How to be more innovative | Sam Schillace (Microsoft deputy CTO, creator of Google Docs)

**Sam Schillace** (0:00)
We tend to undervalue the things we're good at. We tend to think work has to be unpleasant. And so if something is easy and fun, we don't tend to think it's valuable. So I think lots of people gravitate in this direction of let's go do unpleasant things and grind our way through the career because that's the way to make it. But the reality is you should go do the thing that you feel guilty to get paid for if there's a thing like that, and do the hell out of it, right? Do it as hard as you can. If you get pleasure from doing something that people want to pay you for, do it the best you can do it, as hard as you can do it. And if that's messing around and playing around with cool ideas, do the hell out of that.
Work doesn't necessarily have to be hard.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:37)
Today, my guest is Sam Schillace. Sam has an incredible resume that is very hard to summarize succinctly. I'll give it a shot. Currently, he is corporate vice president and deputy chief technology officer at Microsoft, where he leads efforts in the consumer product space, infrastructure and AI. Sam is most known for basically inventing Google Docs. With his company, Writely, which was acquired by Google, and became the foundation for what is now Google Workplace, which currently has over one billion active users a month. After joining Google, Sam ended up responsible for many of Google's consumer applications, including parts of Gmail, Maps, Automotive, Groups, Reader and more. He's also founded six startups, was senior vice president of engineering at Box, through their IPO. He's also worked at Intuit, Macromedia. He was even a VC at Google Ventures for a time.
As you'd suspect, we had a fairly wide-ranging conversation, but the core focus was around innovation. How to think big, how to come up with original ideas, why optimism is so important and powerful, and also a ton of career advice. Sam is hilarious and not what I imagined a corporate vice president at Microsoft would be like, which gives me even more respect for Microsoft. A big thank you to Brett Berson for making this introduction. With that, I bring you Sam Schillace after a short word from our sponsors.
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Sam, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

**Sam Schillace** (3:51)
Thank you. Happy to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:53)
A really fun fact about you is that apparently you have the very first Google Doc file. I don't know what you call it. The very first Google Doc document saved somewhere from before even Google Docs was a thing.
Does it still work in today's Google Docs and what is in this document?

**Sam Schillace** (4:08)
Yeah, it does actually still work. It's pretty funny. Actually, if I move my camera for a second, you might, if you're on YouTube, you can see the Writely thing in the background. That's Writely was the company that did Google Docs.