Category:Microsoft people
Microsoft turns up in this wiki in three separate capacities, and the category reflects all of them. It is the company two Seattle schoolfriends founded in 1975; it is the place a set of chief executives worked before going on to run other companies; and, for a large and much younger group, it is the first line on a résumé that now reads as a startup founder. The result is a roster with no single center of gravity, spanning a Fields Medalist, two members of Congress, several sitting chief executives of other firms, and a long list of engineers who left in their twenties.
Founders and chief executives
Bill Gates co-founded the company in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen and served as chief executive for twenty-five years. Allen stepped back from day-to-day operations in 1983 after a Hodgkin's diagnosis and spent the rest of his life as an investor, philanthropist and sports team owner. Steve Ballmer was hired by Gates in 1980 as the company's thirtieth employee and became chief executive from January 2000 to February 2014. Satya Nadella joined in 1992, rose through the product organization and has been chairman and chief executive since succeeding Ballmer.
The ones who left to run something else
The largest identifiable pattern in this membership is Microsoft as a training ground for other companies' chief executives. David Risher began his technology career there before Amazon and now runs Lyft. Mike Sievert held positions at Microsoft and AT&T Wireless before joining T-Mobile as chief marketing officer and becoming its chief executive. Lidiane Jones held executive roles at Microsoft and Sonos before running Slack and then Bumble. Thomas Dohmke arrived when Microsoft acquired HockeyApp, the mobile testing platform he had co-founded, then rose through Microsoft and GitHub to run GitHub itself. Dennis Pilarinos spent more than a decade on developer tools at Microsoft before founding Buddybuild, which Apple acquired, and then Unblocked.
Two members entered by the acquisition route rather than the front door. Ryan Roslansky runs LinkedIn, which Microsoft owns, and in June 2025 also took on oversight of the Office productivity division. Mustafa Suleyman co-founded DeepMind and then Inflection AI before becoming chief executive of Microsoft AI, a division created for the company's consumer AI work. Reid Hoffman sits on the Microsoft board, as does Emma Walmsley, the chief executive of GSK, who was appointed in September 2019.
Research and public office
Two smaller groups keep this category from being a purely commercial list. Michael Freedman, a Fields Medalist for his work on four-dimensional manifolds, made an unusual move for a mathematician of his standing when he joined Microsoft Research in 1997, and he has led Microsoft Station Q at UC Santa Barbara on topological quantum computing ever since. On the political side, Suzan DelBene held senior executive roles at Microsoft before representing Washington's 1st district and chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and Josh Gottheimer worked in the company's corporate affairs division before his election to Congress from New Jersey.
Microsoft as a first job
The remainder of the roster, and numerically the bulk of it, consists of engineers who spent a few years at Microsoft and then founded accelerator-backed companies. Alex Pedersen, Faraz Siddiqi, Rohit Sirosh, Sachin Sridhar, Varun Tandon, Luke Bogus and Khalid Ashmawy all fit that shape, and all are building in artificial intelligence tooling or vertical automation. Their presence is the reason this category keeps growing while the executive layer above it stays roughly the same size.
See also
Pages in category "Microsoft people"
The following 14 pages are in this category, out of 14 total.