Reed rocks

The geek in question: Reed Sturtevant

The job title: Managing Director of Microsoft Startup Labs

What are you working on right now?
Hiring in Boston! Our group is in start-up mode. The first of us got hired last fall, and now there are 12 of us. We’ve got seven people who’ve accepted who haven’t started yet.

What kinds of stuff will you be working on?
The idea is to create an internal, Boston-based development group that can build products and launch them to market the same way that start-ups do. We want to do a whole bunch of products at the same time, put them together from scratch. We’ll take ideas and concepts from within the company and figure out how to move these products through the early stages of creating a new business. Evaluate them. Work on prototypes. We’re focused on the early stage, but with permission to ship.

We’ve been asked to focus on two things: products that will attract a large enthusiastic audience, and to help drive new strategic platforms. So for example we’re using the Live Mesh SDK and building a set of applications on top of that.

So, you’re totally from start-up world, right?
Before coming here, I’d been working for 12 years with start-ups. To be honest, I’d stopped paying attention to Microsoft. Microsoft wasn’t a competitor, because I was working mostly with online start-ups. I hadn’t really been using the tools because I’d totally been living the open source life. You know, clusters of Linux boxes, Java, MySQL. Ruby on Rails was the last big platform that I used.

And I didn’t even know what Microsoft was doing — they weren’t really relevant to me day-to-day. So when a job offer came up, I was skeptical.

Yeah, I heard it took a year to recruit you into Microsoft!
I’d gotten a call about a project that was going on in the office of CTO, because of some work I had done with Idealab, where we’d done a whole bunch of companies, including Picasa –

OH MY GOD I LOVE PICASA!
I can’t take credit for it, the core architect was a super amazing guy. Anyway, Microsoft had called me to talk about a next-gen photo thing, and I was like “Meh.” But that conversation led to some meetings here in Boston about what I was doing and what I’d been working on.

It was clear that Microsoft was thinking of making a serious commitment to the Boston area, and trying to assemble a variety of different R&D efforts in the area. The conversation went on for a long time. I was like, “I’m busy right now with a start-up!” And I was so skeptical about Microsoft as a place to work.

Yellow laces + stars = Reed's bad-ass shoes

But my skepticism was met with enthusiasm, with people saying things like “That’s exactly the point! We need skeptics!” I saw that there was a huge appetite for change at the company. People were saying things like “We’ve really learned that we don’t understand this particular point of view. We need you to teach us things like how to think like a startup.”

So is this Microsoft higher-ups acknowledging “We have an existing process, and in this new marketplace it isn’t serving us well, so we need to learn something new”?
That’s part of it, but in some ways it’s additive. The existing process is very successful and shouldn’t be replaced, but in uncertain territory an experimental, iterative approach works great. It’s not just thinking about how to engineer a product, it’s how to build a successful business. I think we can model our group’s behavior around what’s evolved in the start-up and VC communities.

There are interesting market forces that lead you to act a certain way in the start-up world. You have to constantly prove to someone else that it’s worth taking the next step, by gathering real evidence. You have to pitch why it’s so great, how you’d tackle it, how the logic works.

VCs aren’t going to say “Ok, here’s $6 billion dollars,” and then come back six years later to see how it turned out.

Microsoft is a big boat to try to steer in a different direction. Do you feel like, in your year with the company, you’ve being able to turn the boat yet?
Not quite yet, but that’s ok. The best news is that we’ve got a lot of people helping us, and nobody has said we’re crazy.

Links, please?

• Article about Reed’s arrival at MSFT
• Reed on FriendFeed
• Reed on Facebook