Jeff Teper

Jeff Teper has spent more than three decades at Microsoft, but his career is less a story of staying in one place than of repeatedly choosing to start again. The son of an engineer, Jeff learned to program while still in elementary school and became fascinated by the ability to create something entirely through software. At 19, while studying at NYU, he found himself responsible for software development at a small investment firm. It was there that he learned an early lesson that would stay with him: taking risks matters, but so does being willing to acknowledge when you are wrong and change course.

After NYU, Jeff attended Harvard Business School. He describes getting into HBS as something he very consciously wanted to prove to himself at that stage of his life. He was competitive, ambitious and motivated by the challenge. After graduating, however, he made a decision that looked irrational to some of the people closest to him. He left a promising path in New York and accepted a Microsoft job in Seattle for roughly half his existing salary because he believed personal computing was going to reshape the economy and Microsoft was where he wanted to be when it happened.

That instinct to choose the opportunity rather than the title appeared again inside Microsoft. After managing a technical marketing team, Jeff moved into an individual contributor role working on Microsoft's emerging internet efforts. It looked like a step backwards organisationally, but he believed the internet would matter more than the title he was giving up. The work eventually led through MSN and Site Server. Site Server did not become the success the team hoped for, but its failures became part of the foundation for what came next: SharePoint.

Jeff became one of the central figures behind SharePoint, but he is quick to credit the leaders who continued betting on him before he had a major product success to point to. He describes having enthusiasm, optimism and grit, while people including Anthony Bay, Brad Silverberg, Paul Gross, Bob Muglia and others gave him enough room to build a team and keep trying. SharePoint eventually became one of Microsoft's fastest businesses to reach $1 billion. The experience also reinforced a lesson Jeff returns to throughout the conversation: successful careers often look inevitable in hindsight, but they are built through repeated attempts, failures and people willing to give you another shot.

His career then went through another major reset with the move to the cloud. After years building SharePoint, Jeff was moved into corporate strategy and seriously considered leaving Microsoft to start something of his own. About a year later, Satya Nadella asked him to return to SharePoint. Jeff describes the choice as a 51/49 decision. He returned, helped reinvent the product for the cloud era, later led Teams during the pandemic as usage grew from roughly 30 million to more than 300 million users, and continued working on services operating at enormous global scale.

Today, Jeff sees artificial intelligence as a third major technological wave in his career. Many of his peers have stepped away, but AI has given him another reason to stay in the game. He describes it as a genuine reset in how products, organisations and even jobs are designed. For Jeff, the attraction is not simply remaining at Microsoft. It is having another opportunity to learn something new, build at scale and once again rethink how people work.