Stefan is the Chief Product and Strategy Officer for Radial, and the General Manager for Radial’s Payment, Tax and Fraud division. Stefan is charged with steering Radial to build the products and solutions that will make eCommerce more convenient for customers and more profitable for retailers as it becomes an even larger part of our everyday life. In his role as GM of Payments, Stefan runs the $6B division that allows retailers around the world to securely accept payment from customers for goods and services without having to worry about fraudulent transactions.
Stefan came from Microsoft where he was one the founding members of the Bing search engine. While focused on Microsoft's product line, he worked across the industry to understand searcher behavior, academic developments, and innovations from all over and, in his role as an evangelist for Search, drove key product innovations millions of people see every day.
Prior to Search, Stefan led the strategy and partnerships to develop the next generation MSN portal platform and developed Microsoft's muni WiFi strategy and implementation, leading the charge to blanket free internet access across metropolitan areas. Stefan has been writing code since he was 8 years old and got his start at Microsoft in eCommerce with the acquisition of eShop in 1997. Across his 17 years at Microsoft, his focus was always on whitespace problems that required massive cultural and technical transformations, including applying open-source practices in Windows Server, designing and implementing Microsoft’s Informatics Security, or building entirely new models to support advanced search and discovery across the web.
Stefan holds a half-dozen patents in various disciplines and is a frequent lecturer to industry and academic groups on the future of data, information storage, retrieval, and usage. He recently published his thoughts in the international best-selling book, “Search: How the Data Explosion Makes us Smarter”.
Stefan is a huge gadget 'junkie' and can often be found in electronics shops across the world looking for the elusive perfect piece of tech. Stefan also serves on advisory boards for many startups ranging from biometrics to advertising to virtualization and is an active Angel investor. In his spare time, he is working with national educational reinvention groups to reboot K-12 education in this country and is actively advising startups that are focusing on boosting student achievement through technology and big data. He sits on the GenCon board of Conservation International and two other technology companies, and is a mentor and advisor for Endeavor Global where he helps cultivate high-impact entrepreneurs around the world. Finally, Stefan is working on a book with the nation’s youngest VC to promote entrepreneurism to the high-school audience and is actively working on disrupting mobile networks in southern Africa. He lives in Seattle.
