Asia Leadership

Michael is the Sales and Business Development leader for Startups & Digital Natives in Southeast Asia. Michael works with startups and digital natives across the region to enable them to build digital-first businesses of the future through the use of Microsoft products. Michael also partners with venture capital firms, private equity firms, incubators, accelerators and venture studios to assist their portfolio companies in working closely with Microsoft to further propel their investments.

Previously, Michael worked at AWS as the Solutions Architecture Leader for the APJ region in the startup segment, managing a team of SAs in India, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. Michael worked as the technical executive sponsor across key accounts and was a regular speaker at AWS and external startup events. Apart from the technical management responsibilities, Michael was the relationship manager for Tier 1 venture capital firms in Southeast Asia.

Michael started his technical career in the USA working as the first sales engineer for Weblogic, Inc. that was sold to BEA Systems which was later sold to Oracle for $10B – one of the largest software acquisitions ever at that time. Michael moved to Hong Kong in 1999 to work for BEA as the Asia CTO and never returned to the USA. Michael has lived in Hong Kong, China, Thailand and Singapore working across various executive roles in startups, was the Managing Partner for a seed fund in Southeast Asia and has held leadership positions in Yahoo, HOOQ and AWS.

Michael is married with three kids and spends most of his time outside of work shuttling them around town to various activities and trying to organize date nights with his wife. Michael enjoys the gym, rucking and barbecuing when there is time.