Hit Refresh

by Satya Nadella

After a few years at HPS my dad went to work at the United Nations in Bangkok. He wasn’t too fond of my laid-back attitude. He said, “I’m going to pull you out and you should come do your eleventh and twelfth in some international school in Bangkok.” I said no chance. And so I just stuck to Hyderabad. Everybody was thinking, “Are you crazy, why would you do that?” But there was no way I was leaving. Cricket was a major part of my life at that time. Attending that school gave me some of my greatest memories, and a lot of confidence.

  By twelfth grade if you had asked me about my dream it was to attend a small college, play cricket for Hyderabad, and eventually work for a bank. That was it. Being an engineer and going to the West never occurred to me. My mom was happy with those plans. “That’s fantastic, son!” But my dad really forced the issue. He said, “Look, you’ve got to get out of Hyderabad. Otherwise you’ll ruin yourself.” It was good advice then, but few could predict that Hyderabad would become the technological hub it is today. It was hard to break from my circle of friends, but Dad was right. I was being provincial with my ambitions. I needed some perspective. Cricket was my passion, but computers were a close second. When I was fifteen, my father brought me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum computer kit from Bangkok. Its Z80 CPU had been developed in the mid-seventies by an engineer who left Intel, where he had been working on the 8080 microprocessor, which ironically was the chip Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to write the original version of Microsoft BASIC. The ZX Spectrum inspired me to think about software, engineering, and even the idea that personal computing technologies could be democratizing. If a kid in nowhere India could learn to program, surely anyone could.

  I flunked the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) entrance exam, the holy grail of all things academic for middle-class kids growing up in India at that time. My father, who never met an entrance test he did not pass, was more amused than annoyed. But, luckily, I had two other options to pursue engineering. I had gotten into mechanical engineering at Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra and electrical engineering (EE) at Manipal Institute of Technology. I chose Manipal based on a hunch that pursuing EE was going to get me closer to computers and software. And fortuitously the hunch was right. Academically it put me on a pathway that would lead to Silicon Valley and eventually to Microsoft. The friends I made in college were entrepreneurial, driven, and ambitious. I learned from many of them. In fact, years later I rented a house in Sunnyvale, California, with eight of my classmates from Manipal and re-created our dorm-room experience from college. Athletically, though, Manipal left a lot to be desired. Playing cricket was no longer my central passion. I played one match for my college team and hung up my gear. Computers took cricket’s place and became number one in my life. At Manipal I trained in microelectronics—integrated circuits and the first principles of making computers.

  I didn’t really have a specific plan for what I’d do after finishing my electrical engineering degree. There is much to be said for my mother’s philosophy of life, which influenced how I thought about my own future and opportunities. She always believed in doing your thing, and at your pace. Pace comes when you do your thing. So long as you enjoy it, do it mindfully and well, and have an honest purpose behind it, life won’t fail you. That has stood me in good stead all my life. After graduation, I had an opportunity to attend a prestigious industrial engineering institute in Bombay. I had also applied to a few colleges in the United States. In those days, the student visa was bit of a crapshoot, and frankly I was hoping it would be rejected. I never wanted to leave India. But as fate would have it, I got my visa and was again faced with some choices—whether to stay in India and do a master’s degree in industrial engineering or go to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee for a master’s degree in electrical engineering. A very dear friend from HPS was attending Wisconsin studying computer science, and so my decision was made. I entered the master’s in computer science program at Wisconsin. And I’m glad I did because it was a small department with professors who were invested in their students. I’m particularly thankful to then department chair Dr. Vairavan and my master’s advisor Professor Hosseini for instilling in me the confidence not to pursue what was easy, but to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in computer science.

  If someone had asked me to point to Milwaukee on a map I could not have done it. But on my twenty-first birthday, in 1988, I flew from New Delhi to Chicago O’Hare Airport. From there a friend drove me to campus and dropped me off. What I remember was the quiet. Everything was quiet. Milwaukee was just stunning, pristine. I thought, god, this place is heaven on earth. It was summer. It was beautiful, and my life in the United States was just beginning.

  Summer became winter and the cold of Wisconsin is something to behold if you’ve come from southern India. I was a smoker at the time and all smokers had to stand outside. There were a number of us from various parts of the world. The Indian students couldn’t stand the cold so we quit smoking. Then my Chinese friends quit. But the Russians were unaffected by winter’s chill, and they just kept on puffing away.

