I’ve always been a big news junkie and an advocate of keeping myself and my team informed of what’s happening with our tech space, our competitors, and the industries we care about.

I also like routines and love scheduling things on my calendar :), so every morning for the last ten years I’ve spent the first 30min of the day reading, saving, and sharing tech news I find cool and relevant.

I started sending daily email newsletters to my team shortly after joining Microsoft in 2004. They were a quick summary of the articles I’d found that morning along with my perspectives on how we should think about them as a team and business. The emails often got forwarded around and I had some amazing conversations with folks from around the company, including many that I never worked with or even met in person. 

Along the way the daily emails transitioned into posts on an internal social networking site built by the OfficeLabs team (pre-Yammer), then eventually to actual Yammer posts once we had them up and running inside the company. I adopted the #neato hashtag from an internal OfficeLabs discussion list and have been using it ever since.

I recently left Microsoft in November 2013 to start a new phase in my life and career by moving to NYC with my wife Amy and joining an amazing startup,www.contactive.com, as Director of Business Development. 

I’m continuing the #neato routine and am excited to be doing it as a public-facing site. I hope to share my perspectives on tech news and trends, but also some of my experience leaving a 100,000-person company to join a 10-person one. 🙂

Follow along, share your perspectives, or just leave a note to say hi.  

Thanks!

-m