Why I'm leaving Microsoft

hi everyone kevin here if you've seen any of my previous videos before especially when i talk about microsoft products you've probably noticed that i always start out with a disclosure as full disclosure and as full disclosure as full disclosure and this full disclosure before we jump into this i work at microsoft as a full-time employee yeah i pretty much said that in every video where i talk about microsoft products my hr department required me to say that i know but a lot of you sent me feedback asking me do i really need to say that why do you start every video with that so i felt like as a responsible youtuber i should respond to my viewer feedback and i've decided to leave microsoft so i no longer have to say that disclosure at the beginning of my videos ah just kidding that's not the reason i left microsoft but actually a little bit of an announcement to make i officially left microsoft after almost 14 years on friday july 17th so i am no longer a full-time employee at microsoft and you might be wondering well what happened where are you off to uh i made the decision to leave microsoft and i want to pursue my youtube channel full time so it's a pretty big change for me and it's gonna be quite a journey coming up and you might be thinking well hey kevin like that sounds great it's always good to be entrepreneurial it's always good to start a business but seriously we're in the middle of a pandemic right now there are massive job losses lots of people are struggling you really think this is the best time to leave a pretty good stable job and microsoft's weathering the pandemic pretty well because a lot of people are relying on cloud services and software and what i want to do today is i'm going to walk through first off all the things that and all the reasons i stayed at microsoft as long as i did then i'm also going to walk through some of my rationale for why i decided to leave microsoft why i felt like now is the right time and then at the very end i'll share a little bit about what's coming up next this video is going to be different from my typical ones but hopefully you enjoy and i'd love to see your comments and thoughts down below let me know what you think let me know if you think i'm crazy or whether this was a pretty reasonable reasonable and also rational decision first off i want to talk a little bit about why i stayed at microsoft as long as i did and really the crazy thing is microsoft has been my work home ever since i left college and when back when i was in school between my junior junior and senior year i interned at microsoft and the internship went well and i came back full time and it was really the dream job to work at microsoft and i've gotten just over all my years i've gotten to work on some pretty incredible projects my last project that i worked on while at microsoft was i got to lead the office.com and office app experiences which is just an awesome opportunity when you look at the office.com domain this is one of the biggest websites in the world it sees upwards of 100 million visitors every single month and it's one of the top 25 websites in the world now the cool thing there is as i built features as i built functionality this is impacting millions and millions of people and i'm making people's lives easier i'm making people's lives simpler i'm helping get help them drive more business so it's just an amazing opportunity and not just the projects that i got to work on i also worked with some phenomenal people my manager and i had a great relationship you know the one tip i could give especially if you're early in your career who your manager is makes such a big difference in your satisfaction with your job also along with that i built relationships with a lot of great people who i'm still friends with now even though i left microsoft you know many of my friends outside of the company are people who i met on different teams i was on or different partners i worked with so these are lifelong friendships that i developed while working at microsoft outside of just all the relationships i formed i also gained a lot of skills that i'll be able to use throughout the rest of my life for instance i got to really refine and build up my muscle around presenting i got to present in front of thousands of people at conferences and company events i also got to build up my expertise in experimentation whenever we rolled out new features and functionality to millions of people on office.com we got to experiment you know the funny thing is you think about when i'm in school you know i'm sitting in statistics class and you always wonder am i really going to use this someday and i did i got to put all these different things i learned in school to practice when i was at work i also learned about building an mvp and getting a product so it's just good enough to put it out there you start getting customer feedback and then you can continue building on the product and probably the one thing i value the most while at microsoft and one of the things i found most satisfying is when you talk to a customer and they tell you about some problem or issue or pain that they're having and then you listen to that and you bring it back to your team and then you build a solution you come up with designs you code it up uh and then you work with the customer to make sure that what you're building satisfies them and then you actually put it out there and the customer gets to use it and you just see the delight and how you solve business problems for them just that end to end of figuring out an issue and then building a solution i found that just so satisfying now i've been talking very favorably about my time and very fondly of my time while at microsoft you might be wondering well why is this guy leaving it's he's selling us on working at microsoft and it's true i really enjoyed it and i likely would have stayed there longer but i'm going to walk through my thought process for why i decided to leave microsoft and this is one of my favorite examples that really helped frame my thinking but i looked to jeff bezos i read his book and he had this interesting thing called the regret minimization framework and it sounds kind of like jargon but what it means is if you project forward to when you're 80 years old and you look back on your life what you want to do is you want to minimize the number of regrets that you have and so i read that and i was like oh that's really interesting so if i thought back on my life when i'm 80 what would what would be some of the regrets i have and just to give a little bit of context when i was back in high school i ran my own web hosting business and that was one of my favorite experiences to build something up from nothing to having hundreds of customers just such an awesome experience and one of my regrets would have been if i never started another business again and so this seems like something i really want to do and if i stayed at microsoft sure you could build a business within the context of microsoft but i wanted to build something on my own to have an experience like my web hosting company emec a web to build something like that again but even bigger along with running my own business the reason i like running my own business so much is you really have an ownership mentality when you work for a big company at the end of the day everything that you build all the effort that you put in at the end of the day you're an employee and everything that's built goes to the benefit of the company and sure you get a salary