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.
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Hoop has excellent taste in music
I first met Zune developer Hoop Somuah last summer, after a colleague on the Zune team suggested that he might make a good profile for the ViewMyWorld website. We covered all sorts of topics in his profile, including the ways that the small team felt like a start-up, and the ruffled feathered from a coding retreat that some regarded as a coup. More than six months (and a Zune release) later, I thought I’d catch up with Hoop again to see how things were going.
Hey, Hoop. So, what’s changed since we spoke last summer?
Last year was all about building the base for the Zune service. This year, we’re working on building cool stuff on top of that infrastructure. Last year we were much more hard pressed for schedule, trying to make the release date for Zune 2.0.
Summer and early fall of 2007 I worked harder than I have ever worked in my life — harder than college, even harder than when I had two jobs simultaneously.
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