Sep 10 '25, Wednesday
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19:16·2 SPEAKERS·3267 WORDS
AHello.
BHello. Yeah, he's Pragan. How are you?
AHi. Ranveer.
BYeah. So congratulations on the offer.
AThank you so much. Thank you so much.
BYeah, excited to have you on board. So.
AYeah, I'm excited as well. Like I talked to a few connections of mine who work at Copilot tuning as well and like I really liked what they said.
BYou have people who work in copilot tuning, you have connections.
AYeah, like I talked to not exactly Kubai Turing. Like do you know Sahil Bhatnagar and Radhika? I talked to them as well. Yeah.
BOkay, good, good. Yeah, Radhika is part of the team too.
AYeah. So yeah, they all had good things to say. So like, and like they talked about the work being exactly the kind of work I'm looking for, which is really nice.
BYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No you like it here. So. And I think there's a huge amount of learning opportunity. Huge opportunity to make impact. Definitely, definitely have said that we are a small team and we are doing big things. Yeah. So the opportunity is huge. So. Yeah, no looking forward to it. And you know, Leo also really liked you. So it's. And Leo's thinking of where exactly. You know, like I've told him that we need to make sure that you come and you learn and grow and with the opportunity to make big impact, you know, so the opportunity will be there and as soon as you do it, the growth within Microsoft should be quick after that. So that's all like, you know, very. The. That's. I'm saying this is a role which it's not like a typical big company role, you know, where you go. It's basically a slow growing thing here. Like because we're a small team and like the revenue opportunity and all that is big. The. There's a huge, A huge amount of opportunity to grow, grow fast, learn a lot. So. Yeah. Yeah. And I know you've talked about principal. Principal may be tough. The salary wise it should be go up that you should keep pushing Tam, I'm helping her to, to be able to make something. But at the same time I think, you know, the, the like, yeah, I really think this would be a great fit for you. And given where you are, given what you've shown already and then coming here and just taking it to the next level.
AOkay. Okay. Is there like a way we could like, I mean, I like would obviously defer to your judgment and if you think like principal is not right right now, it totally makes sense. But do you think like is there, is there some kind of way we could like evaluate me for principal maybe soon. Like six months down the line. 12 months.
BYeah, definitely. I'll, I'll keep that scope. In fact, when you join, I'll even give you those targets, man. Do this and I'll push for the next level.
AOkay, okay, okay.
BSo I'll. Yeah, so I'll make things happen. So if you just deliver, just be like, man, if I can, I'll give you hard targets but doable. And if you do it, then I can keep making that case. I've done that for people in the team and I'll do it for you too.
AOkay.
BGive them a hard target and if they. Basically, we have to win. The competition is hard and we have targets. We know what you want to get to and.
AYeah, okay, perfect. Oh yeah, that sounds good.
BYeah, yeah, that's. It's different from the other roles here and be personally involved in your growth. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. And what are you looking for in a role? Like I know you mentioned that, hey, you want to get into the AI space, you want to build more skills in that space. But what, what would be success for you?
AI think I'm primarily interested in like two things. I think one of them, I feel like your team already is covered on and like the, from the people I spoke to is that like I just want to be able to like read and be at a level where I read, interpret and implement current state of the art research. That's one and I think that's covered. And the second is like be able to like get everyone's productivity up by using AI assisted tools. Like that's another like, so I don't know how, how like how big your team currently is on that front, but.
BLike at rippling I've seen it's a big charter. We are not, you know, the hardest part comes when you work in like, you know, with a lot of additional code that you know, where a lot of the AI tools are not that great. We do use AI. A lot of the code is a. But not the complete package, you know, of automatically doing commits through agents and stuff because of a lot of additional code that we need to, you know, work with a lot of like, you know, office and these things. So that's a very interesting challenge to if you think of how do you. Because when many, many companies have this as well, they have a lot of code like for our team there's also a lot of new code which is good. But for many other teams, if I look at around Copilot across Microsoft there are these challenges still that there's already a lot of legacy code like the SQL team and then how do you make some of these AI systems work? It's interesting, it's non trivial but their team's working on it and this is a very important goal for the company. So yeah, if that is a passion, we have a huge opportunity to. To you know, make that change.
AYeah. Is there something, is that something I could work on? Like maybe not as a primary thing.
BBut yeah, yeah, definitely. In fact, both you didn't talk to Khushboo but her team and Leo's team, Renato in particular, who you talked to. This is one of the big charters. I in fact measure them this way. So it should be a great opportunity to actually go and do something in.
AThe teams because like at rippling, just to give you an example, we had someone come in whose dedicated mission was to just get all the coding services available like Cursor, OpenAI's Codex, Claude Code running and get people to use it and then get their assessment from it. So we can like pick one. But like that's sort of something that I would also be interested in doing like get.
