Nearly 20 years ago (!), in 2007, I published my first and only book: Microsoft 2.0. It focused on changes I expected at the company in the “Post-Gates” era. What would remain the same and what likely would be different once co-founder and CEO Bill Gates had left the building?

CEO Satya Nadella has not exited the company (yet). But there’s no question that Microsoft and its mission have morphed considerably in the past year or two. I’m not quite ready to christen this the Microsoft 3.0 era, even though Nadella handed the reins of Microsoft’s dominant commercial business to Judson Althoff nearly a year ago.

That decision resulted in Nadella moving into more of a “founder mode” role, allowing him to focus less on the day-to-day work of running the business. (Microsoft historians may recall that Gates made a somewhat similar move back in 2000 when he became Microsoft’s chief software architect.)

While it might not yet be time for Microsoft 3.0, we arguably could be in the “Microsoft 2.5” era. Windows and Office are still around and still play a big role. Microsoft still builds and sells developer tools and databases. But there’s no question that the cloud and all things AI are at the top of the pecking order now.

I’m embarking on a series here at GeekWire that will focus on what matters to Microsoft and, by extension, to its customers, partners, investors, and employees these days. Who are some of the people shaping and leading the company? What are their opportunities and challenges right now?

Over the next few weeks, I will be profiling various Microsoft execs working on plans for Microsoft’s ongoing evolution. Some are company veterans; some are newcomers. I’ll be talking with top execs from Microsoft’s Security, Copilot, Windows + Devices, Xbox, GitHub, and more.

I’m interested in their strategies for Microsoft’s key products and technologies and how they plan to try to turn Microsoft’s ambitious vision into reality. What are their teams building? What do they see as their biggest challenges and opportunities? And where do they see the technologies in their respective areas heading?

I feel like many of us who’ve been keeping track of the biggest tech companies (myself included) have fallen into the trap of blaming or attributing everything a company does to AI. Layoffs? AI is the culprit. Price increases? It’s all thanks to AI. Changing sales strategies? Chalk it up to AI …

But upon further reflection, I believe Microsoft’s strategy is more nuanced than “AI or bust.” There’s no question that Microsoft’s AI ambitions are shaping its goals and tactics. But Microsoft, as a heavily enterprise-focused entity, can’t simply stop supporting products that aren’t built from the ground up with AI (as much as it might like to do so). Nor can it just leave behind customers who aren’t 100% onboard with its AI moves.

Couple those enterprise hurdles with some not-so-popular consumer decisions, like axing 3,200 people in the gaming unit, and Microsoft’s approach to turning the ship looks a lot trickier.

Our Microsoft 2.5 series kicks off Thursday. Stay tuned.

As AI workloads drive soaring cloud bills, more companies are weighing whether to move computing out of public clouds and into their own data centers. But building and operating AI infrastructure is far more complicated than simply buying servers — networking has become one of the biggest technical hurdles.

That’s the opportunity Seattle startup Hedgehog is chasing.

Founded in 2022 by CEO Marc Austin, a Cisco networking veteran, Hedgehog develops open-source software designed to make private AI data centers operate more like hyperscale clouds. It has raised $11 million in seed funding, with plans to raise a series A financing round.

We caught up with Austin for the return of GeekWire’s Startup Spotlight to learn more about the 20-person company, the AI networking boom and what surprised him most about building a startup in one of tech’s fastest-moving markets.

In 50 words or less, give us your elevator pitch?

Hedgehog is open-source software that makes AI networking simple. AI clouds and enterprises use it to run GPU networks the way hyperscalers do — deployed in hours instead of months, operated by DevOps teams instead of armies of network engineers, on open hardware with no vendor lock-in.

What problem are you obsessed with solving?

Time to GPU value. A GPU cluster is the most expensive asset most companies will ever buy, and every day it sits idle waiting on the network is money burning. That wait is rarely the hardware — it’s the fabric: weeks or months of scarce network engineers hand-designing, cabling, tuning, and validating it across proprietary CLIs and locked-in vendor gear.

Meanwhile the people told to “own the network” usually aren’t network engineers at all — they’re platform and DevOps teams. We’re obsessed with collapsing that timeline: declare your network like intent in Kubernetes and go from racked GPUs to inference in hours instead of months — on open hardware, no lock-in, no room full of specialists. Cloud-grade networking without hyperscaler headcount.

What surprised you after talking to customers?

