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Satya Nadella

Things Satya Says on Podcasts

Where to Find Them

Satya Nadella has been a guest on GeekWire (4 times) , Bloomberg Tech (3 times) , Closing Bell (3 times) , Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel (3 times) , Masters of Scale (3 times) , All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg (2 times) , Dwarkesh Podcast (2 times) , Decoder with Nilay Patel (2 times) , TBPN (2 times) , BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley (2 times) , Freakonomics Radio (2 times) , The Circuit with Emily Chang (2 times) , Pivot (Kara Swisher & Scott Galloway) (2 times) , No Priors , HBR IdeaCast , The Exchange , Rowan's Notes , Bloomberg Daybreak: US Edition , Economist Podcasts , Cheeky Pint , Squawk Pod , On with Kara Swisher , Greymatter , Latent Space , Hard Fork (NYT) , Y Combinator Startup Podcast , Worklife with Molly Graham , The Journal. , Sources , TED Tech , Possible , The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch , View From The Top , Babbage from The Economist and OMR Podcast .

Recently: “20VC: Satya Nadella on Open vs Closed Models: Who Wins | Whether to Trust Frontier Model Providers | Why Companies Need to Own Their Own Intelligence | The Importance of Verticalisation: From Chips to Models and More” on The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch (October 2026); “Satya Nadella on Microsoft's agent bet and AI’s trust problem” on Sources (September 2026); “Satya Nadella on the AI Doomer Slowdown, Microsoft's Master Plan & Who Wins AI” on All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg (September 2026); “Amazon's next big business, Satya Nadella's DIY app, and a VC's rallying cry for Seattle tech” on GeekWire (August 2026); “Possible: Satya Nadella on making human and token capital compound” on Masters of Scale (July 2026); “Microsoft’s CEO Has a Message: Don’t Let AI Eat the Economy” on The Journal. (July 2026).

What They Said

“One of the things that I'm very gung-ho about is we all become, every firm will have a private eval benchmark, which is their core IP. And every model comes in and tries to sort of hill climb on that eval. And that to me is how a firm works.” — Satya Nadella, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Nadella on the future of the firm in an age of AI, citing Hayek on local knowledge and Kenneth Arrow's information paradox. His worry is that companies leak value to model providers just by using them. He argues they should keep that surplus in their own data, context and evaluations.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 2026-10-26 Permalink → Listen →
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 10:20 into the episode
Satya Nadella

It may be, it may be open weights. Or as I said, it can also be cheap closed rates, right? Because there'll be lots of price competition, let me put it that way, right? Because if you look at my own usage inside a Copilot, we use a lot of closed source, cheaper models along with open weight models.

Harry Stebbings

You said about kind of the importance of owning your own intelligence for some of your amazing customers that you have. You were talking about some in the UK. Is that the model environment that we have moving forward, specialized intelligence for companies with their own data?

Satya Nadella

…capturing that value for yourself. So I think one of the things that at least I ascribe is that we need to have, for this to be stable, more of that surplus that gets created by use of intelligence to remain at the firm. And by the way, it doesn't need to be only by embedding your knowledge in weights. It can be in context. It can be in your evals, right? You may have a benchmark. In fact, one of the things that I'm very gung-ho about is we all become, every firm will have a private eval benchmark, which is their core IP. And every model comes in and tries to sort of hill climb on that eval. And that to me is how a firm works.

Harry Stebbings

I love this private evals, benchmarks for each company. This is for a rarefied era of companies, so it would seem. Your Harveys or your Lagora's or the kind of very forward-thinking AI companies. Will that disperse to every company in the world, you mentioned it? Yeah, it happens.

Satya Nadella

Yeah, it happens, Harry, always, right? Which is, you know, there was a day when I remember in the late 80s and the early 90s that the few companies that had deployed PCs and were doing forecasting, which felt magical, they were able to put it in Excel spreadsheets, send it an email, and avoid the…

Harry Stebbings

we move into an implementation economy then? Because when we think about these customers, as you said, some of your very big customers, they will need heavy FDE support, much more so than they have done in traditional years when the last 10 years. Will we have a very heavy implementation economy to…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode
“I think the biggest change now I have is I used to always think that alignment will just fall out. I no longer believe that. So I think this alignment thing may be a harder, different problem.” — Satya Nadella, The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch

Asked what he has changed his mind on in the last year, the Microsoft CEO says he was an early believer in scaling laws in 2018 and 2019. He now thinks alignment won't come for free from scale. Earlier in the interview he argued it has to be built in from the start rather than added later.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch · 2026-10-26 Permalink → Listen →
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch Around 21:12 into the episode
Satya Nadella

…years even on, which is every morning I get up and I used to be able to run. Unfortunately, my knees have gone away. And so now at least I walk with incline. Even this morning, I was able to get a half hour in. And so that's what, in spite of any jet lag, wherever I am, I get hit the gym every day.

Harry Stebbings

I too have bad knees. It's my age as well. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

Satya Nadella

It might be because after all, I was one of the first. Obviously, when Dario and Ilya and Sam and Greg and Elon were all, I guess, one happy family, they were really the believers in scaling laws. And that's what I believed in back in 2018, 2019. And I think the biggest change now I have is I used to always think that alignment will just fall out. I no longer believe that. So I think this alignment thing may be a harder, different problem. And so, yeah, that's the one thing I've changed my mind on.

Harry Stebbings

What looks crazy today, but will be incredibly common and accepted in five years.

Satya Nadella

You know, it might be that thing that we just talked about, this evals, right? What is a firm? I think a firm would be an AI benchmark.

Harry Stebbings

Final one for you. There are many things to be excited about over the next 10 years. For you specifically, like for me, it's my mother's got MS. I'm so excited for the drug development that could be capable. What are you most excited for?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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