Nadella’s Network: How Microsoft’s CEO Avoids Getting Disrupted
Every tech CEO has their way of making sure business threats don’t catch them flat-footed. The CEO of Microsoft’s approach: Never stop talking to startup founders, venture capitalists and Fortune 500 CEOs.
Earlier this year, Aravind Srinivas’ phone rang. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, wanted to dish with Srinivas—CEO of Perplexity, an artificial intelligence–powered search engine startup—on the biggest competitor they had in common: Google.
Days earlier, Google had announced several upgrades to Gemini, its generative AI model, and Nadella wanted to know: Was Srinivas impressed with how much text Gemini could handle in a single prompt? How did the capabilities of OpenAI, Microsoft’s AI ally and a provider of models to Perplexity, stack up to what Google had just announced?
“His focus on the details was pretty tremendous as the CEO of such a large company,” Srinivas said. “You might think of Satya as more of a manager, but it speaks to his ‘founder mode’ way of operating.”