  Sure, I would get homesick, like any kid, but America could not have been more welcoming. I don’t think my story would be possible anywhere else, and I am proud today to call myself an American citizen. Looking back, though, I suppose my story may sound a little programmatic. The son of an Indian civil servant studies hard, gets an engineering degree, immigrates to the United States, and makes it in tech. But it wasn’t that simple. Unlike the stereotype, I was actually not academically that great. I didn’t go to the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) that have become synonymous with building Silicon Valley. Only in America would someone like me get the chance to prove himself rather than be typecast based on the school I attended. I suppose that was true for earlier waves of immigration as well and will be just as true for new generations of immigrants.

  Like many others, it was my great fortune to benefit from the convergence of several tectonic movements: India’s independence from British rule, the American civil rights movement, which changed immigration policy in the United States, and the global tech boom. Indian independence led to large investments in education for Indian citizens like me. In the United States, the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act abolished the nation-of-origin quota and made it possible for skilled workers to come to America and contribute. Before that, only about a hundred Indians were allowed to immigrate each year. Writing for The New York Times on the fiftieth anniversary of the immigration act, historian Ted Widmer noted that nearly 59 million people came to the United States as a result of the act. But the influx was not unrestrained. The act created preferences for those with technical training and those with family members already in the States. Unknowingly, I was the recipient of this great gift. These movements enabled me to show up in the United States with software skills just before the tech boom of the 1990s. Talk about hitting the lottery.

  During the first semester at Wisconsin, I took image processing, a computer architecture class, and LISP, one of the oldest computer programming languages. The first set of assignments were just huge programming projects. I’d written a little bit of code but I was not a proficient coder by any stretch. I know the stereotype in America is that the Indians who immigrate are born to code, but we all start somewhere. The assignments were, basically, here it is, go write a bunch of code. It was tough and I had to pick it up quickly. Once I did, it was awesome. I understood pretty early on that the microcomputer was going to shape the world. Initially I thought it might be all about building chips. Most of my college friends all went on to specialize in chip design and work at places with real impact like Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, and Juniper.

  I became particularly interested in a theoretical aspect of computer science that was, at its heart, designed to make fast decisions in an atmosphere of great uncertainty and finite time. My focus was a computer science puzzle known as graph coloring. No, I wasn’t coloring graphs with crayons. Graph coloring is part of computational complexity th
eory in which you must assign labels, traditionally called colors, to elements of a graph within certain constraints. Think of it this way: Imagine coloring the U.S. map so that no state sharing a common border receives the same color. What is the minimal number of colors you would need to accomplish this task? My master’s thesis was about developing the best heuristics to accomplish complex graph coloring in nondeterministic polynomial time, or NP-complete. In other words, how can I solve a problem that has limitless possibilities in a way that is fast and good but not always optimal? Do we solve this as best we can right now, or work forever for the best solution?

  Theoretical computer science really grabbed me because it showed the limits to what today’s computers can do. It led me to become fascinated by mathematicians and computer scientists John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, and by quantum computing, which I will write about later as we look ahead to artificial intelligence and machine learning. And, if you think about it, this was great training for a CEO—nimbly managing within constraints.

  I completed my master’s in computer science at Wisconsin and even managed to work for what Microsoft would now call an independent software vendor (ISV). I was building apps for Oracle databases while finishing my master’s thesis. I was good at relational algebra and became proficient with databases and structured query language (SQL) programming. This was the era where technology was changing from character or text mode on UNIX workstations to graphical user interfaces like Windows. It was early 1990 and I didn’t even really think about Microsoft at that time because we never used PCs. My focus was on more powerful workstations.

  In fact, I left Milwaukee in 1990 for my first job in Silicon Valley at Sun Microsystems. Sun was the king of workstations, a market Microsoft had in its crosshairs. Sun had an amazing collection of talent, including its founders Scott McNealy and Bill Joy, as well as James Gosling, the inventor of Java, and Eric Schmidt, our VP for software development who went on to run Novell and then Google.

  My two years at Sun were a time of great transition in the computer business as Sun looked longingly at Microsoft’s Windows graphical user interface, and Microsoft looked longingly at Sun’s beautiful, powerful 32-bit workstations and operating systems. Again, I happened to be at the right place at the right time. Sun asked me to work on desktop software like their email tool. I was later sent to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work for several months with Lotus to port their spreadsheet software to Sun workstations. Then I started to notice something alarming. Every couple of months, Sun wanted to adopt a new graphical user interface (GUI) strategy. That meant I had to rework my programs constantly, and their explanations made less and less sense. I realized that despite its phenomenal leadership and capability, it had a hard time building and sticking with a cogent software strategy.

