The story so far

From Pac-Man to Copilot

Hi, I'm Boris. When I was ten, I asked my parents for a new video game. They told me to write my own. That Atari 400, and the BASIC cartridge that came with it, set the course for everything that followed.

I've spent my career chasing a single question: how do people create together? It has carried me from a teenage computer club to the dot-com boom, from a startup that didn't make it to more than two decades at Microsoft, and lately to building the collaborative canvases where people and AI agents work side by side.

Quick facts

A dare, a cartridge, and a manual

My first computer was an Atari 400. It came with two cartridges: Pac-Man and BASIC. I got very good at Pac-Man, and when I asked for something new to play, my parents handed me the BASIC manual and told me to make my own. So I did, and soon I was writing original games for myself and my friends. I was hooked. As I outgrew one machine I'd move up to the next: from that Atari 400 to an Apple IIe, then a 286, and on from there.

By high school I'd found my people in the computer club. We flew to Toronto for the American Computer Science League championship and placed 17th in North America. My senior year, I was the only student in all of Seattle who signed up for the AP Computer Science AB exam. It was just me and a proctor in an otherwise empty room.

The long way around

I went to the University of Washington to study Computer Science, but other interests kept pulling me sideways. I wandered through geography and graphic design before finally settling on Political Science. For a while I figured I'd left programming behind.

My first real job brought it right back. As a junior developer at Centric Development, a small consulting shop in Kirkland, I was building early Internet solutions in C++, Visual Basic, ASP, and Perl, and I remembered exactly why I'd fallen for this in the first place.

Silicon Valley, a book, and a startup

The late 1990s pulled me to the Bay Area, straight into the middle of the dot-com boom. I ran the corporate intranet for a semiconductor-equipment maker, then hung out my own shingle as the Feldman Group, consulting on Microsoft Internet technology for clients like Sun Microsystems and SearchButton.com. Along the way I co-authored one of the first books on Internet Explorer programming, wrote magazine articles for other developers, and spoke at industry conferences.

One assignment changed my trajectory. I spent eighteen months as a consultant to Keen.com, a startup incubated in the offices of Benchmark Capital, and watching a company take shape up close gave me the itch to build one of my own. In 2000 I took the leap and founded Postalis, a startup that offered internet service providers email services like spam filtering, virus scanning, and even wireless (WAP) email. We signed letters of intent from eight ISPs representing nearly 200,000 subscribers and reached beta. Then the market turned, and the company closed. It was my first hard lesson in how much timing matters, and one I'm still grateful for.

I've spent my career chasing one question: how do people create together?

Twenty-plus years at Microsoft

I joined Microsoft at the end of 2002 and, somewhat to my own surprise, never left. What's kept me here is that the work keeps changing underneath me.

I started on Coriolis, a confidential project bringing the .NET Framework to UNIX, then moved into developer tools and the job of getting .NET deployed across the company. I was a program manager on the first release of Expression Web, Microsoft's tool for professional web designers. I spent years in advertising, launching mobile ads for Windows Phone, building the SDKs that put ads inside apps on iPhone and Android, and later working on card-linked payments with partners like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and First Data.

Then, around 2017, the work found its way back to the question I'd started with.

How people create together

I began building the collaboration and discovery services woven through Office 365: the "Recommended" and "Most Recently Used" document experiences that quietly help hundreds of millions of people pick up where they left off. I led the Cloud Storage Partner Program, which lets third-party cloud-storage providers integrate their services with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (including document viewers and real-time collaboration), so people could work in Office no matter where their files lived.

Since 2023 I've led product for Fluid Framework, Microsoft's open-source platform for real-time collaboration, the technology behind shared, multi-user experiences across Microsoft 365 and Copilot, now carrying more than a billion collaboration sessions a month. These days that means building collaborative canvases where people and AI agents work together in the same space.

It's a long way from a ten-year-old writing his own games on an Atari 400. But it's the same impulse it always was: make the computer do something real for the people in the room, and make it feel a little bit like magic.

The path, in milestones