2019 Eight-minute musical film With Trip Master, Swetha Prabakaran, Joshua Yang, Peter Yang, Stephen Hitchcock, +150 others
Plate 1
The opening number on the Redmond campus.
Still, YouTube, 6 September 2019.
In the summer of 2019, I really wanted to make a Tony Awards-style opening number. So, during my data science internship at Microsoft, I gathered 150 interns and employees from across the company to make one about Microsoft. We celebrated and satyrized everything from Windows Phone to Clippy.
It was posted on 6 September 2019. Satya Nadella celebrated it, and it was covered by the usual tech publications like The Verge, GeekWire, Gizmodo—but also publications as far afield as Broadway World. My return offer came with a message: I trust you can do the data science. If you can get people from twenty teams at Microsoft to come together mornings, nights and weekends—you can move mountains, and we want you here.
Plate 2
Group meeting.
Photograph, 1 August 2019.
Plate 3
Recording the strings section at Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s private recording studio on Mercer Island.
Satya Nadella wrote that it was “great to see our interns bring their energy, creativity and passion to make us better”, and Brad Smith added that “with interns and inspiration like this, it’s easy to be excited about coming to work in the morning”. In a Teams meeting in 2020, Trevor Noah called it “still better than Cats”.
Microsoft interns capped off their summer with a Broadway-style music video, which celebrates (and takes some jabs at) the storied company’s history tweet
