Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - William A. Adams, Software Engineer, DEI Innovator, and Philanthropist

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

William A. Adams is a software engineer, DEI innovator, and philanthropist whose contributions to the field have been documented by the Computer History Museum. He spent more than 20 years at Microsoft, where he rolled out critical XML code globally, co-founded the Leap program, and served as Kevin’s first technical advisor. In this episode, Kevin and William discuss how William got interested in STEM at a young age, founding a software development company in the 80s, his career at Microsoft and pioneering D&I programing, and the importance of equity and diversity in tech.  William A. Adams  Kevin Scott   Behind the Tech with Kevin Scott   Discover and listen to other Microsoft podcasts.   

Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech.

Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. Kevin Scott, CEO, Behind the Tech, is the CEO of Behind the Tech. working at McDonald's or they're back to general population, they don't try again because they got obligations. Hi everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft.

In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who have made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. Join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind the scenes insights into what's happening today. motivated them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around.

Hello, and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm co-host Christina Warren, Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub. And I'm Kevin Scott. And today we have a really exciting guest, William Adams. And I'm Kevin Scott. And, and, and, he just launched a new venture studio aimed to help every Black person interested in having a career in business or technology get into the field. So I'm really excited to hear you two talk. I know you have a lot of history with William Kevin. Yeah, William was one of the first people I recruited into the office of the CTO when I joined Microsoft almost seven years ago. He was an unbelievably valuable member of my team. But maybe more important than that,

William just taught me a ton. He was a source of tremendous inspiration. Technically amazing, but his determination to go give back to people was absolutely extraordinary. I can't wait to chat with him today. I miss him since he's been gone from Microsoft. It's always great to catch up and hopefully we can hit on a few of these inspirational topics

where everybody else can see what inspired me so much about William and the example that he sets for us all. inspirational topics where everybody else can see what inspired me so much about William and the example that he sets for us all. William Adams is a software engineer, DEI innovator, and philanthropist. He founded Atomation, where he developed customer enterprise apps and earned two patents. His contributions to the field there were later documented by the Computer History Museum. William was at Microsoft for more than 20 years and was recognized for rolling out critical XML code globally, as well as for co-founding the Leap Apprenticeship Program, which was named

Microsoft's D&I Program of the Year in 2020. About a year ago, he left Microsoft to create a venture studio aimed to help every Black person interested in having a career or business in technology get into the field and to prosper. Welcome to the show, William. I'm so glad to have you here today. I'm happy to be here. It feels like it's been a super long time. I miss you.

Man, the love is mutual. So we've got a ton of stuff to talk about, but I always start the show by asking folks how they got into STEM in the first place. So tell us a little bit about what lit the spark for you, and we can go from there. Okay, well, I'm a child of the 60s. I was born in 1964. So before all the computer, you know, personal computer stuff and all that. So I started with like, ah, the chemistry set, the physics set. And mind you, this is all when I was probably eight, Hey, let's go to radio shack. I went and buy one of those electronic kits. Right. So, um, I was just kind of self-driven in that way. And it was probably because my dad was a typewriter repair man. So we had stuff in the house. Um, but, uh, he passed away when I was seven. So from then on, I was just like, I was just one of those precocious kids, you know? Yeah. And what did your mom do?

Oh, my mom was, at that time, she worked in Orange County. So she was a county administrator. She started out as being a welfare, what do you call them? She would check on people who were on welfare. And eventually she evolved into being like the office manager of Orange County. So very, very humble beginners. You know, my mom was not into STEM. My dad was not into STEM. My dad was actually in World War II. You know, he had joined the Navy when he was 16. Wow. So, you know, there's no history of STEM in

my family other than my uncle, my mom's brother. And this will come back later in the history. So I just started out as a cautious kid doing wacky stuff on my own. I was very shy. So while other kids were out playing, I would play too. But then at the end of the day, I'm going to go and play with my electronics kit. It is interesting your your parents are almost an ideal combo of value so your dad was a mechanical uh tanker and like fix things that people depended on to do their work and your mother had this uh social thing yeah and like that's an interesting

combo like have you ever thought about the extent to which that influenced some of uh your thinking about the world not not really until you just said it now actually um when i think of my origin story and you know what really motivated me i mean a black child growing up in the 60s there's plenty around me that was like social justice this that and the other thing but yeah i hadn't really thought of the combo like that before um but yeah that that probably well it definitely shaped me because obviously they were my parents right so so when did you first become interested in computers um it was uh i the exact year escapes me but it was my uncle said i have this commodore pet if you want to go back into the annals of history, Chiclets keyboard, cassette tape drive.

I had this Commodore pad. Would you be interested in it? Because he was getting something new. And of course I'm like, yeah. So for a few months, I put pictures of Commodore machines up on my mirror. It was like, it's coming someday. So that was the entree to computers

was the Commodore pad way back then, early 70s. And what was it that attracted you to a personal computer and what sort of programming did you start with? Well, the attraction was availability, of course, because no one else in my neighborhood had a computer at that time. Right. And this was by that time we had moved to the the more middle class neighborhood as opposed to the barrio that we used to live in. So but still no one no one had computers because they just weren't that common. Right. But I was a really shy kid, you know, to the point where I couldn't even tell people my name. I would spell my name out for them with my eyes downcast rather than say my name. You know, I was just very shy, even though I was in sports and stuff like that. And the computer is just one of those things.

Right. It's like you get to tell it what to do. It's your buddy. It's your friend. It does what you want and you interact and you learn and you grow. So that's, that's, I think why the connection was made between me and the computer. First stuff I did was very low level machine programming. And by machine, I mean, even before assembly language, right? It's like, you have to encode the instructions by the numbers, you know, and the first things I did were graphics oriented, put blocks on screens. I mean, this was the time of Pong, right? So it's like, oh, let me try to do what Pong does, that sort of thing. 6502 CPU chips.

Yeah. And then I think after that, there were these books and magazines that had like games, right? Wompus, Hexapon, whatever, you know, little adventure games. So you would type those in and then run the program and make a mistake and have to type the whole thing over again, maybe save it to cassette. So it was games. And then eventually I started fiddling with the hardware. So like I would hook up a joystick to the computer, mess with that, fry an input chip, go to the store, buy another input chip, you know know fry it again so

that sort of thing so his earliest was just messing around and games yeah i mean it i i want to touch on a couple of things that you just said like what one of them which is you know more uh you know just an interesting thing to highlight because i think uh kids like I think of my 13 year old and my 15 year old, like their mind would be blown by what you just said. So the way that you got to play games is you had this computer that was by modern measures, like extraordinarily clunky and limited. And the games came to you printed in a magazine and you typed them into the computer and hoped you didn't make a mistake and then you got to play the game yeah yeah that is kind of wild i mean 8k of ram and you know not very not even one megahertz cpu i mean pretty slow

so you have to be very clever and they're of them are text-based, but we also add some visuals, you know, if you're really clever about how to program that stuff. But maybe the more important thing that you just said is, I think it's extremely important in kids forming an idea of what's possible and what they want to be. Part of it is about access to things that will shape them. And part of it is about role models and like being able to sort of see themselves in things. And so it was a really extraordinary time when you were growing up and when I was growing up that all of a sudden this new interesting thing was accessible. And like making technology accessible to kids, I think, is one of the most important things that we all can be doing. And I know it's something you think a lot about. Yeah. I mean, I thought about before I was thinking about this podcast,

like, what about my history? And early on, I mean, I had my uncle. Even before that, when I was like seven or eight, there was this guy in my life, his name was Jackie Robinson, who was a black dude who was at UC Irvine studying computers. And he'd show me printouts of his Fortran programs.

And he let me read his book. And it's like, okay, that was an influence, right? And then here's my uncle. Here's your computer. Okay, that's an influence. And local to us, we lived in the city called Placentia, which is like a, at that time, a farming community, really. But it was right next to Rockwell International. So all my classmates, at least the white kids, were, their parents were engineers. And Rockwell had a program where they actually brought high school students in for kind of a, not an internship, but it was a training program. So I learned Fortran, Key Punch, the rocket equation, you know, calculators, all this stuff. So I was fortunate. I had access and there it was, right? My circumstance would be completely different if that series of things didn't exist. Yeah.

Well, and, you know, I think kids also are so impressionable when they're young. I mean, I remember my own journey. I got interested in computers, like, A, because they were accessible, and B, because video games seemed fascinating. And I just, you know, like the thing that I always have from the time I was like a super little kid is I just wanted to understand how everything worked. And the more fascinated I was by the thing, the more I wanted to understand how it got made and how it functioned. And like video games were the initial thing that got me into computers.

But I remember I got into a science and technology high school when I was a senior. And I did an internship as part of the computer science class that I was taking there where half a day, a week, for six weeks, I went to this place and worked with real adult professional engineers. And one of them had a copy of Alan Hullab's compiler book sitting on their desk. And I saw that and I was like, this is the most mysterious thing that i've ever seen in my life and i must understand how these programming tools uh work that i'm using and loving and like and that became like i was 17 years old and that became the next 13 years of my life was studying

compilers and programming languages. Yeah. And when you're young, you don't know how hard it is. Like here I am a 12 year old kid and I'm writing, I'm translating machine code. I don't know if that's hard or not. I just know how to do it because I read the book and it says do the following. It's like, oh, okay. Right. So it's like, uh, it's great to have a plastic mind when you're young, but that plastic mind needs to be fed with stuff to spark it towards, you know, interesting directions. Right. Yeah. So, so, so let's talk about college and what did you study? And I know like part of your journey is like not only were you becoming a better and better programmer over time, but like you were thinking about, you know, how do I become an entrepreneur?

Like, how do I make money at this stuff? How do I start businesses? Like, what are the useful and interesting things that I can do with this thing that I love? Yeah, I have a prop that I wanted to show you that I'm sure you can appreciate. I went to college with this Commodore 64. Nice. Now, this isn't the actual one, but I got it off eBay because of nostalgia. It's like, I got to get one of those again.

Yeah. So I went off to college and electrical engineering, computer science. And it was interesting at that time, UC Berkeley, because I remember my math teacher in high school, Dr. Jim Jenkins. He was a guy who had worked on the Manhattan Project, drove to school in a Rolls Royce every day, you know, because he was just giving back to the system. As he said, he was public schooled. He went to UC Berkeley. So I was inspired. And I went to Berkeley and he said, computer science, there's no such thing, you know, so this is 1982, right? Yeah. And he was right. There there wasn't computer science but you know they they had some computers and you're programming uh deck pdp 10s flipping switches you know and then eventually they got terminals and that was the birth of uh unix and all that sort of stuff um but at that time we were learning i think i learned pascal yeah i learned pascal there

and there was this other language called c that you're supposed to learn on your own, you know. And it was just a heyday of a lot of invention, not the internet, but ARPANET. All that stuff was happening then. And as college students, we were surrounded. This is in the Bay Area. So we're surrounded by all these companies popping up. I mean, certainly Apple, you know, they weren't as huge as they are today. Adobe, you know, Sun Microsystem, all these companies. So it was just natural for all of us to go, okay, I'm going to do a startup. Right. And it was different from what we think today, right? At that time, we're like, I'm going to change the world. And, you know, we're starry-eyed and all that sort of stuff. So my brother and I,

you know, he said, well, you know how to program. He knows how to sell. Let's go do that, right? So we just started our first company, Atomation. We did some custom software development for the people that own the building that our office was in. And it just kind of went on from there. You know, it was like, this is just what you do. Let's go make some money. Right? Now, of course, in the early years, we just starved. I mean, quite, we have four employees. And I quite literally, for at least a year or two in there, we had Chipparoo cookies and popcorn for lunch. That's all we could afford. You walk down the store, Chipparoo cookies, a bag is like $1.50, popcorn was maybe $1. And I would ride my bike home at night, literally looking in the gutter for a dollar so I could

buy a donut to have for dinner, right? It's like, we're going to do this thing that we're dedicated, right? That's how it was for a few years. But over time, we actually succeeded. We came big dogs in a little, or big fish in a small pond of next computers. And then we went on from there. But it was just a natural flow. It's like, I'm learning stuff. I know how to program. I've got friends who can program. The world is our oyster. Let's go get it, right?

Let's talk a little bit about why Next versus, so again, this is another interesting thing for the young folks. The number of platforms and types of computers and different types of microprocessor instruction set architectures that were out there when you were doing all of this was way more diverse than it is now. You could have chosen to do a lot of things.

You could have done PC software. You could have done Mac software. You could have done like Unix stuff on a bunch of different Unix systems that were becoming popular then. But you chose to work on Next. This niche market Next. And that comes from while I was at UC Berkeley, I managed the computer store there. And so I was familiar with Apple. So I knew all those people. And, you know,

I wouldn't say I was a Steve Jobs fanboy, but I knew Steve Jobs. And then when he went off to do Next, you know, he was kind of pushed out of Apple. We thought, we literally said, we don't know what you're going to do next. You might be selling, you know, back guano to Eskimos. I know it's going to be exciting. We're going with you. Right. So as he did Next Computers, and of course, Steve Jobs, for anyone who knows, was quite the showman, you know. And not only not not in a fluffy way, there's like there's no there's no stake with that sizzle. It's like he knew what he was talking about and he knew what people really wanted. He had a sense of style. Right. It's like whatever you do, Steve, is probably going to be good. We're in.

That's what drove us, right? Well, and Next was a really interesting company. I mean, so Apple ultimately bought Next and a whole bunch of the Next team, you know, like Craig Federighi, for instance, are still at Apple doing interesting stuff today. But they had beautiful industrial design. There were two machines, so the next cube and the next station. So one was a cube and one was a pizza box. But the back end of the operating system was Unix. It had a really nice graphical user interface. They embraced object-oriented programming.

Yes. Super. They were innovating and doing a bunch of interesting things and putting a bunch of pieces together that are exactly the pieces that are together now that are the basis of what we use every day. Yeah, exactly. At that time, they introduced this thing called App Builder,

which was a way of visually putting your application together by dragging and dropping and all that sort of stuff. And today we go, yeah, of course. But at that time, it didn't exist, right? So they were innovating in that sort of way. And Steve also did things like, he said, you should think of your, he had a sense for how apps should work.

You should be no more than one click away from achieving some action. So he hated like endless lists of menus and all that sort of stuff. It's like one click direct action is the way things should work. So, you know, there are certain things about the platform display postscript, like you said, the networking, the networking model, they have this thing called speaker listener. And, and it was a way of passing messages back and forth, even across the network. So yeah, there was a lot of innovation and it allowed us to create apps that would come out and take two or three months instead of a year. It was quite literally that dramatic of a difference.

And we even won, our company won an award. I can't even remember what it was. It was a DB Expo way back then. We won an award for best in breed because of this database app stuff that we did. And it was because of object-oriented, you know, dynamic, this, that, and the other thing and the way we connect things together. So, yeah, they had tons of innovation that is now lasting, right? Yeah. So, yeah, that's why I did Next because it's like, this is going to be where it's at, you know? Yeah. And, you know, Next wasn't a super successful company in the grand scheme of things, but it was a super influential company.

Yeah, the dean I lived on, but they didn't get the commercial success. Yeah. So you were you were pretty prescient in figuring that out. Yeah. I mean, I did one more before I went off to Microsoft, which was the B operating system, BOS. Which was another, that was Jean-Louis Gasset.

That was his company, right? Yeah. Jean-Louis Gasset, Steve Sackleman. I forgot the Eric. I forgot Eric's last name.

That was a, that was a, also a brilliant operating system. And like, I never had one, but I always wanted a B-Box. It was such a cool computer. I still have one. I have one down in the basement. They were innovative in quite a few things. They were one of the first people to come out with a PC that was multi-processing. It had two CPUs in it. And then they also had quite a lot of innovation in the UI in terms of speed.

This guy, Benoit Schillings, who later did QT, did the UI for the BOS. This other guy, Dominic, oh, what is Dominic's last name? Anyway, Dominic, they had this operating system that had, it was journaled for one, so it was kind of crash-proof. And they also had tagging, so you could attach tags to things, which made it really interesting. So they did a lot of innovations. Of course, they didn't win. We were right there at that battle between,

is Apple going to buy next or B? And they bought next. And that was the end of B, essentially. So how did you end up at Microsoft? So as I was, I exited B in, what was it? 96, I guess. Maybe 97. And I was like, because something happened there. I was like,

this is not a good place for me. So then I was sitting around just kind of programming along, you know, compiling Linux and whatnot at home. And I had a friend at Microsoft, Chris Lovett, who said, hey, we're working on this XML thing. You want to come join? And I said, that sounds interesting. So I went up, did the interview. I was like, yeah, okay. And this was right at the time where it was 1998. So recession is coming, dot com bubble is inflating and about to burst. Microsoft is under investigation by the DOJ, about to be split up, you know.

And I thought that place is going to be, either they're going down in flames or they're rising like a phoenix. Either way, it's going to be a fun ride. So I jumped off to Microsoft. And it was also, I had a child, you know, these are my earning years, I'm 30 something. It's like, well, this is my last chance to actually go get some dollars, you know, and not starve.

So I better go, you know, do that thing. So I did. That's how I came because someone asked me to come. Again, in a minute, we're going to get to all of the DEI stuff and inclusion and access, but that is another thing. Network matters. Network matters, absolutely. Network, like being connected to people who not necessarily are passing you opportunities, but just making you aware of what some of the interesting things are that you might not otherwise see.

And like we want to work with you. Like it's just an amazing thing to have. Yeah. And this Chris Lovett, I had met actually at Taligent, another Silicon Valley also ran. And he was impressed with the work that i had brought there from animation um and it was just that right it's like he's thinking oh that guy william he's kind of interesting why don't i give him a call and then the opportunity is up to me to take it or not right yeah is to impress or not impress. But yeah, network is super important.

So tell us a little bit about the XML work that you did. So it was like really central infrastructure, like a thing that was, you know, at that time, it was very important to how the, you know, this sort of emerging network infrastructure was operating. Yeah, I mean, XML, you know, the easiest way to put it in context is to say, well, HTML was important for the UI browser, right? XML was the equivalent for data transmission and sharing. Now, it went further and created things like SVG,

which is a graphics format, and the Office, all their documents are actually XML formatted documents. They're in a zip file, so you don't realize it, but they're actually just XML. So at the time, we were trying to do a couple of things, but primarily just being able to wrangle data, right? Add some amount of structure and schema to data that otherwise is just kind of out there. And by structuring things with XML, you make it easier for inter-company communications or intra-company communications and on and on.

We went a bit too far, it got too cumbersome, along came Jason, and now Jason's that. But XML was super important at that time. Well, and also in a bunch of subtle ways. I mean, like one of the things that Microsoft did in Internet Explorer, like with XML adjacent to XML is like this thing called the XML HTTP request, which. Oh, yeah. That was the most important thing because that allows you to program the web.

Correct. Right. And now people is like, well, you don't even think about it. But at that time, yes, the HTML request was like, oh, this is different. Because before that, there was no way to really,

or at least there wasn't a real standardized way of saying, I'm going to call this function over there. Correct. Again, just to pull back, this was the way where you could write an application in JavaScript that ran in your browser that could then interact with something running in the cloud. And we didn't even have the cloud at that point. The cloud, nobody was calling it this silly name yet. Yeah, so it was the birth of that.

It's kind of funny what you're telling me. It's like, well, there was this HTML requesting. I'm like, yeah, man, we did that. There's so much history in there. It's like, yeah, we did that too, and we did that, and we did that. Little known fact, I was granted, after doing this XML stuff and some other stuff, my then GM at the time, Dave Reed, said, hey, come up with something. So he gave me free license. He said, pick your top six people and go do something interesting. And

he had gotten some commandment from Bill Gates or whoever at the top, do something that helps us fight against Java at that time. And so we wanted to do something that was really like, that would be hard for Java to do quickly, right? So we ultimately came up with this thing, which is now called system.link. And I know you had Anders Halsberg on in the very beginning, and he talked about this. So we worked with Anders and some other people and came up with this way of changing your programming

such that your data types had nullable types, and we had things like lambda expressions, and it was pretty easy to do database stuff and XML integration and blah, blah, blah. And that was something that Java couldn't do easily. So that was birthed out of this same set of people that were doing this XML work. They then prototyped the system.link stuff. It's awesome. Super cool. We'll fast forward through a whole bunch of stuff. You and I first met when I came to Microsoft and was

appointed CTO and I was recruiting the first people into the office of the CTO. I borrowed this concept that Bill Gates originated a long while back, which when he was running the company, he always had a technical advisor. His technical advisor was basically like an avatar that he would send off into this org to go dive deep on things and to come back,

and help him make sure that he understood technically what's going on, and that he had an independent point of view about the technical goings on inside of Microsoft, aside from what he's being told by the teams that are working on stuff. And, you know, the point that I was CTO, like the company was, or when I was appointed CTO, the company was like really big. And so I was like, all right, I not only need a technical advisor,

I need lots of them. And you were one of my very first technical advisors. And, you know, I want to talk a little bit about what you did and what was appealing to you about that role. But I also want to focus on this amazing thing that you brought with you, which is a program called Leap, which is a new way to do recruiting, which flips a whole bunch of things around on its head and results in not only hiring amazing people, but just by the nature of how you're doing the recruiting, you tend to get a more diverse and inclusive set of people coming in because you are. Not relying on traditional paths. Yeah, it's the easiest way to fill filters that have systemic biases, like not evil ones, but just they're there.

And so. Yeah. So I'll pick up this story from the, I got an email. I think it was from Fatima, who said, oh, would you be interested in, you know, working in the office of the CTO? And to be honest, I was like, oh, we have a CTO? Yeah, right. Because Microsoft doesn't always have, you know, and it was like Ray Kurzweil.

Ray Ozzie was a previous one. So I was like, oh, okay. And honestly, I thought it was a prank mail until I actually called and talked to her. And it's like, oh, OK. And I remember you and I had this conversation. And I said, well, I'm really interested. Can I bring this Leap thing with me?

And probably you were like, yeah, whatever. For you. I don't know if you really realized what it really was, but that was the one condition. You said, yes. And now Leap had started in 2015. I'll come back to the CTO's office. And it was this, the challenge with Leap was

I went to a CVP, Girish Bablani, and said, hey, what's one of our business challenges? And he said, oh, there's this diversity thing, right? Like we need a little bit more diversity in our engineering talent. I said, oh, okay. Now I'm at that time, what, approaching 50. I think I was about 50 at that time. And until that point, I had not really been thinking, even though I'm a black guy in tech, I hadn't really been thinking about my responsibility for bringing my tribe into engineering. It wasn't a deep thought for me, honestly. So I started this thing just thinking of it as some challenge. And it turns out that what was missing in our hiring processes

was we hire from college and we go to the top 15 schools like everybody else. Well, they look a certain way and they are a certain way, you're not going to find much diversity beyond whatever you find there, right? So I thought, well, where are the people? Where are the women and minorities? Well, they're in other careers. They're at coding academies. They're at community colleges. They are STEM ready. They've got degrees. They just didn't slipstream into our college intern program, and they're not college hires, so you'll never find them, right? So what was missing was essentially an internship program for professionals who weren't just fresh out of college, right? That was the premise, and that's what LEAP became. It's essentially a 16-week apprenticeship program. And it just turns out that that model worked, right?

So that's what LEAP is, and we can go further into that. In the office of the CTO, I thought from the beginning is actually what you said, which is you need to go out, you need to synthesize, right? You need to go over the landscape because Kevin can't read and be in every single meeting. And if you are in a meeting, they're going to tell you what they think the executive wants to hear. They're going to prep, you know, sugarcoat, you're not going to get the God's truth. But when you're a TA and you go in with a different approach, you know, and of course you're leveraging some relationships that you have with people so you can get the insider's story and all that sort of stuff. And then you can

synthesize. And I often describe it to people as we're like the Supreme Court's clerks, right? The justice doesn't have time to read all the case law and they need their clerks to do a lot of the legwork and then feed them something and say, well, and here's, you know, and then the justice forms their opinion. That's how I viewed the job. It's like, oh, we're like the Supreme Court justices clerks, right? And I think it was useful to you. I don't know because I'm not you, but I thought we were doing a useful job. It is the only way that I can do my job is having having all of the fantastic TAs who work in the office of the CTO. And it's a hard job to do, I think, because you have to be.

Technically excellent, you have to be technically excellent. You have to be able to go into a situation and absorb a whole lot of new information very quickly and synthesize it into something. And you have to maybe even do the harder thing, which is show up and do something valuable enough for the team that you're showing up to that they are willing to authentically share real information with you versus being wary of you. It's like, oh, you're the emissary of some bald headed exec who's seeking to make my life more difficult. Right. How do we set you out? Yeah. And, you know, like I think it was one of the things that was sort of surprising to me.

I've said this to a whole bunch of people over the years at Microsoft. The thing that I was actually counting on when I became CTO, because the surface area of technology at Microsoft is so vast that people would, that everybody would basically have the same reaction that you did. It's like, A, I didn't know we had a CTO and B,

can we just please make this person leave us alone for as long as humanly possible, which would then let me select into what I thought were the highest priority things to go figure out first. The unusual thing about Microsoft is we had lots of people who wanted to engage with the office of the CTO very quickly. It was overwhelming.

If I hadn't had all of you excellent TAs, like it would have just been too daunting. Yeah. I mean, it was a, it's a, in the, in the guts of forming that office, I mean, if you ask what, what else I did, it was the TA part. And it was also since the office, there's no playbook for the office of the CTO. It's not like, hey, Kevin's a CTO. And here's the description of how an office of the CTO should run. So we spent quite a lot of time amongst ourselves just trying to figure out, well, what should we be focused on? What is the right use of our energies?

And how should we operate? How do we evaluate whether we're being impactful or not? And one of the key things we did or you did for us was to lay out, it's not really a manifesto, but it was the words that said, you know, how we operate, right? Which was go in with humility, listen, you know, don't go in with a sledgehammer all that sort of stuff laid the groundwork for and i think why the office of the cto is successful

what we're six seven years in now um almost yeah yeah so it's like most offices of the cto that microsoft has had didn't last that long. And it's because they were different. Like Ray Ozzie, for example, ended up trying to become a product team. So the people he was supposed to be serving were now his competitors. Right. It's like, well, that's not your Kevin Scott's office as CTO. You stuck with the, look, man, I'm here to serve. Yeah. Right. And I feel super important.

Yeah. And, you know, I think, you know, we talk, talk a bit about this. Companies need a mix of different things in order to be successful. So obviously you have to have product teams who make product and you have to have people who sell them and you have to have, you know, human resources teams that like help hire the people and retain them and make sure that they are, you know, happy and content or like wherever they need to be on that spectrum and have what they need in order to continue doing the job. And so there are all of these different roles. And the question I think we've always asked ourselves in the office of the CTO is, is the thing that we're doing, the role that we're serving for the company, is it important? And if it's important, then it's pretty clear that you don't evolve it into something else, because if you did, then you'd have to go find someone else or some other group to go do the thing that you were doing that

five seconds ago was important. And so the important thing that the office of the CTO does is it sort of thinks about technology strategy across the full breadth of the company. It thinks about time horizons that are a little bit longer than maybe product teams are more accustomed to thinking about because they a set of urgencies around business deliverables. Like the thing that I've always said for Satya is like, just I will go do things that need to be done, that aren't getting done otherwise. It's like I'm doing a bunch of AI stuff right now.

It's why I ran the search group for a little while. But I've always thought that, you know, and it's sort of true for TAs as well. So when you're a TA, you're not running a thing. And there are lots of super senior people like you who became TAs. And so if you get to the point where you want to run something again, like the thing that we're not going to do is build a group inside of the office of the CTO. You go back into general population. Correct. Right. Yeah, I think that's super important. And there's two things that I wanted to observe while you were talking. it's like, I remember from day one, not day one, but day two, your emphasis on AI, right? So for seven years now, from the beginning, I think one of the first conversations we had was

about AI. And it's like, that's this forward look that you're saying, and now everything is AI, right? And I think that's super important to be able to have a look forward because like you said the product teams it's harder for them to do that right because they're they've got quarterly um obligations and they can look maybe a year or two in advance but they can't look 10 years in advance it's too it's too hard um i forgot the other point, but it was, it was really interesting. So it'll come back. Yeah. And like the other thing too, is, you know, you have to think about a bunch of different time horizons. So I run Microsoft research or like, I don't run Microsoft research. Peter Lee runs Microsoft research and Peter, you know,

is generously consented to report to me, which is how things work in the real world. And so, yeah, the job of Microsoft research is to take large intellectual risk. So to like really go have wild, ambitious ideas. And when you're trying to have wild ambitious ideas, whole bunch of them don't work. That's one time horizon.

The big bowl bets, if you get a few of those right over the course of a decade, they really change the nature of how an organization works. Then there's the medium time horizon stuff, which is you have a technology like AI, and if you're a platform company like Microsoft, it's easy to imagine if AI is on a particular trajectory, you're going to want to have

the technology be well-represented in your platform because it's going to be very important and how people build software. And, you know, there, you just have to be very dis, it's, it's not a thing where you're like, Okay, well, this is some wild bet. And like, we can afford for it to fail. It is a thing where you have to be very disciplined year after year about how you're going to go get after this thing and make sure that you're tracking everything that's going on. Your market making.

Correct. You're not following. You're market making at that point. And that's, like you said, the word discipline. It's like you've decided that the market is going to be a certain way and you're going to make it that way. And you have to have the discipline. And you also have to have the foresight or discipline to be able to say it's not going our way. Correct.

And you have to be unbelievably truthful with yourself about that. Right. Or else you end up wasting billions chasing elephants or whatever. Yeah. The other point I wanted to make about something I did in the Office of the CTO was, do you remember Africa? Oh, yeah. Tell the story, please.

This is so important. Africa was interesting. There's African engineers within Microsoft who came to me and said, William, you're the office of the CTU, maybe you can help us out, you're influenced, blah, blah, blah. They basically said, look, the continent of Africa has zero engineers on it. The whole continent, one point,

however many billions of people, however big Africa is, which a third of the planet or whatever Africa is, which, you know, a third of the planet or whatever it is, no engineering from Microsoft. We think this is a problem because we're not leveraging the smartness that's there. Which is very, very interesting because like we have a couple of, more than a couple, but like, you know, the folks that I work closely with. So we had Hoop, who was Satya's TA when I became CTO. Hoop was from Nigeria? He's from Ghana. Ghana.

And then one of our technical fellows, like the highest individual contributor rank in the entire company is Abelade Badagation. And so it was really interesting that we had these very senior, extraordinarily accomplished engineers from Africa. And like you said, no presence on the continent. Engineers there building things for us.

And they've been trying for that group, Hoop, Adelaide, there's another guy named Bombo, there's a few others. So they've been trying literally for 10 years to convince Microsoft to do engineering in Africa, open up a dev center or something like that. And I kind of got involved with them and I was like, oh, well, the problem is you're doing it wrong. They would have meetings all the way up

and down the executive chain, but they weren't in a position to actually just go and hire some people, right? So I got involved and I said, okay, let's go take a trip. And we went to Nigeria and Kenya in one week and had all these conversations, talked to a lot of people and said, okay, I came, I said, okay, we're going to do this. I came back and I actually went to you and said, look, Kevin,

I want to do this stuff in Africa. I'm not asking for anything from you. I just don't want you to say no. Do you remember that? Yeah, I did. And you said, I't want you to say no. Do you remember that? Yeah, I did. And you said, I'm not going to say no. Right. And, uh, and so I, I, I then went on to hire people in, uh, Kenya to start. And we actually did it through leap. Um, that's, uh, that's where I got the money from actually. Uh, and then, and this wasn't the only thing happening at that time.

There are other things, but this kind of pushed it. The Windows group was already kind of leaning in towards it. And then Mike Fortin got involved. He was an exec in Windows. And then we brought the company, right? And now I think between the two sites, Kenya and Nigeria, we have 650 engineers. Which is incredible. It is. It's amazing that that happened. And it's only been like four years, you know.

I was there in 2006 for the bring up of the India Development Center, not bring up, but to help it grow. At the time I joined there, it was 1,000. By the time I left, it was like 2,500. So over three years. It takes a lot to establish an engineering center, particularly in a place where you went from zero, right? Yeah. So Africa was really important for me because it was a – I thought you have to go to where the talent is and it's going to be in Africa.

One of the youngest places on the planet. There's a lot of them. You have to assume there's a number of geniuses on the continent because we already had proof in the company that there were. So it was just a good harvest. And so that was just a good harvest and so that that was the africa story it's like i'm i'm super happy that you didn't say no right and i was uh enabled to go off and do something like that super important you know and now it is something so well and we we were just lucky that we had uh someone with an entrepreneur's mindset like you who thought that it was an interesting problem and went. Because it really was not one big obstacle like me saying no.

It was several. Yeah, it was like you just had to go get a bunch of medium, know, medium, small, big things all lined up. And it's a lot of work. Yeah. And they all lined up. We even did a promotional video and all this sort of stuff. And it was quite an extraordinary thing. And I think that, I mean, hopefully we get to talk about Wave Studio, but it's all about enabling genius wherever it is.

Yeah. Right. about enabling genius wherever it is. It's like, let's get the full value of human intelligence no matter where it is on the planet. That's what I'm after these days. Yeah. We evidently have not talked fast enough. We're coming. I want to talk at least for a few minutes about what you've been doing since you left Microsoft because it's fascinating and important work.

And I think we've got another five minutes or so. Yeah. Well, let me put on my speed mouth then. The general thing is, and this started back with when George Floyd was killed. I kind of really sat and thought, it's like, okay, what am I going to do? I mean, this is not the first black man who's ever been killed by police. He's not going to be the last. But this is a good moment because it was caught on 4K video. People are kind of paying attention.

