Joining Microsoft

Over the last couple of years I’ve been helping build Empatico. We’ve hired a great team and built an awesome product which is having real impact. I’m super proud of what we’ve achieved and I’m confident it and the team will go from strength to strength. So when, a couple of months ago, Chad Fowler talked to me about a role at Microsoft, that confidence allowed me to entertain the idea.

I’m very excited to be starting leading a team of “CTOs in residence” at Microsoft, helping startups take their first product and engineering steps and helping them build the right architecture and teams to be successful. I’ve long been involved in the startup, infrastructure and Cloud communities and interacting with such a broad audience, exploring what they are building, and helping make them more successful is an amazing opportunity. To top it off, our team will also be representing the product needs and specific challenges of the startup community to the Microsoft Azure product teams, to ensure that platform is a great place for startups to grow and scale. The opportunity to be involved in the development of a Cloud platform from the inside is fascinating and compelling.

I’m staying in New York (my team is based in quite a few places!), I’ll still be involved with VelocityConf and the other roles I currently juggle, and I expect you’ll be seeing some more writing (probably not about shell scripting sadly :)) here soon too.