How rarely the buyer is a network engineer. It’s platform and DevOps teams, often at AI clouds who just took delivery of thousands of GPUs who are told “you own the network now.” They don’t want to learn BGP; they want a network that behaves like the rest of their cloud-native stack. The other surprise: they don’t just want to run the network, they want to sell it by carving up capacity for their own customers, like a cloud provider does.

How has AI changed the way you build your company?

Twice over.

Our product exists because AI broke traditional networking. Training and inference traffic melts networks designed for web apps.

And AI changed how we build: we use it heavily across engineering, testing, and go-to-market, which lets a small team continuously test every supported device and configuration in our lab and ship with hyperscaler-grade rigor. AI raised the bar for what a startup-sized team can deliver.

What’s one thing people misunderstand about your startup?

That “open source” means hobbyist. The opposite is true: openness is the enterprise feature. Our customers can audit every line of code that runs their fabric, extend it, and never get locked in. Nearly every competitor markets “open networking” while shipping a proprietary controller. Hedgehog is the only one that actually publishes the repo.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve made in the past year?

Betting entirely on Ethernet. We decided open, standards-based Ethernet would win AI networking and put everything behind it. Watching the industry’s largest AI operators now standardize on that same approach makes us feel good about the call — but saying no was hard.

What’s the one piece of advice you give to other entrepreneurs?

Pick the wave, not just the surfboard.

Product decisions are recoverable; betting against a structural industry shift isn’t. Find the standard, the architecture, or the buyer behavior that’s inevitable, align everything to it early, and be patient while the market catches up to your bet.

We’ll know our company has made it when…

Networking is boring again. When a platform engineer stands up a multi-tenant GPU cloud and the network is just a few lines of declared intent that nobody thinks twice about. When “network like a hyperscaler” describes every AI cloud, not just the giants running on Hedgehog, then we will have made it!

Vieu, a Seattle startup aiming to replace cold outreach with warm introductions, launched what it calls the “Business Graph,” a live map of trusted relationships that drive business-to-business sales, marketing, recruiting and fundraising.

The 40-person company, which raised an $11 million seed round in October 2024, has grown to more than 100 enterprise customers including a number of well-known companies. Vieu competes with sales-intelligence tools like ZoomInfo and Outreach, and overlaps with LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.

The company is led by CEO Samir Manjure and CTO Simon Skaria, both Microsoft alumni. Manjure went on to found KenSci, a healthcare AI startup acquired by Providence in 2021. Skaria has also founded and sold two other startups, Office365Mon and Albits.

The Business Graph, which launched Tuesday, maps relationships between people and companies based on observed signals — such as shared work history, co-authored research, board affiliations, and joint ventures — rather than the self-reported connections that populate LinkedIn.

Common use cases include finding someone who can make an introduction to a decision-maker at a target account, quietly checking references on a job candidate, and figuring out which LinkedIn connections a salesperson actually knows versus the ones they simply accepted a request from.

Vieu says the graph can be used inside its own app or queried directly by AI assistants like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, and it integrates with CRM, email, and Slack.

Manjure said Vieu still has the majority of its 2024 seed round in the bank and has not raised new funding. The company charges customers a platform fee for access to the Business Graph plus outcome-based pricing tied to specific use cases like sales, recruiting, and fundraising.

Sunny Gupta has led two prior enterprise tech companies with backing from venture capital firm Madrona in the past 20 years. iConclude sold to Opsware. Apptio sold to Vista Equity Partners, then to IBM for $4.6 billion.

Now they’re getting the band back together for the AI era. Madrona’s Matt McIlwain is calling it the biggest opportunity “by far.”

Gupta is launching Thira, a Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise AI startup, with Apptio co-founder Kurt Shintaffer, and leaders from companies such as Atlassian, Oracle, and Databricks. Thira announced Tuesday that it raised $21 million in seed funding led by Madrona, with participation from FUSE.

The idea: Thira is building AI to handle the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep big companies running, like setting up a new hire’s laptop, resetting a locked account, or approving a software purchase. The pitch is to enable a “back-office that runs itself,” according to the company.

It’s starting with IT support. The company is building software agents that can take an IT ticket, work it across the systems where the actual fixes happen — such as ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshservice, and the identity and device-management tools that connect them — and close it out.

Finance and HR systems are also on the roadmap. Thira’s job listings describe agents built to “autonomously run the back-office work that consumes companies today, across IT, finance, HR, and beyond.”

Thira is entering a crowded market. ServiceNow closed its $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks last December to build autonomous IT ticket resolution into its service management platform. Startups including Aisera, Rezolve.ai, and Serval are pursuing similar territory.

