In The Loop’s Post

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Hi everyone. Today super excited to have a great fellow colleague of ours, Mike Powell from the Microsoft Garage at Base in New York and working on some of the most exciting innovative at work with a lot of our different types of partners and customers at Microsoft. My name is Mike Pell. I leave the Microsoft Garage here in New York City. I have a very long history in the tech industry. I've been a designer, technologist, entrepreneur, big company, man. I love taking people's ideas and making them real. And also over the years have been on the very cutting edge of a lot of technologies that many of you are familiar with. Stylized font, menu, Acrobat, and. PDF, The Metaverse 25 years ago, by the way, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I'm sure we'll get into today. What was your dream job as a kid? Well, like many kids when I grew up, I wanted to be an astronaut in a Formula One driver and why wouldn't you want to be going through that from F1 to like, after I teach you ever expect like to where you are now? It's funny, I was in an event last night where I got some meat and some of the most powerful people in the automobile industry and so I I have come a very long way from. A kid laying on the floor building plastic models of, you know, Indycars to now actually knowing the people who do that for real, Going from that water sounds like the meaningful moments in your career that actually brought you to the job that you're in today. Well, there's been a lot. I'm certainly the most important moment was when I first saw the Macintosh in 1984, like everybody else, you know, that era. I saw the commercial, you know, the famous Super Bowl commercial. And then I actually went to go see a Mac in a store and I fell in love with Mac paint. And it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life, and I had to be near it. I had to learn everything I possibly could about the Macintosh. So that completely changed my career. Trajectory's the one that comes to mind after that is maybe one of the most meaningful was when we created the very beginnings. I was the person who hacked together the very first PDF document and the beginnings of the Acrobat, you know, viewing way back when. Yeah, I was on a little tiger team at Adobe that had a job to go, put together a crazy idea for John Warnock, which was to create something that would allow you to see the same document on different computers, Macs, PC's, you know, Unix. Accident, which was impossible in 1990 it you just couldn't do it. And so very, very quickly we hacked this thing together. But the moment that really struck me about all about inventing, you know hacking together the PDF document, these things was when John Warnock, who is the CEO of Adobe at the time, saw it. He immediately recognized it as world changing. He he had this crazy idea and he knew it was needed. But you could tell in that moment he knew exactly what to do with it and that that was incredibly powerful. For me it's a seat. And then I would say on a personal and career level, there's another moment that has always stuck with Maya, friend of mine, as working at Microsoft is really in my career. You want a vacation to Machu Picchu and I was working as a program manager in Microsoft and and I'm a creative guy and I'm a designer and a technologist working as a PM but was good and I learned a lot. But it it wasn't fun, you know it was just one of those things like running things down and trying to get everybody to to do what they're supposed to do. And I I came into work one morning and I actually saw a I saw these colored pencils sitting on my desk which were present for my friend Aaron on his trip to Machu Picchu. And in that moment, I was so happy to see these colored pencils. It sort of brought me back to being an artist or and brought, you know, being back to that, that kid who was, you know, building models and and drawing things, you know, in. I immediately knew I could not be a program manager for one more minute. I had to switch to design. And it was because of the joy that I felt that I felt like there was something incredibly important that was missing in my life and my career. So I'm just a bunch of colored pencil. What makes you tick? And like knowing at that point, like what is kind of the right path of the right thing that interests you, or like opportunity, like how how do you kind of navigate that? What makes me sick is people, you know, as much as I love technology and I love doing other things, it's really talking to people, interacting with some, collaborating, you know, being part of the creative process. That's what really excites me, and that's what I enjoy the most about what I do. But I've always loved science. Action, I've always loved, you know, being able to sort of merge ideas for the future with what we're doing right now. So that's one of my strengths, I guess, is being able to triangulate and then also synthesize things that could exist now, you know, based on things that are about to happen. And so based on this, what is a normal mic day look like, right? I think you went into that a little bit, but what does it mean to work at the Microsoft Garage and what goes on every day there? Well, every day is different in the garage. Every day is a new adventure. We help Microsoft employees, we help our customers and just people from the community to take their ideas and their passion and make them real and then figure out a way to go test it to see if there's really something there. And so every day I have an opportunity to talk to people about what's most important, how they can really make an impact, and then show them how they can very, very quickly to go from idea to making it very, very real so that they can test it out. And that's sort of what this whole program is. About that's where I spend most of my time. What was one of the most exciting kind of like projects that you were able to kind of go through the garage door where made you take a step back and like reevaluate everything or relook at kind of the problem and the solution that kind of came out of it? Let's say there's two really good examples. One is, because we're in New York City, I get to work with junior high and high school students from the five boroughs, allowing them from disadvantaged situations. They come into Microsoft, and first of all, they're just incredibly thankful and happy to just see a place like Microsoft. You know, a lot of them thought they would never do that. And then secondarily, they realized that this is actually a place that they could work. And, you know, part of my my role is to show them that that's entirely possible. And in those moments when you see sort of the light bulb go off and they realize that there is a career path, they don't have to be a coder. They don't have to be an engineer. There's a million things that we do right in the tech industry that have nothing to do with that, that are equally as important. And so that's, you know, really, really good days for me is seeing students become inspired and knowing that maybe there's a possibility that they can go off and do something that is equally exciting to them as it is to me. Some of our large customers come in a lot. Some very risk averse industries and highly regulated having to. Go through the motions of trying to innovate but but not really being able to for a number of different reasons and showing them that it is possible and they can leap forward and these amazing things are really, you know, right at their fingertips if they try. And a lot of people for whatever reason, just don't try. So those