Hit Refresh: A Memoir by Microsoft’s CEO. Satya Nadella

3.1 had just been released, setting the stage for Windows 95 and the grandest consumer technology product launch yet. Sony introduced the CD-ROM, and the first website was launched, though it would be two more years before the Internet would become a tidal wave. TCI introduced digital cable and the FCC approved digital radio. On a chart, PC sales at this time show the start of a meteoric ascent. Looking back now, I couldn’t have timed my entrance any better. The resources, the talent and the vision were there to compete and to lead the industry. My journey to Redmond had taken me from my home in India to Wisconsin for graduate school to the Silicon Valley to work for Sun. Over the summer I had been recruited to join Microsoft as a twenty-five-year-old evangelist for Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system that was designed to extend the company’s popular consumer program into much more powerful business systems. A few years later NT would become the backbone of future Windows versions. Even today’s generation of Windows, Windows 10, builds on the original NT architecture. I had heard of NT while working at Sun but had never used it. A colleague had attended a Microsoft conference where they showed off NT to developers. He came back and told me about the product. I thought, wow, this is going to get serious. I wanted to be in a place that would have real impact. The guys who had recruited me to Microsoft, Richard Tait and Jeff Teper, said they needed someone who understood UNIX and 32-bit operating systems. I was a little unsure. What I really wanted to do was go to business school. I knew that management would complement my engineering training, and I had been thinking about a switch to investment banking. I had gotten into the full-time program at University of Chicago, but Teper said, “You should just join us straightaway.” I decided to do both. I was able to switch my admission to the part-time program at Chicago, but then never told anyone that I was flying to Chicago for weekends. I finished my MBA in two years and was glad I did. During the week my job was to fly all over the country—lugging these enormous Compaq computers—to meet with customers, usually chief information officers at places like Georgia Pacific or Mobil, to convince them that our new, more robust operating system for business was superior to the others and convert them. And at school I learned more math by taking high-level finance classes in Chicago than in my engineering coursework. The classes I took with Steven Kaplan, Marvin Zonis, and many other storied faculty at the university on strategy, finance, and leadership influenced my thinking and intellectual pursuits long after I completed the MBA. It was an exciting time to be at Microsoft. Not long after joining I met Steve Ballmer for the first time. He stopped by my office to give me one of his very expressive high fives for leaving Sun and joining Microsoft. It was the first of what would be many interesting and enjoyable conversations with Steve over the years. There was a true sense of mission and energy at the company then. The sky was the limit.

      * * *

      Within a few years my work on Windows NT landed me in a new advanced technology group, founded by Renaissance man Nathan Myhrvold. Along with Rick Rashid, Craig Mundie, and others, Microsoft was assembling the greatest technology IQ since Xerox PARC, the famed Silicon Valley center for innovation. I was humbled when asked to join the group as a product manager on a project code-named Tiger Server, which was a major investment in building a video-on-demand (VOD) service. It would be years before cable companies would deliver the technology and business model to support VOD, and years before Netflix made video streaming mainstream. Fortunately, I lived right next to the Microsoft campus, the endpoint for all of this amazing broadband infrastructure that made our VOD pilot possible. So in 1994, long before it was commercially available, I had video-on-demand while sitting in my little apartment. We only had about fifteen movies but I remember watching them over and over again. Even as our team planned to launch our Tiger server over a fully switched asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network to the home, we saw our idea become obsolete virtually overnight with the birth of the Internet.

      * * *

      While my mind was fully engaged, my heart was distracted. Anu and I had decided to marry when I made a trip back to India just before joining Microsoft. I had known Anu all of my life. Her dad and my father had joined the IAS together and we were family friends. In fact, Anu’s dad and I shared a passion for talking endlessly about cricket, something we continue to this day. He had played for his school and college, captaining both teams. When exactly I fell in love with Anu is what computer scientists would call an NP complete question. I can come up with many times and places but there is no one answer. In other words, it’s complex. Our families were close. Our social circles were the same. As kids we had played together. We overlapped in school and college. Our beloved family dog came from Anu’s family dog’s litter. But once I moved to the United States, I lost touch with her. When I went back to India for a visit, we saw each other again. She was in her final year of architecture at Manipal and enjoying an internship in New Delhi. Our two families met for dinner one evening, and that night, more than ever, I was convinced that she was the one. We shared the same values, the same outlook on the world, and dreamed of similar futures. In many ways, her family was already mine and mine hers. The next day, I persuaded her to take me to an optician where I needed to have my glasses repaired. After the appointment, we walked and talked for hours in the neighboring Lodi Gardens, an ancient architectural site that today is popular with tourists. Anu, a student of architecture, loved all the historical monuments that dotted Delhi, and for days afterward we explored them together. I had visited them all before as a kid. But this was different. We stopped for lunch on Pandara Road, enjoyed plays in the National Institute of Drama, and shopped in the bookstores of Khan Market. We had fallen in love. It was in the lush Lodi Gardens that one October afternoon in 1992 I proposed and, thankfully for me, Anu said yes. We walked back to Anu’s place on Humayun Road and broke the news to Anu’s mom. We were married just two months later, in December. It was a happy time, but the complications of immigration would soon prove a challenge.

      * * *

      Anu was in the last year of her architecture degree and the plan was for her to complete the remaining course and join me in Redmond. In the summer of 1993, Anu applied for a visa to join me during her final vacation before finishing school. But her visa application was rejected because she was married to a permanent resident. Anu’s father sought an appointment with the U.S. consul general in New Delhi and argued with him that the U.S. visa rules were not consistent with the family values that the United States stood for. The combination of his persuasiveness and the kindness of the U.S. consul general led to Anu getting a short-term tourist visa—a rare exception. After her vacation, she returned to India and college to complete her degree. It was now clear to us that Anu’s return to the United States would be very difficult given the visa waitlist for spouses of permanent residents. Microsoft had an immigration lawyer who told me it would take five or more years to get Anu into the country under existing rules. I contemplated quitting Microsoft and returning to India. But our lawyer, Ira Rubinstein, said something interesting. “Hey, maybe you should give up your green card and go back to an H1B.” He was suggesting that I give up permanent residency and instead reapply for temporary professional worker status. If you’ve seen the Gerard Depardieu film Green Card, you know the comedic lengths people will go to to obtain permanent residency in the United States. So why would I give up the coveted green card for temporary status? Well, the H1B enables spouses to come to the United States while their husbands and wives are working here. Such is the perverse logic of this immigration law. There was nothing I could do about it. Anu was my priority. And that made my decision a simple one. I went back to the U.S. embassy in Delhi in June of 1994, past the enormous lines of people hoping to get a visa, and told a clerk that I wanted to give back my green card and apply for an H1B. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. I said something about the crazy immigration policy, he shook his head and pushed a new form to me. “Fill this out.” The next morning, I returned to apply for an H1B application. Miraculously, it all worked. Anu joined me (for good) in Seattle, where we would start a family and build a life together. What I didn’t expect was the instant notoriety around campus. “Hey, there goes the guy who gave up his green card.” Every other day someone would call me and ask for advice. Much later, one of my colleagues, Kunal Bahl, did quit Microsoft when his H1B ran out and his green card had not yet arrived. He returned to India and then founded Snapdeal, which today is worth more than $1 billion and employs five thousand people. Ironically, online, cloud-based companies like Snapdeal would play an important role in my future and that of Microsoft. And the lessons I learned in my former country continue to shape my present.