Part of Thira’s bet is that Gupta and Shintaffer’s relationships with CIOs, which they built over many years at Apptio, will help to give it a foot in the door. Thira says it’s working with 10 companies as design partners ahead of a broader launch this fall.

In many ways, it’s a step beyond Apptio, which helps CIOs see where their companies spend money on technology. Thira is aiming to go past visibility to the “system of execution,” actually doing the work.

In a post on LinkedIn, Gupta said he began hearing from CIOs during Apptio tenure who wanted not only visibility into spending but also the ability to act on inefficiencies and automate work.

“In early 2026, I asked more than twenty CIO friends a simple question: has enough changed that what they’ve been asking for is finally buildable? The answer was yes, and bigger than I expected,” he wrote.

Thira’s team also includes:

• Mudit Goel, previously SVP of engineering at Atlassian;
• Grant Neuman, who was an AI engineer at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure;
• Tarek Madkour, previously director of product management at Databricks;
• and Shashwat Srivastav, previously founder and CEO at AIVOT.

Gupta has been Smartsheet’s executive chair since August 2025, when longtime CEO Mark Mader retired. He also served as acting CEO until Raj Singh was named CEO in October 2025. Shintaffer was Smartsheet’s CFO from July 2025 to May 2026.

McIlwain, the Madrona managing director, is joining Thira’s board of directors. FUSE founding partner Kellan Carter is a board observer.

In a statement, McIlwain said the founding team pairs Gupta and Shintaffer’s two decades of enterprise credibility at Apptio with what he calls “AI-native innovators.” He added, “This is my third time starting and building a company with Sunny and it is by far the largest opportunity we have pursued together.”

Salesforce’s Tableau business has renewed its lease for roughly 114,000 square feet at the Data 1 office building in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, extending its long-term home in the city.

The lease renewal takes effect after the current agreement expires in 2029, according to an announcement Monday first reported by the Puget Sound Business Journal. It marks the largest office lease renewal in Seattle this year.

The renewal continues Tableau’s long association with Fremont, where the company added offices over the years to accommodate its rapid growth before its $15.7 billion acquisition by Salesforce in 2019. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff once said the Seattle region would become the company’s “HQ2” with the Tableau deal.

However, the years following the acquisition brought significant change. Salesforce conducted multiple rounds of layoffs that affected Tableau employees and trimmed its Seattle office footprint as hybrid work reshaped demand for office space.

Former Tableau CEO Mark Nelson also departed in 2024 after leading the business for two years. Before the acquisition, Tableau had grown to about 4,200 employees worldwide, about half of them in the Seattle region. 

Salesforce originally planned to sublease the Data 1 building at 744 N. 34th St., which Tableau opened in 2018. But it then quickly reversed course in 2023, instead choosing to put its nearby Fremont headquarters building on the sublease market.

The Tableau news also comes at a changing time for Fremont.

Last year, Google announced plans to leave its Fremont campus, bringing all of its employees in Seattle together at its South Lake Union campus. At the time, it cited a desire for better collaboration and community. The pending departure has meant a large chunk of prime office space remains available for lease along the Lake Washington Ship Canal.

However, other companies and organizations have discovered the so-called “Center of the Universe.” Chip maker Nvidia recently leased 28,000 square feet of space at The Fremont Lake Union Center building and the global biotech nonprofit PATH last year took over offices formerly occupied by Tableau in Fremont’s West Dock building.

We’ve reached out to Salesforce about the Tableau lease, and we will update this post as we learn more.

UPDATE with statements from Salesforce and Hess Callahan Grey Group:

“Data 1 has been a critical hub for our local employees and customers, and we are thrilled to continue our presence in Fremont,” said Rob McCorkindale, VP of Global Real Estate Portfolio & Transactions at Salesforce. “This renewal underscores our continued investment in the Seattle region and our focus on creating spaces that inspire our people to do their best work.”

“Salesforce has been an exceptional tenant and a valued presence in the Fremont community since Data 1 was completed,” said Mark Grey, partner at Hess Callahan Grey Group. “Their decision to extend their commitment to the building speaks to the enduring appeal of Fremont and the importance of creating great environments for leading employers. Salesforce is an integral part of the neighborhood’s technology ecosystem, and we are proud to continue supporting their long-term presence in Seattle.”

— Rina Hahn has left Seattle’s Remitly as chief marketing officer. Hahn joined the remittance company in 2018 as director of digital marketing and rose to CMO after four years. Before joining Remitly, she was an executive at Blue Nile and Big Fish Games.

The publicly traded company helps customers in more than 170 countries send money internationally.

