That's great.

great.

I'm a huge fan of your podcast. I've been listening to it for a very long time.

Oh great, great.

I'm delighted beyond words to be on this podcast.

Well, and let me say that you, you know, consider ourselves recording. let me say that you are the first

person that I have brought the show back for in about a year and a half I've always said that if

somebody approached me that was interesting enough and you've been involved you've had a

finger in everything so you definitely qualify.

So thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, you bet.

Yeah.

You're coming to promote a book. I'm gonna I'm gonna mention that right now, but then we'll circle back to it at the end. It's called from startup to exit an insider's guide to launching and scaling your tech business. I highly recommend it and I'm going to tell you all why at the end.

But Cherish, let's start with the fact that you join Microsoft in 1987, which is one year after the Microsoft

IPO.

This is way before the web.

This is way before Windows. Microsoft is basically an MS-DOS company. So how old are you when you join and you know what what was

Microsoft like in 1987? Yeah so I was What was

26 when I joined Microsoft? I was fresh out of business school at that point and

Microsoft and Microsoft probably had about a thousand employees at that point so it was still a small company and what was incredible was that as a young graduate I was given the responsibility

of product managing the Microsoft's entry into the email space.

And this was a time when email did not really exist.

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