Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president of strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft Corporation, was recently interviewed by Business Insider about Microsoft's presence in Silicon Valley. Below are highlights, as quoted from Business Insider, from this conversation:

  • Growing Valley Presence: Microsoft's presence in the Valley has doubled in the last ten years, and the company now has about 2,200 employees there, including about 400 working on search.
  • Microsoft BizSpark: The BizSpark program, which gives startups three years of free use of Microsoft software and services, has 37,000 participants after two years, and 330 of them have raised more than $900 million in funding in the last six months.
  • Fun facts: He was a classmate of Google CEO Eric Schmidt at Princeton. When Lewin was the CEO of Aurigin before joining Microsoft, he had to tell one of his investors that online pet food sales were not a good idea.

A full transcript of this Q&A session can be found here.