“I’ve seen firsthand the deep love this company has for its customers and the impact that purpose-driven work can have on immigrants and their families around the world,” she said on LinkedIn. Hahn, who is based in London, did not share her next move. Remitly co-founder Matt Oppenheimer stepped down as CEO in February.

— Temporal announced that Preeti Somal has been promoted to executive vice president in a role that will oversee the company’s engineering, product and design operations, which were recently reorganized under a single leader.

The industry is moving so fast that “we can’t afford any distance between the people who decide what to build and the people who build it. Unifying these functions closes that loop,” said CEO Samar Abbas on LinkedIn.

Somal has been with Temporal for three years, joining from HashiCorp where she held EVP roles.

The Seattle-area software company offers a platform for running complex computer workflows more reliably. In February, the business closed a $300 million round that pushed its valuation to $5 billion. Temporal is No. 2 on the GeekWire 200 is a ranked index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company, appointed Michelle Graff as senior vice president of global partners and channel. She joins from the cybersecurity company Commvault and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

“The future belongs to organizations that can transform trusted data into trusted AI with resilience built in from the start,” Graff said on LinkedIn.

Graff’s hiring is the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made five other executive hires or promotions this year.

— Qualtrics, an experience management technology company with headquarters in Seattle and Provo, Utah, has promoted Ken Hoang to senior vice president of product. Hoang is based in San Mateo, Calif., and will work remotely. He was previously a VP at Apptio in Bellevue, Wash.

Qualtrics had a big leadership shakeup in April, when five executives were let go in what CEO Jason Maynard described as an effort to “simplify our structure and ensure we are positioned for our next phase of growth.” Two product executives were among those who left, and Hoang joined the company around that time.

Qualtrics, which employs more than 4,500 people globally, makes software that helps companies gather and act on feedback from customers, employees and others through surveys, AI-powered analytics and other tools.

— Monica Lazo is now the sales director for Loopr AI, a Seattle startup that sells computer vision quality control software to manufacturing firms. She joins from Neurala, an AI platform automating visual inspections that is based in Boston.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has named atmospheric scientist Larry Berg as the director of the Department of Energy’s Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility.

And some departures from Big Tech:

• Mary Birkner is retiring from Microsoft after 21 years, primarily in leadership with Xbox. “I thank you for the laughter and goodness that were part of the journey to all the big work stuff,” she said on LinkedIn.
• Steve Andrews has closed out a 32-year career that included more than 11 years across two stints at Amazon, most recently as senior principal technical program manager. The TPM role “is often misunderstood and misused, so I dedicated a substantial amount of effort helping to set TPMs, their managers, and their teams up for success across the company,” he said. “I hope it made a difference.”
• Jeff Nienaber is departing Microsoft after more than 16 years, leaving the role of senior director and principal PM for the office of the CTO. “I’m really excited to see what tomorrow’s sunrise has in store,” Nienaber said.

On this week’s show, we’re on the GeekWire deck for our annual founder open house, where we dig into Microsoft’s latest round of layoffs — including a major Xbox shakeup — and the surprising rise of hardware companies on the GeekWire 200.

Then we sit down with four guests to talk about how AI is reshaping how they build: 

• Jana Schuster of StackIQ, whose AI-native platform helps companies find redundancy in their software spending — like Rocket Money, but for business — with a small team.
• Blake Resnick and David Benowitz of Brinc Drones, whose mechanical engineers are now vibe coding their own prototypes;
• Boaz Ashkenazy of Shift AI, who’s setting up always-on agents and rethinking how we interact with AI tools.

Finally, this week’s GeekWire Trivia Challenge: how a longtime T-Mobile executive got his start in the wireless business, and the star-studded history of T-Mobile celebrity endorsers.

Stories mentioned:

• Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, about 2% globally, revamps salesforce and launches massive Xbox overhaul
• GeekWire 200 update: New unicorns and a hardware surge remake our list of top Pacific NW startups
• Former GitHub CEO’s startup Entire unveils its answer to the crush of AI coding agents
• Chicago software company plants flag in Seattle area as new leadership team seeks AI talent
• T-Mobile exec Mike Katz exits after 28 years, as carrier reshuffles top ranks and taps ex-AT&T leader

Audio editing by Curt Milton.

— Hrishikesh Aradhye has joined Amazon Music as vice president of product and tech for the streaming service. He spent nearly 19 years at Google, most recently as senior director of engineering leading YouTube Music and Podcasts.

“The music industry is going through a tectonic shift that will unlock entirely new kinds of customer experiences through AI,” Aradhye said.

