robots, right? Those are cars that drive themselves.

Um, and so it really does come down to the operating system of America where the states are supposed to have some sovereignty-

Yeah.

It's the labor market versus the software market.

And I think that's very underappreciated when you think about market size for some of these things.

You're really gonna miss the size of these markets and how big they are.

You know, the services economy that we looked at on, on my team in terms of, like, where AI could intervene is about $5 trillion, right? So it's a lot of GDP is accessible to this.

And so then you ask, okay, is it, uh, is it a workflow that's specialized to customer support, legal, whatever? Is it a roll-up where you're buying assets and changing them? Is it a different approach? Like, how do you sort of span all the change that's coming because of this?

Sure.

... um, really adopt AI.

The cluster, we were talking a little bit about this before we started recording about clusters of people.

Mm-hmm, yeah.

Yeah, it's really fascinating because if you look at almost every major movement throughout history, and that could be a literary movement, it could be an artistic movement, it could be a finance movement, um, e- economic schools of thought, uh, it's almost always a group of young people aggregating in a specific city who all somehow find each other and all start collaborating and working together towards some common set of goals that reflect that.

So there was, um, you know, a famous literary school in the early, uh, 20th century in London that was, I think it was, like, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster and all these people all kinda aggregated and became friends and started supporting each other.

Or you look at the Italian Renaissance.

Similarly in Florence you had this aggregation of all these great talents, all timely, uh, in a timely manner coincided with each other.

Or Fauvism or Italian Futurism or Impressionism, Paris in the, you know, late 1800s.

... and things that get in the way?