Full Transcript Of Satya Nadella's Talk At LinkedIn's All Hands Meeting

Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that they are acquiring LinkedIn for $26 billion. You can read Satya Nadella’s email to Microsoft employees regarding this acquisition here and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s memo for his employees here. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella attended the All Hands Meeting on June 13 at LinkedIn office and he along with LinkedIn co-founders spoke about the deal and the future of LinkedIn inside Microsoft. Read the full transcript of the All Hands Meeting below.

Read the full transcript below,

Satya Nadella: Thank you so much, Reid and Jeff. You know, the first words that come to me is admiration. Admiration for what Reid has created, what Jeff has created and built, and all of you have built. Really, I thought Jeff talked about the different emotions that could be all going through. I’m hoping that one of those emotions is real pride. You all absolutely deserve to be very, very proud of having created LinkedIn, made LinkedIn into what it is, and that sense of purpose with which you’ve built this — that to me is what I admire the most in people, and what I admire the most in the institutions that people build. So this time around, give yourselves a round of applause that can go as long as you want.

So what I thought I will do is just give you a little bit of a feel for how I think we at Microsoft think, and what is our excitement of having this chance to work with you all. It starts with the mission. That’s the first thing. When Reid and I started talking and when I first met Jeff, the sense of purpose to me is everything. At Microsoft I talk about our mission is empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more — it has real deep meaning for all of us and for me. Because when you think about ultimately how does all of this digital technology make a difference, it has to be about empowering people and organizations. In fact, I think a lot about going beyond individual people, because quite frankly it is the institutions that move societies, that make economies, and if you don’t have digital technology, software, help people build institutions that outlast them, then you’ve not accomplished much, so that’s what I think about. I think about, how can we as Microsoft really empower people to build things that can even outlast them? And when you think about that as the mission, and what LinkedIn has done, what LinkedIn has built, what LinkedIn has always aspired to create, of connecting the world’s professionals to be more productive and successful — Jeff said this super well, these two missions are exactly isomorphic. They are the same. They are the realization of how technology can shape people and the institutions they build, and that is really, really exciting, because I think a lot of technologies will come and go but that sense of identity, sense of purpose, is what will give us that energy to keep reinventing ourselves. So talking about reinvention — Microsoft – this is our 41st year. We have had a tremendous history of success, here we are, north of $400 billion of market cap, 90+ billion dollars in revenue, and behind all that stuff though, each time, in each era, you have to start with high ambition for what you can do going forward. So I want to give you a little bit of a flavor of how we think about Microsoft going forward. The first thing I talk a lot about, and Qi who is here. We dream a lot about, what we call reinventing productivity and business process. The way I come to it is by saying in all this abundance, computing is becoming ubiquitous and we have multiple devices per person and what have you, but what is scarce is human attention and time. So how can we get people to capture that back? How can they be more productive, how can they get more out of every moment of their lives? That is what I think, it is not just building another version of any tool or app or service, it is, how can we truly empower people to be able to capture more out of every moment of their life? And when you think about that and you think about the combination of what we do in Office and Office 365 and LinkedIn, I told Jeff in one of the interviews we just did, you don’t go to LinkedIn to waste time, you go to LinkedIn to gain time. I thought that was a fantastic way to capture the realization of what both of us really seek. Today we have these two graphs, Microsoft graph which is the information fabric underneath all of the activity that happens inside the enterprise. People, the relationships with other people that’s captured in active directory, the calendars, the schedules, work artifacts, in fact you can extend that graph, you have needs in CRM, prospects — all of that inside this information graph, which we call Microsoft graph, that is something our team has been building. We also have another graph which is the world’s graph inside of Bing. Now just imagine we connect all of that with the professional graph that you have, and the dream you have, the vision you have for creating the true economic opportunity.

That ability to connect these two worlds is fairly unique. We’ve got to realize it in tasteful, natural ways for the LinkedIn members, for all the professionals who use Office, Office tools, and LinkedIn, whether it is to be a salesperson, a recruiter, someone who is trying to learn some new skill — there is plenty of great user experience work you have to do in order to make this stuff really tasteful, natural. But our ability to change the professional world, of connecting this professional cloud and the professional network is the most unbounded opportunity that there is, and Jeff captured this. Because if you look at the world today — I get to travel the world, meet many leaders across the world, what is the number one issue for everyone? Skills. How are they going to enable their population, their societies, to be ready for this digital economy? Everyone wants employment growth in a world with a lot of displacement, and the only solution to that is this continuous up-skilling of your people, and to me that is what we encompass by bringing dynamics, Office 365, and LinkedIn together. So we have got to have very high ambition.