Earlier in his tenure there, he worked at Google Research, where he helped pioneer computer vision and machine learning systems for YouTube and Android.

— Vasu Jakkal is stepping down after six years as Microsoft‘s corporate vice president of Security, Compliance, Identity, Management & Privacy. She thanked colleagues and customers in a LinkedIn post.

“It’s been an epic journey — six years ago, we formed our Security customer solution area and the growth and impact of Microsoft Security over these past years has been incredible as we built the #1 security business in the world while keeping our mission of building a safer world for all at the heart of it,” Jakkal wrote.

Jakkal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held executive roles at FireEye and Intel. She did not indicate her next move.

— Mika Yamamoto was named chief marketing and customer AI officer for Veeam Software, a Seattle-based data protection and ransomware recovery company. It’s the latest in a string of leadership changes at Veeam, which has made four other executive hires or promotions this year.

Yamamoto previously worked for Seattle-area companies including F5, Microsoft and SAP, and joined Veeam from Los Angeles-based Blackline.

“She has experienced this industry from every angle — analyst, operator, executive leader — and has consistently put the customer and partner at the center of how companies operate,” CEO Anand Eswaran said in a statement.

— In case you missed it, Microsoft has undergone a leadership shakeup within Copilot as the company works to turn its platform into a “super app.” Changes include:

• Jacob Andreou has moved from corporate vice president at Microsoft AI to executive vice president of Copilot. He joined the company in 2025 from Greylock Partners and before that was at Snapchat-maker Snap.
• Peter Sellis has been named Copilot’s lead of design, growth and engineering, reporting to Andreou. He joins Microsoft from Discord and overlapped with Andreou at Snap, where Sellis was VP of product.
• The reshuffle also comes with a departure. Trevor O’Brien, former VP of product for M365 Copilot experiences, has resigned from his role. “The past two and a half years have been inspiring, chaotic, intense, and deeply rewarding,” O’Brien said on LinkedIn. He did not indicate his next move.

— Seattle-based tech executive Niranjan Vijayaragavan has taken the role of CTO at Five9, a cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service company. He joins Five9 from Nintex, where he served as chief product and technology officer. Other past employers include Avalara and Expedia Group.

“Five9 is at the center of one of the most important shifts in customer experience as AI reshapes how companies engage with their customers,” Vijayaragavan said in a statement. The company is based in San Ramon, Calif., but Vijayaragavan will remain in Washington.

— Maura Mast was appointed president of Seattle University, succeeding Eduardo M. Peñalver, who resigned to lead Georgetown University. Mast is the first woman and first mathematician to hold the top role at the Jesuit Catholic university.

“Our world urgently needs spaces of dialogue and discernment that actively work to heal deep divisions and build a more equitable society,” Mast said in a statement, adding that SU can lead in these areas.

Mast will begin the job on Sept. 1 and joins SU from Fordham University, where she served as a dean and mathematics professor.

— The Cascadia Sustainable Aviation Accelerator named Jake Gentry as its executive director. Gentry helped create CSAA, which aims to make the Pacific Northwest a center for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). He remains a senior director at Seattle’s Earth Finance and is leading the accelerator as part of that organization.

Hawaiian Airlines CEO Diana Birkett-Rakow praised Gentry’s appointment, saying in a statement that he has “the right combination of strategic depth, execution orientation, coalition-building instincts, and commitment to the work.”

Gentry previously held sustainability leadership roles with companies including Point B and Boeing.

— Seattle’s F5 has added Gavin Munroe to its board of directors, where he will serve on the audit and risk committees. Munroe has decades of experience in financial services and most recently was chief information officer and transformation head at Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

— Harini Gokul, a former leader at Microsoft and AWS and past chief customer officer at Entrust, has joined the board of Afiniti. The company builds AI software for call centers that aims to match customers with the appropriate agent. Gokul also serves on the Medina City Council.

— Safe Software, a data and AI enterprise integration platform based in Surrey, British Columbia, has named Nabil Lodey vice president of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Lodey will help lead the company’s expansion in the UK and Ireland.

— Allison Gruber is now VP and leader of Portland-based Cambia Health Foundation. She previously oversaw Cambia Health Solutions’ Strategy and Innovation team, where she led data-driven strategy initiatives.

— And some more folks are retiring from Microsoft, in addition to those featured Tuesday in a GeekWire story on the company’s first-ever voluntary retirement program:

• Nir Michaely, Azure software engineering manager, closes out 26 years with the company.
• John Ballard, principal security researcher, departs after nearly 30 years.
• Kristen Mattoni, senior product marketing manager, is leaving after 15 years.