Brad Silverberg, PARTNER
Brad represents Ignition as director on the boards of Seven, SourceLabs, ice.com, GlobalScholar, Avvo, and Skytap.
Prior to founding Ignition, Brad is best known as an industry pioneer who built the Microsoft Windows franchise and led Microsoft's Internet turnaround. During his nine-year tenure at Microsoft, he was a senior vice president and member of Microsoft's nine-member Executive Committee. He was responsible for driving all aspects of the Windows business from 1990 through 1995, including establishing the vision and strategy, and executing on product marketing and development. In five years, he grew Windows from a $50 million business to over $3.5 billion. He was also responsible for the MS-DOS business during that period. He was named PC Magazine's Person of the Year in 1995 for his leadership of Windows 95.
From 1994 through 1997, Brad led the Internet effort at Microsoft and was responsible for its Internet platform, as well as the Developer Tools Division and the Developer Relations Group. As part of the Internet efforts, Brad's responsibilities included Internet Explorer versions 1-4, which he grew from 0% share to over 60%, Outlook Express, Java, Commerce Server, and Commercial Internet Server.
In 1996 and 1997, he also led the Microsoft Office division, was responsible for over $6 billion in revenue and managed over 5,000 people. In 1998-1999, Brad worked part-time at Microsoft, primarily as a strategic consultant for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
At Microsoft, Brad led numerous acquisitions and licensing deals, including directing the acquisitions of eShop and Dimension X and negotiating acquisitions of Hotmail and WebTV. He also directed the licensing deals with AOL (Internet Explorer), Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Central Point and Spyglass.
Prior to Microsoft, Brad's career involved running product development at Borland International; running product development at Silicon Valley startup called Analytica, which was later acquired by Borland; product development at Apple Computer; and computer science research at SRI International.
He received a Bachelor of Science degree magna cum laude in Computer Science from Brown University, and a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto.