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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella receives TiE Lifetime Achievement award
In a fireside chat with Naveen Chaddha, Nadella offered deep insights on leadership, institutional relevance, and the evolving role of technology.
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Ritu Marwah -
Malvika Choudhary - Fri, 02, May 2025
- 11:08 EDT
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Satya Nadella receiving the award / LinkedIn
Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella on May 1 received the Lifetime Achievement Award from TiE Silicon Valley during the TiEcon 2025 conference at the Santa Clara Convention center.
The award was presented by TiE Silicon Valley president Anita Manwani, recognizing Nadella’s “visionary leadership, relentless innovation, and commitment to empowering every person.”
Also Read: TiECon engages all Silicon Valley constituents: President Anita Manwani
In a fireside chat with Naveen Chaddha, managing partner at Mayfield Fund, Nadella offered deep insights on leadership, institutional relevance, and the evolving role of technology.
“When I look back, a framework for, I think, given the number of founders, number of people who are, you know, working in companies. The real question for all of us is how do you build institutional strength?” Nadella said, emphasizing the importance of staying relevant over time.
“I'm not saying longevity itself for a business is a goal, but relevance is. I like to sort of remind even us at Microsoft that we've been there for 50 years. It really doesn't matter what is more important; are we relevant to the world in our 51st year?”, he added.
He outlined a three-part framework for sustaining relevance: generating new concepts, building new capabilities, and nurturing a culture that enables innovation.
“If you're an established company or founding a company, you have to come up with some new idea whose time has come. But in order to build that new concept, you have to have new capability… But then the key question is, in order to build that new capability, long before it's conventional wisdom, you need culture,” he said.
Nadella believes that culture is essential regardless of role or stage. “Whether you're a VC, whether you're an entrepreneur founding a company, whether you're an executive or an engineer working in a company, it's the same thing. You kind of really have a cultural sort of posture that allows you to either skill yourself up or get associated with other people with complementary skills that are needed to build something new that is needed in the world.”
The Indian American CEO underscored empathy as a “critical soft skill for innovation,” essential for identifying unmet and unarticulated customer needs. “You can even find empathy in log files,” he said, explaining how understanding a user’s struggles at scale requires not just data but the ability to see the world through others’ eyes.
On adapting to rapid technological change, Nadella emphasized that while markets are flexible on an individual level it requires constant reskilling. “It requires us to not be afraid of the new tool, but use it and then say, how do I get more leverage in my work? That, I think, is what all of us will go through.”
Discussing Microsoft's role in the evolving tech landscape, he asserted that it is essentially a platform company. “You're building a SaaS application for the new era, you're building an agent. How do we really give you the best core, you know, platforms to do that, whether it's from GitHub Copilot to Foundry to our data services. So as I always say Microsoft is both a platform company and a partner company,” he said.
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