About

My name is Brandon Watson, and I am currently responsible for the Developer Experience team for Windows Phone 7. That means I work on developer marketing, our developer platform products, and have a real focus/passion on new opportunities, specifically around developer enablement and mobile.

I am a retread at Microsoft, having left the company in 1999 to head out to Wall Street and a couple of startups.  Having spent time at Soros Private Equity, I learned a ton about the other side of the table, investing over $70 million, mostly in technology related businesses.  Post Soros, I decided to take a management position at RLX, one of our portfolio companies.  We sold that business in 2005 to HP.  I went on to found IMSafer, a consumer Internet company focused on protecting kids online, in early 2006, built the company up to 150K customers, and sold that business to a company in the UK.

After that sale, my wife and I wanted to get back to Seattle, and, quite honestly, with two kids under age three at the time, I needed some time to breathe.  Once me we made the decision to return to Seattle, the lure of coming back to the company where I cut my teeth, and rejoining with so mnay of the friends I had made so long ago was a great lure.

I have a very dusty engineering degree and an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as an MBA from The Wharton School of Business.  I have to be honest, I’m not sure I’m using any of what I learned in school.

In my free time, I listen to music, read a ton, mess around with Python & C#, train for Ironman and half Ironman distance triathlons, and, most importantly, spend time with my wife and three awesome kids.

You can find me on Facebook and you can follow me on Twitter.