The Corporate Corner
Episode 009
David Sobeski
Part I
Background
For years I talked to David about this podcast I want to make and that he just have to be part of it so he is aware, but when we meet up at the local Starbucks before the talk he is making it clear that this is not something he is looking forward to.
It’s snowing outside, a cold January day in Prague, one of these days you just want to put a blanket over your head and sleep an hour more.
“Where are your questions? David is asking.
“I thought you were going to have a notepad with questions”
Maybe I should be more structured I’m thinking, but questions for David I have more than enough of. He is like an encyclopedia of modern and ancient technology and knows literally everybody who is worth knowing in the technology industry. After the podcast episode with Tony Schiavo David is messaging me that he thinks he knows Tony, they studied at same place and same time and he remembered the accountant guy. Same when I read about some company or that and that person, it nearly always turns David is knowing them.
I decide to throw the structure of the interview upside down and start with these questions that is burning my head, the ones about Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Bill Gates and Microsoft
I recently started to follow Bill Gates blogs and his LinkedIn posts and he comes across as this amazing philantrop caring about everything from Vaccines, Alzheimer’s to Artificial Intelligence and meditation at it sound somehow too good to be true.
How was he really as a boss? I wonder and I ask David, who had the opportunity to work with him in Microsoft.
He tells us the following:
We were very focused on making sure we had a great product or we beat this competitor or that competitor. He was very competetive, very aggressive, very to the point.
He had a communication style in a meeting where you kind of had to impress him. He would ask very tough questions, he knew a lot before coming in to a meeting, but I think the one attribute he has is he can listen very quickly, process very quickly and ask really, really hard questions and you need to be able to answer these questions or it just turns bad.
David continues:
It wasn’t like he was trying to be mean spirited it was really about trying to push you and trying to get the best out of you and thus the team.
David talks more about Microsoft and how it is a company with a lot of technically really smart people and that in the old days the tend to build products from a technology view first rather than with a product view.
Microsoft was a developer lead company, we would build Windows SDK, Visual Studio, C++ compilers, we spent a lot of time building the developer tools we used ourselves.
David explains how inside Microsoft they felt like the underdog who could be outcompeted at any moment, while from the outside many of us felt like Microsoft was this big monopoly.
David gives us some insight into what Microsoft were the late 90ties and early 2000 years and he is also mentioning how he for the first 10 years at Microsoft worked 7 days a week and never took a day off. Pretty amazing and unbelievable for a European thinking of work life balance.
David’s background.
David is talking about how he grow up in West Pittston, Pennsylvania in a classic middle class family with parents who sacrificed for themselves for their kids.
David was lucky to get his first computer, a Texas TI/99-4A computer as a young kid and that is when he started to use computers by playing games and not long after doing programming himself.
In high school he won a statewide coding competition and then went to university and studied computer science and mathematics.
He is praising the connections you make in university as very important.
He learnt the importance of time management at an early age and always tried to under promise and over deliver.
IBM
David’s second job was a IBM where he joined the IBM Watson research center where he worked on software for phones and he worked on the first smartphone, the IBM Simon phone.
His boss at IBM wanted him to wear a white shirt and maroon tie and to come to work at very specific times and David got yelled at for not obeying the rigid IBM rules. One of the reason he left IBM relativeley quickly.
Building Great Products
David is talking about the importance of being a listener, a user of things and to love the idea of investigation. Be a customer and never be afraid of asking dumb questions.
He gives as an example, the movie Big where Tom Hanks plays the kid Josh Baskin whose wish it is to be a grown up.
In one of the scenes Josh Baskin is in a meeting with the CEO and the person presenting the new product and by saying some simple phrases out of kids mouth like “I don’t get it” and “it’s just not fun” he turns the whole discussion around and David emphasizes the importance of never loosing your eyes of innocence.
And More
We cover a lot more in this episode, we also talk about David’s close relation ship with Steve Jobs and their talks about the future of computing.
David talks about a startup he was part of, Playdom, and how they were sold to Disney.
He explains why Computer Science really should be called Computer Art and much, much more. Tune in.