What am I going to do? Right? And one thought was, well, I've got money. I can just kind of throw money out to people, you know, and be that kind of philanthropist. Like, nah, once your money's gone, that effect is gone. Well, I have 40 plus years in tech and I know that tech billionaires are kind of the top of the world right now. So that means there's more money in tech. Why don't I help get more people into tech, right? So then that led to, well, there's lots of different models for that as well.

I could be an LP in someone else's thing or whatever. There's lots of different ways of doing it. And I just came up with a model. I was like, well, what matches my skills and experience and network best? So I came up with the studio model, right? Adventure Studio. And the difference between Adventure Studio and a plain old VC or an accelerator is I tell people, think of Motown, right? I'm the Barry Gordy, right? I'm going to find the talent. I'm going to train the talent. I'm going to find Aretha Franklin. I'm going to find Michael Jackson. I'm going to help show them how to dance, stage presence, give them the record contract, put them out in the network and help them build their thing, right? Do that with software. So it's about creating software, creating a network,

having a finance network, having resources as simple as, as soon as you start your business, you need a tax accountant, or else you're just going to fall behind on your taxes, and you're going to be out of business in a year. You need an admin, you know? So you need three or four programmers. You're not going to write the

code yourself. And when you fail, you need someone to say, that's all right, let's do it again. Right. And this is something that typically Black and women businesses don't have, right? They struggle to do it once, they get burned, they're working at McDonald's or they're back to general population, they don't try again because they got obligations. So the studio is intended to put a little cushion that they don't normally have in the society such that they can have enough longevity to succeed, right? So I've been doing a lot of network building. I've been writing tons of code because the other thing that I'm telling people is,

okay, AI is the thing. Two years ago, I would have told you, go out and learn some C-sharp, you know, and web development. Now it's like, no, no, no. First, you need to go play with ChatGPT. And if you're going to write any code at all, you're going to use Copilot, right? And I'm not just saying that because I'm shilling for Microsoft. It's like, I do it myself and it

makes me 30% more productive, at least. So I turn that and the software I'm writing is about saying, how can I write code such that it's going to be more composable when I use AI to do it, right? So for example, there's zip, the zip file format, right? Compressed files. There's a library for that, and it has its quirks. I wrote one myself. I have my own zip decoder, and the interface is so simple that when I want to say, now compress that and stick it in a zip, it's one function, three parameters, done. Right? Yep. Clear licensing.

I don't have to worry about all the licensing all over the place. And that's a difficulty when you start stitching with AI. It's like, well, wait a minute. Where did that data come from? Where did that data come from? Where did that code come from? Do you have the right license for that chunk of code right there? So I'm creating a substrate of code that's like, this is clear licensed, right? And here's how you program leveraging AI, right? This is how we have to do it. This is how we're going to 10x our abilities, right? Is by leveraging AI. You can't just go and lock yourself in a room and

think you're going to hammer out some code. By the time you're done, someone else who's got AI has already done it 10 times over. So you better learn how to do it with AI, right? So this is what I'm currently engaged in. That is super cool. So last question for you that I also ask everyone. And I know some of the things in the past that you might have answered to this question, but you're doing a ton of stuff. And I think you enjoy all of the quote unquote work that you're doing a ton of stuff. And I think you enjoy all of the quote unquote work that you're doing. But outside of work, what do you love to do? I just bought a mountain bike a few weeks ago. And that's something I used to do. I used to

actually race mountain bikes, cross country mountain bikes. I used to kayak. I used to actually race mountain bikes, cross-country mountain bikes. I used to kayak. I used to do all sorts of physical things. And I would say a few years there of Microsoft plus new kids made a lot of that go down. But now the kids are, the youngest one is eight, the oldest one is 10. So now it's back to mountain biking and my son's kicking my butt. So I like mountain biking. I like tinkering so i've got um uh maybe 10 3d printers in my house um laser cutters favorite uh favorite 3d printer right now

uh the one we use the most is the prusa yeah and we use both a regular size prusa and a mini and we'll do them oftentimes both at the same time me and my son will print stuff out like we made this big sword and we'll do certain parts on the mini and certain parts on the the regular size one um so yeah that's the ones that i use the most right now i just got a uh bamboo carbon x1 uh like a few months ago you're high end man that's not high end like the high end one uh like over yeah here uh behind me like i've got a mark forge but like i tell you the uh which is a very nice printer um but like that bamboo carbon x1 for like a thousand dollar printer is like really nice yeah it's really funny because i've got enough printers

here and it's like do not buy another printer do not buy another oh bamboo carpet huh i mean christmas is coming yeah christmas is christmas is coming so yeah tinkering tinkering and um and gardening so Well, it was as always fantastic to have an opportunity to chat with you. We miss you here at Microsoft, but we are extraordinarily happy and glad that you're doing what you're doing. Just keep up the good work, man.

Yeah. All I can do is say, please like and subscribe. Awesome. All right. Thank you. Okay. You're welcome. Okay.

That was a fantastic conversation with William Adams. I love William. I think that he's amazing. I would love to have coffee with him sometime. I could listen to the two of you talk about tech and about D&I stuff and about your war stories from your time in tech for a really long time. So I loved that conversation. When we were talking a little bit earlier, Kevin, you mentioned how much you like that William is really dedicated to giving back. And that really became evident in the conversation that you two had. From your perspective,

when you first learned about the LEAP program, what about that stood out to you? Because I have to say, hearing him describe it and even knowing as someone who used to work at Microsoft proper, knowing what that was, I didn't know the origin story. It clicked for me in a way that I was like, wow, this is brilliant. Why haven't more people done this? But I wanted to know from your perspective,

what did you think of the program and what were some of the results that you saw, you know, once it was implemented? Yeah. So it was really funny when he was interviewing with me for this TA job inside of the office of the CTO. Like he had this thing that he wanted to bring with him. And I mean, it was funny actually hearing him talk about it, that he was like worried that I was going to say no. And rarely did I say no to things that William wanted to do. But this one in particular, we had at LinkedIn,

which is where I was before I came to Microsoft, had some experience running a similar program. And it was exactly the same idea that if you wanted to find great engineers and great product people who were underrepresented in the places that you normally are recruiting from, you just got to figure out what you're going to change about your process.

