Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently recalled a meeting with Bill Gates that still continues to haunt him. Speaking on the Confession with Ali Partovi podcast, Satya Nadella described a meeting from around 2008 or 2009, when he was running the business that would later become Bing. The meeting concerned an acquisition being considered by Microsoft’s enterprise business. Nadella said that the meeting still ‘haunts’ him bn not because of the acquisition being discussed, but because he failed to speak up against a decision he believed was fundamentally flawed.“I remember another more consequential meeting. This was maybe 2008, 2009 maybe. Bill called a meeting. I was at that time running what became Bing later on. And this was an acquisition our enterprise business was making”, Satya Nadella said.He further explained that the proposed deal involved a team working on parallel data warehousing, an area where he felt the company’s approach was heading in the wrong direction. “And they were trying to buy some kind of a parallel data warehouse team. I looked at it. It is completely architecturally stupid in that time to go buy that. This is this other team sort of making some decision which made no sense.”
Why the meeting with Bill Gates still haunts Satya Nadella
Satya Nadella’s regret was not limited to his disagreement with the proposed acquisition. He said the experience made him think about how people in important meetings can fail to speak up even when they believe they see a problem that others may have missed. During the podcast, he recalled leaving the meeting without challenging the decision.“I sat in this review. I distinctly remember this. In fact, it haunts me to think that I may be in a review where there’s somebody in that meeting who sees the future a lot more clearly than I do and the other person presenting, but does not really advocate for it. And so that’s what I did. I just kind of got out of that meeting and I said, ah, this is such a waste of time.”
