I saw the news via GeekWire that after 17 years, the Microsoft Garage, which I co-founded, is coming to an end.
In software, 17 years is a very, very long time. I’m proud of how long it lasted.
The funny thing about the Garage is that it never should have existed. When we started it, Microsoft already had bigger, better-funded grassroots innovation programs. And none of us had any idea what we were doing. We’d never built anything like it.
And yet the Garage outlasted all of them. And grew bigger than any of them.
Some of that was luck. But I’d like to believe some of it was smart choices. Here are four that I think mattered, in hopes they help someone else with a similar opportunity.
In case you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the short version:
- Doers, not talkers.
- Make it a potluck.
- Don’t worry about the billions.
- Don’t be afraid to do epic shit.
1. Doers, not talkers
When the Garage started, the other innovation groups at Microsoft had one thing in common. They were built around ideas. Submit an idea. Vote on the ideas. Fund a few winners.
This was bad for a couple of reasons.
First, it attracted people who liked talking about things more than doing them.
Second, voting doesn’t work. Put ideas to a vote and the obvious ones win. But if an idea is obvious, someone has probably already built it. What you’re really looking for is someone with a special insight. Committees are terrible at spotting special insights.
So the Garage focused on people building small projects. Nobody had to vote. Nobody had to agree. If you wanted to build it, you built it.
That meant someone could build a test tool that made one annoying part of their job easier. Clark Roberts, Victor Boctor, and Mike Cook thought code reviews were too painful, so they co-built CodeFlow as a Garage project. It spread across Microsoft’s development teams and eventually into Visual Studio. Philip Su coded up Dr. Who, the fastest way to look someone up inside the company. Truong Do wanted one mouse and keyboard for all his computers, so he built Mouse Without Borders, which became the first Garage project released to the public.
None of those would have survived a vote. All of them were useful.
It also attracted a certain kind of person. The best coders are often the best because they just love to code. They code all day at work, then go home and code on nights and weekends. Those were Garage people.
Folks like Philip, who went on to be a tech CEO and site lead for Facebook and OpenAI. Vijaye Raji, who built Small Basic as a side project long before he founded Statsig and became CTO of Applications at OpenAI. And the CodeFlow crew: Victor, now a Technical Fellow at Airbnb; Clark, who leads engineering at TaxBit; and Mike, now an engineering leader at Clipboard Health.
As Chris puts it, they fell somewhere between startup founder and safe corporate employee. They wanted the security of a day job and also wanted to chase a dream. No surprise so many went on to do amazing things.
They weren’t interested in sitting around talking about ideas. They wanted to build things that solved their own problems.
It’s also why Ben Gilbert, now of Acquired fame, was the perfect person to take over the Garage after I left. Ben had always been a Garage type of person, building his own iPhone apps on the side. It’s the same doers-not-talkers spirit that led him and David Rosenthal to start hacking on Acquired way back before podcasts had blown up.
2. Make it a potluck
The Garage had a tiny budget. Me, one amazing contractor, Liane, and a little money for pizza and poster boards.
Meanwhile, one of the other groups had a chocolate fountain at their event.
Our tiny budget looked like a weakness. It turned out to be one of our biggest assets.
When people asked us to do something, we couldn’t just pay for it. When employees at Microsoft’s Hyderabad campus asked us to put on a science fair, we said: we’d love to support you, but you’ll need to find a way to fund it.
Two good things happened.
First, it was a great screen. Only the really motivated people made it happen. And when people know they’re expected to lead, they do.
Second, they went to their local leadership and got them to pay for it. And once leadership paid for it, it was their science fair. Not something some outside group was telling them to do.
This happened again and again. Bing wanted a science fair, so Bing sponsored it. The Developer Division wanted one, so DevDiv sponsored it. And because they were paying for it, their leaders wanted it to succeed. They showed up. And each one made the next easier. We could point to a science fair that had worked somewhere else instead of starting cold.
The Garage became something lots of people owned. The well-funded groups never got that. They were islands. Leaders saw them as distractions, and probably a little arrogant for thinking they knew how to innovate.
Turns out a potluck beats a chocolate fountain.
3. Don’t worry about the billions
I remember when Steve Ballmer visited Office Labs. Chris Pratley said that after the visit, Steve just asked: “So where’s my next billion-dollar idea?”
That one question explains a lot about why innovation is so hard at big companies.
If you’re an entrepreneur, a business doing $10M, $20M, or $30M a year is a huge success. At Microsoft, it’s a distraction. Big companies are looking for multi-billion-dollar businesses, and they’ll shut down things that are only tens of millions.
So the medium ideas get killed for being too small. And the big ideas need so many resources that they rarely make it either.
The irony is that billion-dollar businesses rarely look like it at the start. Facebook and Twitter didn’t even have a way to make money early on. Demand a path to a billion before you start, and you kill grassroots innovation.
We sidestepped all of that. The Garage was never about finding billion-dollar ideas. It was about supporting people doing grassroots innovation. Helping them build skills, ship things, make friends across the company, and make their own teams better.
Nobody could ask us where the billions were. We never promised any.
People always asked Ben, who ran the Garage after me, “What came out of it?” His answer: mostly culture. And keeping great people at Microsoft who went back to their day jobs re-energized. Look at that list of alumni again. Pretty good return on pizza and poster boards.
4. Don’t be afraid to do epic shit
One of my favorite Garage stickers said “Do epic shit.” We stole it from J Allard, who’d used it on Xbox.
It was controversial. People worried that a swear word in our materials wouldn’t be appreciated by everybody. They were right. It wasn’t.
But it had a very different energy from the rest of Microsoft. That was the point.
When you’re doing something like this, it helps to step outside the corporate culture and have a little fun. We never wanted to be arrogant. But we did do really fun stuff. Like a giant volcano, built by two pyromaniacs, that got bigger and bolder every time. Or giving people access to a laser cutter with only minimal training.
“Doers, not talkers” had the same tension. People worried it excluded folks who couldn’t code. And honestly, it did. But to have an identity, you have to say what you are and what you aren’t.
When you’re small and scrappy, you have to take risks. And you have to be willing to have an identity that isn’t for everybody.
Thank you
The Garage is ending, but I don’t think it’s really going away. It lives on in the people who built things there and took that habit with them. It definitely lives on in my network.
To everyone who ever hacked on something in the Garage, came to a science fair, ate pizza at Stay Late and Code, or set something on fire on purpose: thank you.
To those who got to be there at the beginning and in the middle of it all (Chris Pratley, Liane Donald, Ben Gilbert, Jen Michelstein, Joe Coplen, and others): it was a blast.
And if you only remember four things let them be: Find the doers. Make it a potluck. Forget the billions. Do epic shit.