You are listening to the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series, brought to you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and video clips of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

So it is a very special pleasure to introduce Steve Balmer today.

As you all know, he is the CEO of Microsoft.

And the interesting thing is, as many of you probably know, he started out at Harvard University.

And down the hall from him in his dorm, who should be there but Bill Gates. So I'd like all of you

to look around and look at all your fellow classmates and imagine which of these folks

you're going to be starting the next big thing with. Because what happened is after

Steve graduated, he went off to Procter & Gamble and then two years later came back to

Stanford. I don't know if you all know that, but he came to Stanford to the business school.

And after the first year during the time he would go do a summer internship, he was asked by Bill to go up and check out Microsoft up north in Washington.

So he checked it out and decided the rest was history. So I want to introduce this fabulous, wonderful leader who's going to share some of his insights

about the last, I guess, 29 years at Microsoft.

Without further ado, Steve Bomber.

Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.

Thank you.

I've been in this theater now exactly three times in my life.

Today, I gave some speech about five years ago in here, and I got a question from a student

who suggested that we go borrow a bunch of money. When we had a bunch of money, I had to really think hard about that

for like three years. But the first time I was in here was sort of a major moment. I was at Stanford

and the play Pippin, my favorite play, was performed on this stage. And I remember thinking

just how awesome this place was and it's sort of fun for me to have

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