When Indian-origin YouTuber Dwarkesh Patel sent a cold email to Satya Nadella, he wasn't entirely certain that it would catch the attention of the Microsoft CEO. But to his surprise, not only did Nadella read Patel's email, but he also responded to it in four minutes, agreeing to be featured on his podcast.
Patel, who runs the Dwarkesh Podcast, is about 24 and lives in San Francisco. His family had moved from India after his father, a doctor, sought an H1-B visa and was assigned positions in rural America. He was only nine at the time, Meridian reported. He started his podcast during the peak of the Covid pandemic and has featured eminent tech leaders including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in it.
In his recent episode featuring Nadella, Patel revealed that he had reached out to the Microsoft CEO after discovering that he had signed up as a subscriber for his newsletter. "Would you be interested in coming to my podcast? Previous guests include Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, and IIya Sutskever," Patel asked Nadella in an email sent on January 25. "I am keen to hear how you're thinking about AI (and Microsoft) over the next 3/10/25 years."
Patel sent the email at 3.25 pm on a Saturday. Nadella responded at 3.39 pm.
"Hi, Dwarkesh. Your pod is super! I would love to," the Microsoft boss wrote.
Another interesting aspect of the exchange between the two was that Patel chose to write to Nadella using Microsoft Outlook and not Gmail -- a fact that further amused social media users.
Sharing the incident on X, Patel wrote, "Kids, don't underestimate the power of a cold email."
While Nadella and Patel discussed AGI and quantum breakthroughs on the podcast, it was evident that the host had dived deep into the world of AI and Microsoft's contribution to it. According to a report in Meridian, is one of the noteworthy parts of Patel’s journey to acclaim.
“If I do an AI interview where I’m interviewing Demis [Hassabis], CEO of DeepMind, I’ll probably have read most of DeepMind's papers from the last couple of years. I've literally talked to a dozen AI researchers in preparation for that interview — just weeks and weeks of teaching myself about [everything]," he told the publication.
Patel added that most of his research doesn’t end up being useful during the podcast "but some of the things I end up reading, even randomly on my own time, lead to interesting conversations.”
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