Microsoft Deputy CTO, Google Docs creator
Sam Schillace
Profile
Sam Schillace is one of those rare engineers whose fingerprints sit on two separate eras of computing. In 2005 he co-founded Writely, a scrappy web app that proved you could write documents in a browser — something that sounded absurd at the time because browsers couldn’t really do that yet. Google acquired it the following year and rebranded it as Google Docs, which became the template for every collaborative cloud tool since.
After Writely, Schillace stayed at Google long enough to touch an unusually wide slice of their consumer stack — Gmail, Blogger, Picasa, Reader, Groups, and later Maps — before landing at Box as SVP of engineering and taking the company through its IPO. He’s founded six startups and spent time as a principal investor at Google Ventures. In September 2021 he joined Microsoft as Deputy CTO, reporting to Kevin Scott, with a mandate from Satya Nadella to shake loose Microsoft’s consumer culture and — in Nadella’s words — build another category like the one Schillace had already built once.
That mandate landed on his desk just in time for GPT-4. Schillace became one of the earliest senior engineers inside a trillion-dollar company to actually build with frontier models, and he wrote up what he learned as the Schillace Laws — nine pragmatic rules for programming with LLMs that circulated widely in 2023 and still hold up. They’re the kind of laws that come from someone who has shipped enough software to know the difference between a clever demo and a thing that survives contact with users.
For developers learning AI, Schillace is worth paying attention to because he keeps pointing at the same observation: we’re not writing software the old way anymore. The patterns he saw when the web went from static pages to apps are repeating — and he’s the rare person in the room who watched both transitions from the inside. His Sunday Letters substack is where he thinks out loud about it.
Key Articles & Papers
Early Lessons From GPT-4: The Schillace Laws Coding 'laws' for LLMs AI thought is different The agent-shaped world AI is stronger than you How it will happen How to be more innovative (Lenny's Newsletter transcript) AI, Google Docs, and the messiness of innovation (GeekWire)Spotify Podcasts
