Wendy Spies

Worldwide Director Of Engineering Strategy and Business Development, Microsoft

307 - Secret to Higher ROI: Invest in Women

Wendy Spies is the Director of Business Development for Data and AI across Microsoft globally. In more than 15 years of successful product leadership experience, she has brought multiple companies from product conception to financial exit - from 21.co, with a 100x return on investment to trialpay.com, whose offering still powers Visa's advertising network, to Voltage Security where more than one third of the Fortune 500 use it as their corporate encryption standard.

Ms. Spies is now focused on furthering Microsoft's mission of personal and organizational empowerment by guiding technology investments. Her primary focus is to build, buy, and partner to develop game-changing solutions for customers in the Cloud and Enterprise, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning divisions. In three and a half years she has developed product and driven investment in blockchain, containers, AI, data, and OSS. On a mission to grow with others by driving efficient, iterative innovation practices that lead to exponential growth in business value, Ms. Spies holds a B.S. in Engineering from Stanford.