From Startup Founder to Microsoft for Startups

A few weeks ago, I officially began a new role as Senior Director within the Microsoft for Startups team. This is an exciting moment as I’ve been on both sides of the equation. On one side, I’ve been a B2B founder who built a company on the Microsoft cloud. On the other side, I joined Microsoft where I worked with our partners to help our joint customers on their journey of digital transformation.

This led me to Microsoft for Startups whose mission is to help accelerate the trajectory of B2B startups.

So how did I get here?

Around ten years ago, I was living in Hong Kong when my squash partner recommended Marc Benioff’s book, Behind the Cloud, about the founding of Salesforce. Reading that book ignited my desire to start my own thing. I thought, “I want to do something. I want to change something.” I had been working in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions which is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from inception, through engineering design and manufacture, to service and disposal of manufactured products. I wanted to do for the PLM market what Benioff had done for the CRM market – take an old technology and bring it into the cloud.

I moved to Italy and founded a company called Solair. We went through the typical growing pains as we moved towards product market fit and pivoted away from cloud-based PLM towards developing an IoT application platform. One of the first choices we had to make was, “Which cloud are we going to build this on?” We looked at all the traditional players and settled on Microsoft because we thought that for us as a business-to-business platform, Azure was going to be the best way forward given the deep penetration Microsoft has with enterprise customers.

Forming that relationship was vital to the growth and expansion of Solair as the sales teams in Western Europe began pitching us to their customers and we started landing significant enterprise accounts. Jump forward to 2016 and Solair was acquired by Microsoft. I moved over to Seattle and joined Microsoft as Head of IoT Solutions. More recently, I’ve been working in the Azure IoT team setting up vertically focused partnerships and working with our ecosystem to create Digital Transformation offerings for specific verticals combining Microsoft’s first-party services and third-party applications from startups and ISVs.

Today I am excited to say that I have moved to Microsoft for Startups where I get to combine all my experience and my passions from working with startups and working in verticals into this new role. The final thing that swung it for me was that I recently started doing some mentoring for some M12 portfolio companies. I realized that the value I could provide having founded a startup and grown it until acquisition was really appreciated by the founders I spoke with.

As I move forward with Microsoft for Startups, I think that my experiences help me to see both sides of the coin. Having led a startup, I can be an advocate for the startup CEO within Microsoft and after four years at Microsoft I understand a lot more about the different ways we can help startups.

I’m looking at each of our Microsoft for Startups companies from an operational standpoint. I want to understand how Microsoft can help them get where they want to go, how do we help them get the resources and, ultimately, the sales they need to succeed.

I still see enormous potential for growth at Microsoft for Startups. My initial goal in this first six months is to really communicate what Microsoft can do to help startups and then to do it. I want to make sure that we build on everything Microsoft for Startups has been doing to establish coordinated programs that maximize the impact we have on our portfolio companies.

In my experience, when you’re a startup, you just see Microsoft as a giant ship sitting high up in the water sailing serenely along. The reality is that Microsoft is thousands of much smaller vessels all paddling furiously in the same direction. Our role at Microsoft for Startups is to help entrepreneurs stop seeing Microsoft as an impenetrable monolith. We want to guide our portfolio startups to the resources, mentors, business development experts and technical architects within Microsoft that will enable them to reach their next milestone and the one after that too.

More to come.