Staying in the same company for more than thirty years is an almost impossible achievement nowadays, considering the ups and downs of the economy and the current employment scenario. In some companies, it’s hard to get more than two years.
This is not the case for Satya Nadella, who, long before taking the top job at Microsoft, worked as a technical marketing manager at the company and, as such, had to show product innovations to customers and developers.
In 1993, a very young Satya Nadella, somewhat gangly and with better hair, appeared in a company video in which he demonstrated the benefits of the recently introduced Windows NT and how to work with databases with Excel.
There is no denying that the young Satya puts effort and passion into the narration, but he is light years away from the dedication and enthusiasm that his boss Steve Ballmer transmitted in every presentation. His image of him sweating and dancing, jumping and shouting on stage is one of those that will stick in your retina forever.
Presentations that taste like technological archeology
Nadella himself joked about the video and his haircut in one of his presentations in which he assured that even his daughter asked him “Who is that man?” for not recognizing him.
No wonder, the video shows a technological reality very different from today. Details such as the huge CRT monitor or the need to display a support phone number for developers to contact the Microsoft team takes us, those of us who already comb gray hair in technology, back to times before the democratization of the Internet.
In an amused tone, Microsoft’s CEO established an inversely proportional relationship between the amount of hair he had in those years and the processing power of the technology he was using. “…] I must have reached the limits of physics now, because I can’t lose any more hair. So we are surely in a post-Moore’s Law era where GPUs or FPGAs will come to our aid,” Nadella said with a chuckle.
Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992 and, as he recalled in a recent interview, joining the company founded by Bill Gates was a dream come true for him. “I clearly remember walking into Microsoft Building 22 in 1992 thinking that that was the best job you could have in the world and that I didn’t need anything else.” Thirty-one years later, that young electrical engineer is running Microsoft.
Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer in 2014 becoming Microsoft’s third CEO. Since then, the company has not stopped evolving into a giant valued at $2.4 trillion and with a leading position in the development of AI technology.
This leadership position during the OpenAI soap opera has made Microsoft’s CEO its best asset, demonstrating great astuteness and strategic vision in his decisions.
Satya Nadella’s approximate fortune is estimated at $500 million, although the fact that he is one of the highest paid CEOs in the world will contribute to raising that figure.