Bob Kelly
Bob Kelly is joining venture capital firm Ignition after a long Microsoft career

Imagine a millennial — raised with always-on fast internet, smartphones and the cloud — reporting to work, sitting down at a desktop computer and staring at an SAP application.

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“It’s just a nonstarter,” said Bob Kelly, a 21-year Microsoft veteran who today announced that he’s signed on as a managing partner of prominent Seattle area venture capital firm Ignition Partners.

Hard-core business software with roots in the client-server era will be revamped as “everything is rethought on the business-process side,” said Kelly, who spoke with GeekWire this week about his new role at Ignition and changes in the tech industry.

“Absolutely, enterprise business applications — that’s where the action is going to be for the next 10 years,” he said. “It will be completely transformative for venture capital, startups and enterprise customers.”

As much as he loves Microsoft, Kelly decided he wants to be part of that action. In January, he will join three other partners guiding strategy and fund investments at Bellevue, Wash.-based Ignition, which specializes in underwriting early-stage business-software startups.

“I’ve been very blessed to grow two businesses from nothing at Microsoft,” Kelly said. “If I’d wanted to stay at a large company and do large software, I would never have left there. But I felt at this point in my career, if I ever wanted to do something different, now was the appropriate time. The VC world is so passionate, filled with people who want to change the world, and I want to be around that. It’s exciting and exhilarating for me.”

Kelly, now 50, started at Microsoft 21 years ago, an English literature Ph.D. candidate fresh from defending his thesis and put to work on a two-day, $20 contract interviewing beta users of a new product.

“I didn’t want to do it, but my wife insisted,” he recalled. “Two days turned into a week turned into two weeks, and before long I was editing content for enterprise software. I was so hungry to learn that after a year of contracting, they hired me as a product manager in the Windows NT business. I call it my accidental career.”

He ended up helping to build and then running first Microsoft’s Windows Server business and next its Azure cloud service. Kelly left Microsoft in September, where he most recently held the position of corporate VP for the Cloud + Enterprise Business development and strategy team, leading merger-and-acquisition strategy.

Ignition managing partners (from left to right) Frank Artale, John Connors and Nick Sturiale
The other three Ignition managing partners (from left to right): Frank Artale, John Connors and Nick Sturiale

Ignition appealed to him because “I love the way they way they look at the world, their internal operations, their thesis.” That thesis, he said, is that the future lies in understanding how millennials will transition “from being on their phones to being in the workplace.”

To date, the rise of cloud computing, led by Amazon Web Services and Azure, has seen the most investment in infrastructure and DevOps, he said. Now, because of the movement of millennials into the work force, “with their mobile-first, cloud-first world, all business processes are being rethought. Ignition has its fingers on the pulse of those trends and therefore on what bets to make.”

As the cloud grows to embrace and automate more and more of the computing world, “what you’re looking at is not an $80 to 100-billion enterprise software category but the cloud competing in a $1.2-trillion IT category, including hardware, professional services and every part of enterprise IT,” he said. As to which cloud provider might prevail — market-leading AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, which “is getting serious about the enterprise side” — it’s too early to predict, he said.

Between September and January, Kelly has been spending his time consulting with start-ups and larger companies wanting to learn more about Microsoft, though he plans to take a long trip before taking up his new duties. A native of central Massachusetts, he now lives in Seattle with his wife and four children, ages 13 through 23.

“Bob has all the attributes we were looking for in a partner, including deep experience and scar tissue in enterprise and cloud computing, a vast knowledge base from working with tech startups over decades, customer and vendor perspectives on where enterprise computing is heading over the next five to ten years, and a person I have known for decades who is also just a high-quality human being,” said Ignition Managing Partner John Connors in a statement. “We couldn’t be more pleased to bring someone of Bob’s caliber and experience on board.”

Kelly is active in the startup community as both an investor and a mentor, in both Seattle and San Francisco. He serves on the board of advisors at 9Mile Labs, a Seattle-based accelerator. Oh, and he finally did get that Ph.D. He holds a master’s degree and doctorate in English literature from the University of Dallas, and a bachelor of arts in Liberal Arts and Sciences from Thomas More College of Liberal Arts.

Ignition, which also has offices in Los Altos, Calif., currently has investments in more than 40 companies, including Apptio, Avvo, Chef, Cloudera, Docker, DocuSign, Moz, Skytap, and Xamarin. It recently invested in StrongLoop, which was bought by IBM last year, and in Wit.ai, which was bought by Facebook.

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