BNo, that's something good to know too. We'll let me talk internally because I think this is something we need to make happen. It happens at a broader all of, you know, enterprise and experiences and devices level. So this is, you know, across like a 50, 000 person org. There, there is an effort.
AYeah, yeah.
BBut I think what you're saying is do it within the, within the team because we are so like, we are very thin right now in the number of people and the charter that we have. But I still think this is worth it, especially if you could start a group effort across the group.
AYeah.
BThen this might, this might be something to. So no, definitely. I'm totally bought into it.
AYeah. Okay.
BThe challenges people have tried and people are still trying. People still exchange AI best practices, what they do. There's a thread where people keep posting things.
ARight, right.
BBut when I, when I'm looking in the end how much of code was written by AI? I think it could be a lot more. People are not. The agentic stuff is not being used. I don't know if you all use it. It's still. AI is an assistant. AI is not writing code on its own, which it should.
AYeah. I mean it's. That is also hard like getting AI to write a code. But for example, like, for example, there's a, there's A bug that's easily spotted and we know that it's a two line fix. Instead of like actually me doing work to get it done, I would just spawn Slack itself, tag cursor and say oh this is the place where it needs change and fix it and it's a two line fix and then it would just spin up a PR for me and all I have to do is go approve it that, that actually we should be at that level. I feel basic simple tasks should not take human time at all.
BI think the team would love what you're seeing. Yeah, yeah, that is. Yeah, this would be great. I think such efficiencies are critical for the team to move fast. So this is.
AYeah. And I would love to like be the like person to make that happen like if, if it's possible.
BYeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Let me talk to. Actually there's Leo but Leo's counterpart is Al Khushboo. I think both of them would like it. So I would love to. Let me, let me talk to people but I think. Yeah, no, so that is definitely a great place to come and contribute. And especially you know in Microsoft too we are building GitHub copilot and stuff. I know it might not be at the same level but we do like within GitHub copilot we can use Claude and other tools too. Yeah, there is another. Yeah, so in fact, you know Replit.
ARight.
BLike replit tools are also available within Microsoft.
AOh, okay.
BYeah, so that's again another one that like in fact if you think there are any other tools we should be, we should be using. Happy to purchase those two for the team.
ARight.
BSo let's just keep pushing. Yeah, okay.
AYeah, I'll research some of these things I wasn't aware of like what I know Replit but I'll see what's available inside replit tools as well.
BYeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah like you know, you wouldn't expect for example Microsoft allowing you to use Claude but we do. And now we just partnered with them too.
AI know, yeah, yeah.
BWe are hosting their anthropic on Azure so we're doing a bunch of stuff with them.
AThat's nice.
BYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so in the coding part definitely. So that's where you see the. So that's one. And the other thing you'll be doing here is you know one of the other things I would love for you to think about is I see this is not necessarily what I want you to work on but if you want to, I would love it would be great. But there are many opportunities I just. They're talking about. Another opportunity is with Excel and code. Right. You know, Excel is a.
AHave you used Excel much like Basics. I know Basics.
BYeah. You know, even so, I'm not a big Excel user too. Right. But when you talk to a lot of enterprises, they are big on Excel.
AHuge on Excel. Yeah, yeah. Now I know, like almost the entire financial world basically runs on Excel.
BYeah, yeah. And that's another opportunity which we are not tapping in the group right now, where Excel is kind of, if you think of it also in ide, right. You people put in numbers, they write macros and they plot graphs. It's basically an ide. Now, the question is, given different workflows that people use Excel for, how do you automate a lot of that with AI? How do you make. It's fine to use Excel as still a ux, but a lot of the backend work that people use it for, you can make it really faster and simplified and automated and delight customers. There's this company called Shortcut which is doing some interesting stuff here. That's a startup broadcast monitoring what they're doing. Yeah, but that's again, just. I'm not saying you have to work on it. I would rather like. You know, Leo just thinks you'd be a great person to do the platform work for the group. You know that all the code that people write, how do you scale, how do you, you know, how do you make sure that things are repeatable? We are agile. We are like a lot of your background. Right. So he thinks he could be a great fit there, where then you have visibility into all the AI work happening across the team. It goes into your coding passion as well. Because everyone's building their components and using AI. How do you ensure that your entire. Everybody first uses AI, but most of the components are built by the team. So that's one of the things. Leo thinks you would be a great fit, but I'm willing to think of others as well.
AYeah, yeah, definitely.
BYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So at this point, how are you thinking about when like, okay, suppose so first is the salary piece. I'm assuming the event will come up at some. Come up with some things that you both agree on. So with the Renu, basically the way it works is she comes to me, I have to make a case and then it goes up and then basically our HR is in the loop and they then try to make something work. So let's try to keep that going. I have to get back to her, she sent me a mail. But in parallel, like suppose that works out. How quickly will you be able to move? Move as in stay in New York.
ABut join just basically I will need the H1B petition to be sent. At the very least.
BMicrosoft does it. Yeah.
ASo as soon as that is sent, I can then tell my current employer about the two weeks notice.
BOkay.
AAnd then ideally I would like to take a two week break before I join.
BYeah.
ASo in total we're looking at about depending on how fast immigration goes, four to five weeks. Five weeks minimum, at least.
BOkay, that's good. That's good. Yeah, no, that should work. Four or five weeks after you sign. Sounds good.
AOkay.
BYeah, yeah. And you'll be working out of New York, right? So we have other people there in the New York office. We do. You like, you don't mind going to work, right, even if it's in New York?
AYeah.
BMultiple New York offices.
ANo, no, I can definitely go. Yeah.
BOkay. Microsoft has this new thing of return to office. Right now I think it's only for the Seattle area, but they might do it in other areas too where they have something like if your commute is less than a certain distance and you have team members in the area, you should be going to work. It's not mandated for work three days a week, not five days a week. Three days a week. And within that I'm very flexible which three days, how people want to do it.
ARight.
BBut because we have like about, I think if you join we'll have about four or five members there. Right. And you could even try to see how. Yeah, like you know, how the group can work together with like one of them is a researcher, one of them is product manager, one of them is a scientist. Then what title do you prefer? I'm assuming you also prefer applied scientists. Right? Scientists as opposed to a software engineer. I think keep an eye. AI title.
AYes. Yes, I would like, Yeah. I mean like I said, I would not just want to work on the platform stuff. I would also still want to keep doing research.
BYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
ABut yeah.
BOkay, cool. This is good.
AYeah. Okay.
BYeah. Cool.
AAnd how do you feel about the return to office I had, do you, did you go in?
BYou know, I go to work every day.
AOkay.
BAnd the benefit is, you know, like, especially for brainstorming, it helps a lot. But for me the harder part is because I have so many meetings, I don't get time to meet the teammates much. But I, I, I think it, like it works out well. But I also see that people who are remote, it makes it hard for them. They like it. The. The current. What? Like the current policy of return to work is only for mostly the Seattle area, but I think they will extend it to us in Seattle area. It makes a lot of sense, you know, because if, if you're close by, you should just come to work.
ARight, right.
BBut in other places it's. Unless there's a big enough presence and that's part of the policy that the team should have a presence there. And let's see how they come up with. For other. For other places. Yeah, yeah, other regions. Because in Brazil, like a team is completely remote. In India, team is completely achieved. Yeah. The Bangalore one, people go to work, but the Hyderabad and Delhi people, they just work remote. So. Yeah, let's see. We'll figure it out.
AYeah, yeah. I think personally, I think the hybrid model works pretty well. Even at my current company, I'm pretty happy with it.
BSo you have a team in New York too or. No. Your current team is.
AI do have my. Explicitly. No. Like my manager is in sf, but I have colleagues. So even though it's not strictly about talking about projects, but just being in an office space makes a difference, I feel.
BYeah, yeah. No, I think it helps.
AYeah.
BThe Microsoft offices in New York are in really nice locations. So.
AYeah, yeah, I've. I know I had a friend over. He's. I think there's one in Times Square area.
BYeah, we're in Times Square. Yep.
AYeah, I look them up. Yeah.
BOne year World Trade Center. Yeah. Yeah. There are quite a few. So say I have to be there in two weeks. I'll let you know if like how long I'm there for and would love to meet up if possible. There is this. A World Economic Forum board that, that I got invited to which is basically a lot of CEO, CEO of Pepsi, CEO of Cargill, CEO Bear. And I'm the only tech guy in that AI for food. But I'm. I'll be part of. So there's a meeting, so I'll be there.
ANice.
BAnd I'm thinking of just meeting up with the people in the team in New York.
AYeah, definitely. Tell me if you have time. I'll definitely try to meet you.
BYeah, Will be great to meet.
AYep.
BYeah. Super. Do you have any other questions?
ANo, Ranveer, that was all. Thank you so much for the talk.
BAwesome. Yeah. Really excited to make things work and have you part of the team and give you the opportunity to grow and make a lot of difference, to really transform the way people work.
AYeah, thanks. I'm excited as well.
BYeah, cool. Thanks. Have a good weekend. Could you have the message, Karna? I'll get on a call.
AYeah. Bye. Bye.
3h 1mAnniyan
2005
1h 53mShaolin Soccer
2001
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