  By 1992, I was again at a crossroads in my life. I wanted to work on software that would change the world. I also wanted to return to graduate school for my MBA. And I missed Anu, whom I intended to marry and bring to the United States. She was finishing her degree in architecture back in Manipal, and we began to plan for her to join me in America.

  Like all the times before, there was no master plan, but a call from Redmond, Washington, one afternoon would create a new, unexpected opportunity. It was time to hit refresh again.

  * * *

  On a cool, November day in the Pacific Northwest, I first set foot on the Microsoft campus and entered an unremarkable corporate office unimaginatively named Building 22. Shrouded by towering Douglas firs, it remains even today barely visible from the adjacent state route 520, known for its floating bridge connecting Seattle to Redmond. The year was 1992. Microsoft’s stock was just beginning an epic rise, though its founders, Bill Gates and Paul Allen, could still walk down the street unrecognized. Windows 3.1 had just been released, setting the stage for Windows 95 and the grandest consumer technology product launch yet. Sony introduced the CD-ROM, and the first website was launched, though it would be two more years before the Internet would become a tidal wave. TCI introduced digital cable and the FCC approved digital radio. On a chart, PC sales at this time show the start of a meteoric ascent. Looking back now, I couldn’t have timed my entrance any better. The resources, the talent and the vision were there to compete and to lead the industry. My journey to Redmond had taken me from my home in India to Wisconsin for graduate school to the Silicon Valley to work for Sun. Over the summer I had been recruited to join Microsoft as a twenty-five-year-old evangelist for Windows NT, a 32-bit operating system that was designed to extend the company’s popular consumer program into much more powerful business systems. A few years later NT would become the backbone of future Windows versions. Even today’s generation of Windows, Windows 10, builds on the original NT architecture. I had heard of NT while working at Sun but had never used it. A colleague had attended a Microsoft conference where they showed off NT to developers. He came back and told me about the product. I thought, wow, this is going to get serious. I wanted to be in a place that would have real impact. The guys who had recruited me to Microsoft, Richard Tait and Jeff Teper, said they needed someone who understood UNIX and 32-bit operating systems. I was a little unsure. What I really wanted to do was go to business school. I knew that management would complement my engineering training, and I had been thinking about a switch to investment banking. I had gotten into the full-time program at University of Chicago, but Teper said, “You should just join us straightaway.” I decided to do both. I was able to switch my admission to the part-time program at Chicago, but then never told anyone that I was flying to Chicago for weekends. I finished my MBA in two years and was glad I did. During the week my job was to fly all over the country—lugging these enormous Compaq computers—to meet with customers, usually chief information officers at places like Georgia Pacific or Mobil, to convince them that our new, more robust operating system for business was superior to the others and convert them. And at school I learned more math by taking high-level finance classes in Chicago than in my engineering coursework. The classes I took with Steven Kaplan, Marvin Zonis, and many other storied faculty at the university on strategy, finance, and leadership influenced my thinking and intellectual pursuits long after I completed the MBA. It was an exciting time to be at Microsoft. Not long after joining I met Steve Ballmer for the first time. He stopped by my office to give me one of his very expressive high fives for leaving Sun and joining Microsoft. It was the first of what would be many interesting and enjoyable conversations with Steve over the years. There was a true sense of mission and energy at the company then. The sky was the limit.

  * * *

  Within a few years my work on Windows NT landed me in a new advanced technology group, founded by Renaissance man Nathan Myhrvold. Along with Rick Rashid, Craig Mundie, and others, Microsoft was assembling the greatest technology IQ since Xerox PARC, the famed Silicon Valley center for innovation. I was humbled when asked to join the group as a product manager on a project code-named Tiger Server, which was a major investment in building a video-on-demand (VOD) service. It would be years before cable companies would deliver the technology and business model to support VOD, and years before Netflix made video streaming mainstream. Fortunately, I lived right next to the Microsoft campus, the endpoint for all of this amazing broadband infrastructure that made our VOD pilot possible. So in 1994, long before it was commercially available, I had video-on-demand while sitting in my little apartment. We only had about fifteen movies but I remember watching them over and over again. Even as our team planned to launch our Tiger server over a fully switched asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network to the home, we saw our idea become obsolete virtually overnight with the birth of the Internet.

