Patent-holding, foundation-starting, "Old School Geek" to pull double duty for Microsoft and LinkedIn
Call it the first real result from Microsoft’s recently finalized $26B buyout of LinkedIn: The former has named the career networking site’s Kevin Scott as its new CTO, a job he will hold in addition to being LinkedIn’s SVP of Infrastructure.
Having not actually met Scott, where else to start learning about him than on his LinkedIn page, which features a nice fresh post dated Jan. 24, 2017 and titled “Dream Jobs”?
(I checked his Twitter profile too, but this self-described “Old School Geek, Husband, Father, Hacker of Things Large and Small” had no public posts there since late 2014.)
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In his LinkedIn post we learn that Scott has come full circle, having been a Microsoft Research intern during the summer of 2001, working there with his Ph.D. advisor from the University of Virginia (he attended Lynchburg College for an undergrad degree in CompSci and Wake Forest University for a master’s degree in the same). Scott recalls the great opportunity he had to work with some computing science pioneers: “I was in awe of these folks, their stories, their work, and the company that was investing in such talented engineers and the great technology that they were building.”
Now Scott’s reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, while remaining part of LinkedIn’s executive management team.
This cooking/scifi/classical music fan (or so says his LinkedIn profile) claims to pretty much love everything Microsoft (Windows 10, Surface Pro, Xbox, etc).
Not that he’s likely to badmouth Microsoft rival Google either: He worked there from 2003 to 2007 as an engineer. He worked in areas such as online shopping and advertising, and of course search.
A boomeranger, Scott wound up back at Google a few years later as an employee of Google acquisition AdMob. This time around, Scott served as a senior engineering director for Google, focused on mobile ads technology.
Scott’s top skills, as tabulated by LinkedIn based on peer reviews, are software engineering and distributed systems. Java, Big Data and mobile devices are all areas of expertise as well.
A creative sort, Scott has been issued patents, including one for “Systems and methods for reputation management,” and another for “Identifying clusters of similar reviews and displaying representative reviews from multiple clusters.”
Not one to be all about Kevin (or LinkedIn or Microsoft or Google), Scott has served as an advisor or board member for numerous outfits, including Pinterest, Magic, the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, Chartboost and Box.net.
He’s also a philanthropist. Scott and his wife, Shannon-Hunt Scott, launched The Scott Foundation in 2014 to help kids in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, focusing on hunger, early childhood education and girls/women in tech. To date, the foundation has gifted over $2 million to local nonprofits, according to the outfit’s website.
What else can I tell you about Kevin Scott? He’s into open source, something that these days fits with Microsoft. You can read some of his thoughts on this subject in a LinkedIn post from 2015 titled “The Business Benefits of Open Sourcing.”
And you can see Scott in action here, talking on a conference panel about “What Exactly is Open Source?”
And who influences Scott? Well, among those classified as influencers by LinkedIn, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates and Richard Branson are among those on his list. Oh, plus Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner.
Not to mention that Scott follows in the footsteps of a lofty line of CTOs at Microsoft, including the likes of Nathan Myhrvold and Notes creator Ray Ozzie.
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