This idea of doing an apprenticeship program, I think is great. It has been extremely successful for both LinkedIn and Microsoft. I don't understand why more people don't do it. In the worst case, what happens is you have an opportunity to work with amazing people who come in and get 16 weeks or whatever the duration of

the program is of real experience. Anybody who's ever done an internship or has gone from one context where they get a whole bunch of experience that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten that's professionally relevant can tell you how valuable and informative those things are. And you get paid to do it. And at the end of it, like a super high percentage of folks convert to full-time jobs at the company. And those that don't, like, have this super interesting experience and a thing that goes on their resume that helps them find jobs elsewhere. Yeah, no, and I think you hit on a really important thing there. Even the people that don't get jobs from these programs, they have the experience. And I would go on to even say further, I think they have confidence, especially when we're talking about getting people who might not have come through the quote unquote traditional way.

People are plenty competent to do what they're doing, but they don't always have the confidence to do it. And if you can go through a program like this and have that experience, you have the confidence to go, oh, you know what? I can do this. I can apply for this job. And I can go into that interview, and I can feel confident to, you know, get it and to ask for it. And so I think these sorts of programs are so important that I'm so glad that, you know, William brought that to Microsoft

and that you, you know, embraced it in the office of the CTO. Yeah. And just one more thing to say about that. I think the thing that we've seen on this podcast with all of the people that we've chatted with, and it's certainly true in my experience, I think it's true in yours. Everybody has a very different path into the tech industry with lots of twists and turns. And it's so sensitive to, you met or what you got exposed to when or who you saw as a role model or what piqued your curiosity at a moment when you were most receptive. And so we just can't expect everyone to write your first program at 13 and get into a governor's school for science and technology, major in computer science at a top 10 school and then go get a job at a top five. Like that's not that that's that's such a narrow view of the of tech. And, yeah, like it's. It's it's silly to like think that that is the model.

No, I totally agree. You miss out on so many great people if you're just focused on that narrow subset. Some of the most brilliant engineers I know, some of the most technical people I know are art majors, have degrees in history. And that's amazing, right? And the fact that, again, if you were just to go based on a data-driven thing and just to be focusing on a certain subset, you would miss all these people. One of the things that, again, you were talking about towards the end of your conversation with William is talking about him wanting to start an engineering center in Africa. And he mentioned you have to go to where the talent is. And I think that that was so interesting and incisive thing for him to say as well because that's part of it too, right? You have to go to where the talent is. And I think that that was so an interesting and incisive thing for him to say as well, because that's part of it too, right? It is, you have to go to where the talent is.

The talent is everywhere. It's not just one place. And, and we have to, I think, open up our eyes to where that talent can be and look beyond just, you know, what has proven to be fruitful for us, maybe in the past. A hundred percent. And like, moreover, like the thing I would add is like, you have to go to where the talent will be. And if you sort of look at, if you look at what the world is going to be like in the next 50 years,

like we will be slowing down population growth and most of the industrialized world and like the net new population growth for the human race is going to be in Southeast Asia and in Africa. And so the great young engineers of the future are going to be coming from Africa because we just know capability distributions are same, no matter where you happen to be born. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's just, again, it would be silly not to be investing there. No, I completely agree. And I love, you know, I'm glad that there are executives like you and leaders like William who are able to see that and then to make people, you know, make those decisions so that we can start to invest there and take advantage of that, right? I mean, honestly, that's a capitalistic response as much as it is

an altruistic one, because as you said, that's where the next generation of engineers are going to be. And I also really appreciate what William is doing with his venture studio, creating a place for people who don't have the traditional access to, you know, resources and networks, giving them, you know, those, those skills. And again, that experience, that confidence to go out and try things and to fail. Right. Like, cause that's part of that too. I like, honestly, I think that's probably more important even than access to, there are a bunch of places online where you can go get technical skills.

Like if you're willing to spend the time, there are a bunch of places online where you can go get technical skills, like if you're willing to spend the time there's a capital is not not scarce. You know, like if you've got a good idea, like the thing I think that it can be really, really hard. Especially if you are not sitting in the epicenter of like one of these entrepreneurial areas or you don't see anyone in your family or in your network doing these sorts of jobs. What you just said is the confidence. It is like, am I good enough? Am I worthy?

Can I be successful at doing these things? And if you fail, which you will, like all of us fail a lot before we succeed, is there somebody there like William telling you, that's okay? What did you learn from that? Let's get back up and go at it again. Honestly, it's unbelievably valuable, that thing that he's doing. I totally agree. I'm really glad that we have people like him who've given us so much, not just, you know, technologically.

And I will forgive him for some of the XML horror that I've dealt with. I will forgive him for that because of all the good work he's done. I'm kidding. I also thank him for XML, even if the sobera made me want to rip my skin off. But I'm super, super, super grateful for that. I'm most grateful for XML HTTP requests. They gave us the modern web. You're absolutely right. And it was funny because I was really ready when he mentioned XML. I was like, oh, I went on a rant the other week about how much I hate XML.

And then he said that. I was like, you know what? Yes. You got to give him that. I was like, okay, you know what? Correct. Correct. I will bow down.

Awesome. All right. Well, that is going to do it for us today. Big thank you to William Adams for joining us. And if you have anything that you'd like to share with us, you can send us an email anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com. And you can follow Behind the Tech on your favorite podcast platform, or you can check out our full video experiences on YouTube.

Like and subscribe. Thanks for listening. See you next time.