Brad Feld

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New Microsoft Blogger – Royal Farros

Jun 16, 2005

Royal Farros is has now joined the swelling ranks of Microsoft bloggers.  Microsoft bought Royal’s company (MessageCast – which we were investors in) a month ago.  Royal has been a long time friend and collegue – he was my partner Heidi Roizen’s business partner in their first business (T/Maker – thanks for the clip art Royal) and then we backed his previous company iPrint. 

Royal is endlessly delightful, insightful, and often – as Amy (my partially Irish wife) would say – full of the ole St. Nick.  He was on the receiving end this year as Heidi pulled one of the greatest ever April Fools Day jokes on Royal this year – it’ll be echoing in the halls for many years to come.  Let’s just say that since the MessageCast deal closed in mid-April there was a linkage between the April Fools Day joke and Royal’s soon to be future (and now current) employment at Microsoft.

MessageCast (and Royal) totally get blogging and RSS – so look for some good stuff from him about what he and Microsoft are up to.  Plus – Royal’s got the mind of a maturing Jedi Knight when it comes to the software industry, as witnessed by the following recent post on his blog from a speech he just gave at an OMMA panel:

For years, I would say, “I’m Royal Farros and my company, MessageCast, does real-time alerting.”  I found myself blurting out my standard opening… but stumbled as I remember I’m now Microsoft.  I recovered by saying:  “I used to say that we did real-time alerting… but now that we’re Microsoft, I guess we pretty much do just about everything in the entire world!”  That’s another thing you can’t say everyday, eh?

 Royal – dude – can you send me one of those cool Microsoft Office T-Shirts?