Blackberry Vice President Alec Saunders Is Joining Microsoft

Alec Saunders, formerly the Vice President of QNX Cloud at QNX Software, and most recently the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry is rejoining Microsoft. Yes, Alec Saunders was already working at Microsoft from 1992 to 2000. During his period at Microsoft, he worked on the initial launch of Microsoft Internet Explorer, DOS 6, Windows and more. He will be now joining Microsoft’s Developer Experience team to promote Microsoft Ventures.

Despite being away from Microsoft for 14 years, my experiences there provided some of the most enduring lessons of my career — lessons that I have relied on daily in every role I’ve held since. Those lessons range from campaign mechanics, to management, culture, scale and execution. As many of my former staff at BlackBerry will tell you, we often took lessons from Microsoft and applied them to great effect.

So it was natural that one of the first companies I reached out to after leaving BlackBerry would be Microsoft. As of last Monday, I’ve rejoined Microsoft in the role of Principal Technical Evangelist. My beat is Canada – not just Kitchener-Waterloo. My boss is Microsoft Chief Evangelist and Corporate Vice President for Developer Experience, Steven “Guggs” Guggenheimer. I’m part of the global Microsoft Ventures team. And we run programs, like the Microsoft Ventures Accelerators, that are focused on helping early stage companies achieve their full potential.

Source: Alec