are both really great days for me when I get to show people what's possible and then go do it with them, and then for students just to show them that there is a really bright path and all they have to do is apply themselves. I know that really resonates with me and Max and that's that's great. Mike. I was about to send the the little clap emoji that you sent on. Remember we were recording, but I was just going to be like a heart. How can I heard whatever he's saying like this is great. Yeah. So like going back to what you were saying about helping in this like companies in different industries adopt solutions to move their work forwards shortly. I played in right. And so you mentioned the Mac as well-being a turning point in technology and in the world. What do you think about AI? Is it having that same effect? Absolutely. And in a different way, I mean, when the Macintosh first showed up, it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. Artificial intelligence has been around for quite some time. We've been walking around with it in our phones for years and we just didn't talk about it in that way. You know, your Netflix suggestion queue, you know Amazon getting the right, the right thing for you and that's all machine learning, right. That's all stuff that we have all been become accustomed to. We just haven't talked about AI in this way until chat, GPC and generative. Guy burst onto the scene a year ago. So AI has already changed everything, you know, It's just that we, you know, we weren't recognizing it that way. But now that generative AI has taken hold and people are seeing that, it can actually help with their efficiency and productivity and doing some of the things that were either, you know, highly cumbersome or or just, you know, like very tedious all the way to doing things that are highly creative that they were never going to be able to do on their own. Just lots of things I would love to do. I just don't have the time. And I'm never going to be an absolute fantastic 3D animator as much as I would like to spend time doing that, just tools that can help me do that now without me having to spend, you know, the 10,000 hours to to master that skill. And so that's how it's changing everything because that is literally being integrated into the infrastructure of just about every single service that anyone can think of. And it's not going away. I always told people here in the garage if you think this is one of those technology trends where you can just sit on the sidelines and and wait for it to play out. That is really not a good thing to do. You've got to jump in and try it and see what it's all about. Speaking of that, I I think it'd be great to hear too like you you kind of just like alluded to with like creating 3D drawings are just three 3D graphics like what is an interesting use case that you've done with AI. We do a lot of what we call AI powered innovation here in the Microsoft Garage. So what we have always done is help people to take their ideas and move them forward quickly. But that can take days or weeks or months even you've just to get some of the ideas going to start doing prototyping. What we're able to do now with AI like something like Bing Chat that's freely available to anyone you say, hey, you know, you're the world's greatest, you know, business consultant help me think of some new ideas in my particular area or industry that's going to help propel my business forward. And and five XR growth, it'll spit out whatever it spits out. And you say, OK, yeah, I really like the second one. Can you tell me more about this and how would I do that? So we're using a freely available tools like Bing Chat to accelerate how we do the innovation. Process which is incredibly useful. I mean, we save so much time. I often when people come in, I bring them through the garage. And this innovation journey, we get to a point where we have to take their big idea and describe it in one single, very simple sentence. General day I was super great at summarizing. So all you've got to do is just tell it your big idea and say can you please give me a single sentence you know that describes this that anybody would understand? It does such a good job at that saves so much time for all the people seeing this podcast. How can they stay informed on the newest trends and tools that they I for? Like what are your tips for that? That honestly it LinkedIn has been a great source of information for me personally. I used to get all my news from Twitter, I guess way back when I'd get less of that news from there now. But I still find that LinkedIn and and other media you know places are better places to get information about AI. Because of Linkedin's business focus, you tend to get a lot more useful information and summaries of what's going on in addition to all kinds of newsletters. So I would definitely recommend that. It's been really exciting seeing all the momentum of your new book, Visualizing Business, what kind of got you into the common like an author and sharing your perspective in this space and it. It would also be great to hear a bit more about visualizing business. For anybody not familiar. Visualizing business.com is where we can go get a preview and and read what some of the people have been saying about the book, which is really about the confluence of AI data and spatial computing to be able to visualize business processes. Models, live markets in a way that we never have before. Business is constantly in motion, very chaotic, yet we've always depicted it as static spreadsheets and charts and graphs forever. And that always bugged the crap out of me. Like I I cannot understand why you would take something so highly dynamic and emotion and always reduce it to a complete snapshot in in one moment in time. When we have the ability, we have the technology, we have the smarts to do it. So that's why I wrote that particular. Look now to show people what is the path forward to be able to actually see how these things work. The reason that I write books is to try to share what I've learned. And also, frankly, I'm, you know, I always joke that I'm from the future. I have a lot of vision and I'm never going to be able to build all the things that I never are going to come to pass. And so I thought I would write these books to share these ideas and eventually people will realize that I was onto something. Have you seen a lot of what you've kind of written and ideating and thinking futuristically? And then. Application today. Is there an example of that? Absolutely. The very first book I wrote called Envisioning Holograms in 2017 is exactly what Apple is doing with the Vision Pro and Spatial Computing. That as a matter of fact the subtitle of the book has to do with spatial computing. So that was sort of a you has actually been used as a textbook for spatial computing even though it was written in about six years ago now. And my second book that I wrote, The Age of Smart Information is. Really. Hasn't been even, you know, come close to yet? It's next, Next. Next. After what's happening right now? What advice would you give to your younger self? Well, do not sell that Adobe Stock. Don't let anybody tell you that you can't be more than one thing. You can absolutely be more than one thing and be created all of it. And so that is one of the biggest problems that people bump into is they're highly creative, they're super technical, you know, they're great at, you know, business or sales or marketing, and yet they're being asked to do something that doesn't utilize all of their skill. And and I say there is a way to use all of it. You just need to be a little creative about it.