maybe you're a shareholder so you get some of that benefit but when you build your own business all of the benefit accrues to you and the community of customers you're serving and that's something that's really attractive i think also along with that is you get the freedom and flexibility to decide where you spend your time where you invest what you build and so by running my own business i have that freedom and flexibility to do that while at microsoft everything needs to accrue to the organizational objective uh to the strategy of the business and you're a little more limited in terms of what you can do one thing that i also wanted is time and who doesn't want more time you know the funny thing is when you're a kid you complain about not having enough to do and having too much time and then once you start working it's like hey where did all that time go but one thing that i really wanted a lot more of is having time and when i think of my day i you know i sleep and i'm not going to cut back on my sleep and then i have a son and i spend time with my son and i value that i'm not going to cut back on that but then i had this big chunk of time that went towards work at microsoft and that is something i could cut back on and what i really wanted it's not just i don't want to have that time to work i want that time to work but i want to choose what type of work i do and so in a sense i wanted more time so i could decide what to do with that time and i've decided that i want to put it towards my youtube business and building my own business anytime you work at a big company one of the necessary evils is there's a lot of coordination that has to happen so it means a lot of emails a lot of meetings by running my own business hopefully i can cut down on that where i'm focused more on what is the value for viewers on youtube how can i keep delivering value versus the overhead that's needed to basically coordinate and keep people in sync in a larger business so i'm also looking forward to cutting back on that you know it's funny when i think of time because it's one of my favorite tv shows is shark tank but one of the things that they say on that show is if you don't want to work 40 hours a week you have to work 80 hours a week basically it's going to take you so much more time building your own business but you get this freedom and flexibility that's just so worthwhile now although i'm leaving microsoft i still feel pretty secure about it my wife has a job at microsoft so we were a dual income household and she still has her job at microsoft so that makes it a little less risky while i worked at microsoft i also saved and invested a lot and so that also gives me more security going off and making a move like this and then lastly i also think about you know i performed pretty well with microsoft i had job offers from other companies on linkedin i have companies like facebook google reach out to me on a near day a weekly basis asking me if i'm interested in jobs so there's always it seems like lots of opportunity out there so this youtube thing doesn't work out or you stop liking the videos i'm putting out you know hopefully there's a fallback for me but that's one thing that made me feel more confident with this decision the last thing i want to touch on is just the opportunity you know there's always risk in leaving something but the way i framed it to myself is there's also a risk in not pursuing something so if i decided to stay at microsoft you know it's a good stable job i got promotions every two years your income increases and that works out well but by not pursuing my own youtube channel or other businesses on the side i might be leaving a massive amount of growth potential and a massive journey and a massive satisfying experience i might be leaving that on the table and that almost felt like a bigger risk than leaving microsoft and so when i compared those two the opportunity size i think of building my own business is just so great that it almost felt like it would be a bad decision not to pursue it the thing that really cemented this view in my head is i was putting about probably 20 percent of my time into my youtube channel so i would always work on youtube on sundays that's when i would work on a lot of my videos and then i'd work on videos at night during the week and then during the day during the week i'd go to microsoft so youtube was about twenty percent of my time microsoft was about eighty percent of my time now the really just crazy thing that happened and it's just mind-boggling my youtube channel actually makes more if i look at all the kind of income that my channel generates it was making more than microsoft and so i started thinking to myself well what if i put 100 of my time towards youtube can i grow it even bigger um and then also along with that although i was impacting you know millions of people at work at microsoft when i put out these videos on my youtube channel and you just read the comments of how many people it helps you're helping people understand how to do something you're solving problems for people you have small businesses or teachers uh reading guidelines on how to do things and it's just helping so many people and it's this direct relationship with these people who i'm helping it was even more satisfying than say helping you know an anonymous million people at microsoft first like direct one-on-one connection with people on youtube and and so for those reasons it just felt like the clear choice was hey go off and work on my own business that was a little bit on my rationale for why i decided to leave let me know in the comments if you think that was reasonable or if you would still question it or let me know what you would do in my situation now you might be wondering well okay so you're leaving microsoft you're going to work on this youtube channel like what's next what are you going to do well first off my plan is i want to crank out a lot more videos i want to come up with a lot more videos that will help people do more with technology i'm also looking at other series that i could launch and hopefully i could run some of them by you or maybe i'll put out some pilots in terms of an mvp to see how people react what people think and then continue working from there all i know is you never know exactly what the journey ahead will look like but it should be fun and i should learn a lot and i'm really looking forward to that experience and i really i'm really thankful that all of you have joined along for this journey and just let me know what you think i love to interact and engage with all of you and i'll have a lot more time to participate in the community if you found this video interesting or if you thought it was fun to hear about my journey and why i decided to leave microsoft please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this and you're not yet a subscriber hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if you want to see me create any other videos in the future if you have any other questions or anything else leave a comment down below that's how i build my list of videos to create i take it from feedback that i hear from all of you the viewers on youtube well that's all i have for you today i hope you hopefully you found this interesting and hope to see you next time bye you

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 551,626

Keywords: kevin stratvert, microsoft, resign, quit, leave, youtube, full time, job, depart, office

Id: _O5egg9JUOQ

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020