  * * *

  While my mind was fully engaged, my heart was distracted. Anu and I had decided to marry when I made a trip back to India just before joining Microsoft. I had known Anu all of my life. Her dad and my father had joined the IAS together and we were family friends. In fact, Anu’s dad and I shared
a passion for talking endlessly about cricket, something we continue to this day. He had played for his school and college, captaining both teams. When exactly I fell in love with Anu is what computer scientists would call an NP complete question. I can come up with many times and places but there is no one answer. In other words, it’s complex. Our families were close. Our social circles were the same. As kids we had played together. We overlapped in school and college. Our beloved family dog came from Anu’s family dog’s litter. But once I moved to the United States, I lost touch with her. When I went back to India for a visit, we saw each other again. She was in her final year of architecture at Manipal and enjoying an internship in New Delhi. Our two families met for dinner one evening, and that night, more than ever, I was convinced that she was the one. We shared the same values, the same outlook on the world, and dreamed of similar futures. In many ways, her family was already mine and mine hers. The next day, I persuaded her to take me to an optician where I needed to have my glasses repaired. After the appointment, we walked and talked for hours in the neighboring Lodi Gardens, an ancient architectural site that today is popular with tourists. Anu, a student of architecture, loved all the historical monuments that dotted Delhi, and for days afterward we explored them together. I had visited them all before as a kid. But this was different. We stopped for lunch on Pandara Road, enjoyed plays in the National Institute of Drama, and shopped in the bookstores of Khan Market. We had fallen in love. It was in the lush Lodi Gardens that one October afternoon in 1992 I proposed and, thankfully for me, Anu said yes. We walked back to Anu’s place on Humayun Road and broke the news to Anu’s mom. We were married just two months later, in December. It was a happy time, but the complications of immigration would soon prove a challenge.

  * * *

  Anu was in the last year of her architecture degree and the plan was for her to complete the remaining course and join me in Redmond. In the summer of 1993, Anu applied for a visa to join me during her final vacation before finishing school. But her visa application was rejected because she was married to a permanent resident. Anu’s father sought an appointment with the U.S. consul general in New Delhi and argued with him that the U.S. visa rules were not consistent with the family values that the United States stood for. The combination of his persuasiveness and the kindness of the U.S. consul general led to Anu getting a short-term tourist visa—a rare exception. After her vacation, she returned to India and college to complete her degree. It was now clear to us that Anu’s return to the United States would be very difficult given the visa waitlist for spouses of permanent residents. Microsoft had an immigration lawyer who told me it would take five or more years to get Anu into the country under existing rules. I contemplated quitting Microsoft and returning to India. But our lawyer, Ira Rubinstein, said something interesting. “Hey, maybe you should give up your green card and go back to an H1B.” He was suggesting that I give up permanent residency and instead reapply for temporary professional worker status. If you’ve seen the Gerard Depardieu film Green Card, you know the comedic lengths people will go to to obtain permanent residency in the United States. So why would I give up the coveted green card for temporary status? Well, the H1B enables spouses to come to the United States while their husbands and wives are working here. Such is the perverse logic of this immigration law. There was nothing I could do about it. Anu was my priority. And that made my decision a simple one. I went back to the U.S. embassy in Delhi in June of 1994, past the enormous lines of people hoping to get a visa, and told a clerk that I wanted to give back my green card and apply for an H1B. He was dumbfounded. “Why?” he asked. I said something about the crazy immigration policy, he shook his head and pushed a new form to me. “Fill this out.” The next morning, I returned to apply for an H1B application. Miraculously, it all worked. Anu joined me (for good) in Seattle, where we would start a family and build a life together. What I didn’t expect was the instant notoriety around campus. “Hey, there goes the guy who gave up his green card.” Every other day someone would call me and ask for advice. Much later, one of my colleagues, Kunal Bahl, did quit Microsoft when his H1B ran out and his green card had not yet arrived. He returned to India and then founded Snapdeal, which today is worth more than $1 billion and employs five thousand people. Ironically, online, cloud-based companies like Snapdeal would play an important role in my future and that of Microsoft. And the lessons I learned in my former country continue to shape my present.