I'm leaving Microsoft.

After close to two decades at Microsoft, I’m leaving the company to take a truly unique opportunity.?

While I’m excited to tell you about what’s coming next - I’ll save that (and how you can join me) for tomorrow. Today is all about being reflective and thankful for what has been a truly unique experience.

During my time at MS, I had the chance to work in early stage tech in blockchain, cloud, digital marketing, IoT, and low code/no code. I had the chance to launch PaaS and SaaS services, developer tools, and open source projects. I had the opportunity to? meet with political leaders and tech icons, train hundreds of thousands of developers, work all over the world and get interviewed by major news outlets.? Along the way I’ve led a worldwide robotics competition, launched an incubation onstage at AdWeek, had my name literally travel to another planet, spent 48 hours in a hotel room fending off an attack from Anonymous (successfully), helped the Digital Crime Lab use the cloud to take down botnets and there was the one time I sent so much traffic to a rarely used service that I was told it melted a server. And those are just the things I can talk about.

My success is not just the result of hard work, but the time, education, insight, and partnership from so many.

Nick Robinson brought me into the company to work on Microsoft’s then largest project in the world. They say that starting a new job, moving, and getting married can be some of the more stressful things in life – I did all three simultaneously when I took the job. Coaching from Nick – from how to maneuver within Microsoft to helping us get acclimated to Puerto Rico (including finding our first dog) started the my journey off right. Thank you.

Uli Homann and Rimes Mortimer were constants throughout my career and the coaching, opportunities, insights, and friendship they provided were critical to my growth and achievements at Microsoft. These are two truly great people and if you have the opportunity to work with either, you should jump at the chance? Thank you.

The chance to work in Charles Fitzgerald’s Platform Strategy team was a masterclass in both platform thinking and strategy. It also introduced me to Rimes, Tim O’Brien, Jamey Tisdale, LaSean Smith, David Appel, Scott Beaudreau, Daz Wilkin, Tim Harris, Jamin Spitzer and others. It’s here I also got to work with Tandy Trower and launched Robochamps, Town Hall, Looking Glass, and Tafiti. I had a chance to re-connect with Charles as a mentor when I was leading product for Blockchain at MS, where his coaching was invaluable. Thank you.

That opportunity led me to the Architecture Strategy team where I had the opportunity to work for Simon Guest and Jack Greenfield, and folks like Mike Walker who I’d work with many times over in my career. Time with these folks helped me appreciate and understand patterns and modeling that I would use in every role that followed. Thank you.

In the early days of Azure, I had the chance to lead our first customer facing architect team under Rimes.? There were lots of great architects on the team over the years, but the original three set the bar high - Hatay Tuna, Mark Kottke, and Eric Golpe.? Your partnership and excellence in execution was appreciated and recognized with numerous awards. Thank you.

Mark Souza gave me the opportunity to work in the Azure CAT team in the early days of that team. In addition to working on some of the largest projects in the world,? I had the opportunity to learn from leaders like Pat Filoteo, Tim Mallileu, Fran Dougherty and Mark Ozur and work with a number of great PMs and architects like Mark Simms and Christian Martinez who would be regular sounding boards across future roles at MS.? Thank you.

Matt Kerner gave me the opportunity to turn “Project Lexington” into what would become Azure Blockchain Workbench and the opportunity to lead product for blockchain at Microsoft. The trust, autonomy that Matt and Tom Keane gave to the effort and learning from Matt’s approach of leading with empathy gave me opportunities to grow technically and professionally. We shipped multiple PaaS services, developer tools, and even 57 episodes of a? video podcast. It also gave me the opportunity to work with Mark Russinovich. It was amazing to work with an industry icon and have him be such a big proponent of blockchain technology. It also provided me the opportunity to work with outstanding marketing professionals in Wisam and JT Rose. The PM and engineering teams in this org delivered a lot, quickly, and at high quality. I was fortunate to have amazing PMs like Jason Anderson, Nayana Singh, Brenda Lee,? Chris Segura, Mahesh Narayan, Ramya Valstead, Zeyad Rajabi and Chris Klepper.? Marley Gray, Yorke Rhodes, Cale Teeter had an amazing pulse on what was going on in every element of the blockchain space and were amazing leaders and partners on multiple fronts. We were supported by an excellent engineering staff that delivered high quality services in record time. Rajesh, Valeria, Soumya and their great teams helped us go further, faster. The Microsoft Research team led by Manuel and Sylvan gave me an education on confidential computing, and gave me the opportunities to work with smart folks like Venkie. Craig Hajduk’s customer success team with folks like Michael Glaros and Brent Truell led some amazing projects that brought insight and visibility to the platform.? Thank you.

When I saw how quickly my blockchain customers were able to build solutions with the Power Platform, I reached out to “the Ryans” (Ryan Jones and Ryan Cunningham) saying I thought it was our next $1B business and wanted to help. At first that help was focused on helping governments and hospitals manage people, equipment, and beds during the start of the COVID-19 epidemic, and went on to lead Dataverse for Teams, the low code/no code effort for the new meta-os that is Microsoft Teams. From learning the ins and outs of a SaaS business to understanding the low code/no code developer to gaining insight into the types of apps and experiences that will surface in places like Teams and Slack, it was an invaluable experience.

Across all of this work, there has been a very large group that has been critical in any success – the Microsoft field, partners, and of course our customers. Consultants, CTOs, technical specialists, evangelists, global black belts, sales professionals, ISVs, business leaders, developers and IT Pros. With most of my work being in emerging tech, it was rarely on your scorecards but you believed in what we were doing, you gave me your trust, and you gave me your time and were the folks who made or broke success.? Thank you.

To my mentees over the years - you taught me as much as I taught you (probably more).? Thank you.

They say to save the best for last, and I wanted to thank? Kate Mercuri most of all-. My wife, my best friend, an amazing mum and someone way smarter than me, Kate put her career on hold and followed me to Puerto Rico so I could work for Microsoft.? She is truly an amazing individual and any success I’ve had and my ability to take on the opportunities above has been largely been possible because of her partnership, sacrifice and support. The words “Thank You’ don’t even come close.

To everyone mentioned and unmentioned who was part of the journey– thank you. It’s been a truly? amazing run.

For those that want to stay in contact, my personal email is [email protected].?

I'll be sharing details on my next adventure (and how you can join me) in a post tomorrow.