[mcintyre1994]

Alright, all great things for a startup guy but I don't think they're the qualities required for the CEO of a multibillion sprawling company. They have no need to popularise or use lisp, no need to sell companies and I'm not convinced this is bigger than eg /r/technology? Not that that's a bad thing, but it's a bold claim to say this is the biggest tech news forum.

Way more importantly though, PG hasn't turned creating startups into an assembly line. The closest thing to an assembly line he's got is converting strong founders into startups, and still the majority 'fail'. For him to continue that at Microsoft, Microsoft would need to attract strong founders consistently and there's no reason to suspect they can. My suspicion is Microsoft has about as many billion-dollar units as PG has billion-dollar investments, so the actual value is unclear.

Don't get me wrong, PG has a proven history in startups, technology, investments, he writes well, he seems incredibly smart.. but I don't think he nor Microsoft think he has the qualities of a Microsoft CEO.

[unono]

Microsoft's problem has been growth, and that's because they appear to always miss capitalizing on the new thing (web,search,mobile,social,tablets) - all things a startup guy is most talented at.

They lack vision, a guy who has vision himself and can herd cats (visionaries) is the best thing for them. PG's about as good as anyone at that.

[mcintyre1994]

I'm sure I've missed one but I can't think of a dominant force in any of them fields that YC have invested in. I don't know about every investment, and like I said I've surely missed one, and I'm sure their portfolio has come closer than Microsoft to them markets, but if I were looking to find someone capitalising on them I can't think of any YC company immediately. Any ideas?

Edit: To be fair, Dropbox beat Microsoft to making cloud services popular. Microsoft do have a successful web services sector now though. Also I guess Reddit count for social, they have a very solid niche - but they wouldn't benefit under a company like Microsoft. They admitted it was a miracle Conde Nast didn't destroy their brand.

[unono]

Airbnb and Heroku. And all this is since 2004, with tiny funds, and early 20s kids. Imagine how he'd do with unlimited money and talent.