Exclusive: NEA hires Lila Tretikov, former Microsoft deputy CTO, as partner

“God is in the details,” reads one of Stephen Sondheim’s rules of writing.

Sondheim was a lyricist, but it’s a rule I believe is broadly applicable. And I brought this up to Lila Tretikov, former Microsoft former deputy CTO, on a recent Zoom call—we were talking about the fine line between success and failure, and how small changes can make a big difference for a company, especially in AI.

“I joke with my son all the time that I really wish he could download everything that I know now versus when I started my company at his age,” she told Term Sheet. “You can’t do that…but you can help founders with that experience growing companies because, a lot of the time, it’s the few small tweaks that make the company what it is.”

Tretikov, previously both the CEO of Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia Endowment and a founder herself, just joined New Enterprise Associates, exclusively speaking to Fortune about the move. At NEA, she’ll be both a partner and the firm’s head of AI strategy. And she says, yes, my affinity for Sondheim’s “God is in the details” adage applies.

"It's a beautiful quote,” she told me over a Zoom call. “Devil’s in the details, God is in the details—it’s finding that needle in the haystack. That’s the center of venture capital, right? But you have to have perspective on where those needles are, and where they might be moving.”

Which starts answering what, to me, is a natural question: What exactly is a head of AI strategy and why does NEA need one? What does that day-to-day entail? It strikes me as a cryptic title, and I tell Tretikov as much.

"I see myself as like an energy booster, coming up with frames,” Tretikov told Term Sheet. “It’s going to be looking at different companies, one company at a time, but at the same time, it’s having a thesis of where change, and inflection points, are going to occur.”

Tretikov, who was born in the then-Soviet Union and moved to the U.S. at 15, began focusing intensely on AI while at Microsoft after an exchange with CEO Satya Nadella a few years ago. She asked him: “What will your legacy be?...I want to work on that.”

“I ended up at the center of that [AI] transition, witnessing the enormity of it,” she said. “From these large hyperscale organizations, you can see the ripple effect…But it’s like being on a very fast jet, where you can really only see the clouds. Or, you can be outside, and see all kinds of jets going by, innovation happening left and right.”

Then, for Tretikov, it was a matter of taking a gamble: “Do you bet on the big job that’s already in the air? Or do you bet on these rocket ships starting to take off from the ground?”

It’s easy to see where Tretikov landed. NEA’s portfolio already has a fair slice of the AI action, including Databricks, Perplexity AI, DataRobot, Orby AI, and Uniphore.

Since Tretikov’s been surprisingly game for my oddball musical theater references, I pushed my luck one more time, telling her about Sondheim's paramount writing rule—that all is “in the service of clarity, without which nothing else matters.” Can this also be applied to the AI boom?

"I have a parallel degree in art, and we always used to say that simplicity’s the hardest thing,” said Tretikov. “It’s getting to that razor’s edge, where the simplest solution is most likely the best one. But finding it? Boy, it’s hard.”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com