You represent that already with what you have built with LinkedIn, but let’s take that to the one billion+ users today who use our tools and bring this economic opportunity in a digital world to every corner of the world, that is the ambition. The second thing we are up to, that is also very related to, I think, what we will do is a combination is building up this cloud infrastructure, which we refer to as the Intelligent Cloud. I have known Kevin for a while and I’m already thinking about, when will I get that first look at, hey where are my GPUs to do my machine learning? The way we measure is per capita per developer in terms of machine power, because to be able to bring that AI capability to your newsfeed relevance, we are building out not simply as in the structure stack but we want to bring the power of a set of cognitive services, whether it is computer vision, speech, natural language understanding, whether it is the knowledge graph, and making that available as a set of APIs, as well as the full data platform for you to do machine learning at scale. That rich infrastructure, coupled with the kinds of things you are doing at LinkedIn, it’s very exciting. I want you to be able to tell you what you need to do in the infrastructure, because platform companies are all about a feedback loop from people pushing the envelope when it comes to the outside, pushing what needs to happen in the infrastructure side, and I mean infrastructure all the way to silicon. At this point we spend over $5 billion of capital building out infrastructure, we build our own network, we build anything and everything needed in order to build essentially a global scale cloud infrastructure, but all that is only interesting if there are apps like LinkedIn or networks like LinkedIn pushing it, pushing it, so I’m so excited about that opportunity.

The last thing I want to talk about is what we are trying to do in personal computing, after all we are a Windows company, we started there. We started as a tools company, the first product that Bill and Paul built was a basic printer for the Altair, then we built apps for the Mac, that was the second, and here we are. [LAUGHTER] The other thing about it, you should know is, that just down the road is the PowerPoint team, one of the first acquisitions of Microsoft in 1987. Of course now PowerPoint is what you all love and know. But it is so interesting to think about what is going to happen in personal computing. We are not building an operating system for just a single device, when I think about even Windows 10, the way we conceptualized it is, we are building an operating system for the user across all the devices. It is a service, that is how I think of it. Windows update is probably the biggest service we have because it touches 1.5 billion machines every day, and our goal is to really change what is the definition of an operating system, and operating systems for personal computing are always about

inventing the next big change in input/output. And it is no question that we really missed the mobile one, therefore we understand it, we have a particular position in mobile today which is more about enterprise and where we can have more security, more management, more productivity, we will focus on that, but we are on to the next big thing. And if you look at what is happening even today, I don’t know when exactly the Xbox event is, but it must be happening in parallel, hopefully I don’t disclose anything before them or what have you — but the idea that we can bring AR and VR into this one continuum of what we talk about as mixed reality, is something we are very excited about. Think about this, the field-of-view becoming an infinite display where what you see is not just the analog world, but it is a world into which you can superimpose digital artifacts. That is a completely new medium, that is what HoloLens is, and Jeff said, hey where is my HoloLens? He will get one in a couple of days, and I’m really looking forward to all of you having —

[unintelligible yelling offstage] [LAUGHTER]

It is the most mind-blowing new medium I have ever seen, because it changes all your assumptions about what you will do with computing. You can have your 80-inch screen wherever and whenever you want, and what it means for — think about professions. What it means for architecture. It will never be — my wife is an architect and she looks at it and says, wow, that means I can design and see what I’m designing as a holographic output right there. Think about industrial design. Completely changes. Medical education. Some of the work that Cleveland Clinic is doing, where medical students that are trying to understand the human body can look at the human body, inspect it, along with their teacher. Education changes dramatically. So there isn’t a field or vertical industry — by the way, gaming too — we are excited about what Minecraft, on HoloLens could be. So to break new ground, underneath all this is amazing gesture recognition, amazing computer vision, because you have to essentially look at a scene, reconstruct the scene, understand every object and position it, and then to be able to place other objects in it, and do it in real time. That is the level of innovation that we are excited about. These are the three ambitions, we refer to them as reinventing business process and productivity, building up this intelligent cloud, and more personal computing. But besides all the technology, what I think a lot about, and I thought Jeff captured it so well when describing what you have done, which is, your competitive advantage is your culture. And that is what we think ours is as well. That sense of identity — to me the two bookends is that sense of identity and purpose and mission and culture. Those are the things that are constant, and then, technologies will constantly be renewed. And for culture — the way I think about this is not as a static model, there are values that are enduring, but the culture itself that I thought about is, what is a way for us to continuously question and improve and evolve? What is that learning, ultimate learning culture? And the meme and metaphor we picked is inspired by a professor who works at Stanford who has written a book called Mindset, which is more about child psychology, her name is Carol Duak, and her work basically says that the simple way to understand it is, if you take two people in school, one of them is a know-it-all and the other is a learn it all. Even if the know-it-all start with more innate capability, the learn-it-all will ultimately outperform them. That is true for the boys and girls in school, it is true for CEOs like me, it is true for all of us in the organizations we build. So that growth mindset is what we refer to as the cultural high ground we want.

And when I think about that it starts with individual mindsets — see that is what I love about it, it is not about abdicating responsibility for culture to somebody else, it is about being able to grab hold of it individually and thinking about it in our mindset. Sometimes people say I found find people who have a growth mindset. I say, that is not the job. The idea of a growth mindset is for me to recognize individually where have I had a fixed mindset today and to push and say, how can I improve? How can I learn from this person? And that is what is sort of to me, today, is humbling, because I think there is a ton I can learn from LinkedIn. I’m really looking forward to what Microsoft, what I individually, can learn from LinkedIn, and make Microsoft a better place. So thank you all very much, I couldn’t be more excited to join forces with you in really taking the mission you have to help realize the Microsoft mission of empowering every person and organization on the planet, thanks a lot. Thank you.

Satya also sent an email to LinkedIn employees following the meet, read it here.