A few weeks ago at our weekly bridge game, I broke the news to Bill (Mr. Gates to the rest of you) that I decided to accept a job at ChannelAdvisor. He was, of course, devastated.

I left Microsoft just before Thanksgiving after finishing up my features destined for the Orcas codenamed release of Visual Studio Team System. You might be wondering why I left. Well, let me first say that the split happened on good terms and, as far as I can tell, no one's harboring any hard feelings - they even still invited me to the Christmas party :) The decision basically came down to my desire to try something different and learn new things.

I started working at Microsoft almost four years ago right out of college. Brian Harry was starting a new development office in Raleigh, NC and it sounded like a great opportunity. Ever since beta testing Windows 95 when I was fourteen, I'd been a self-confessed Microsoft fan and now I had a chance to see behind the curtain. What I found were five guys in three individually rented offices with big plans to create much of Visual Studio Team System and introduce a huge new business for Microsoft.

Over the past four years the office grew from the six of us to somewhere around ninety people. In that time I had five different offices, one motorized desk, three computers, and approximately 1,137 free drinks.

What I'm most proud of is the fact that we started with nothing and built the web load testing product that formed the cornerstone of Microsoft's software testing tools business. There aren't many places that ship software on Microsoft's scale and it was invaluable experience.

So what am I doing now? I'm working in the ChannelAdvisor Labs group to incubate new product ideas under the broad umbrella of "helping the world sell online" - ChannelAdvisor's tagline. The e-commerce world has a different set of challenges than the packaged software world, so it should be an interesting experience.

Posted by JoshC at December 12, 2006 7:37 AM

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