Brian Valentine

Early life

Born in Centralia, Washington, he graduated high school in 1977, and enrolled in Centralia Community College Upon graduating from CCC in 1979 with an AA degree, Brian enrolled in the University of Washington’s Engineering department. Brian spent one year at UW, before taking a leave of absence in 1980.

In the fall of 1981, Valentine enrolled in the Computer Science and Math school at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington. In his senior year at EWU, Valentine was selected to develop the software for an automated energy management and control system.

He graduated EWU with a BS in Computer Science in May 1983, and took a job as a software engineer at Intel, working on software for in-circuit emulators, and major systems programming for Unix and VMS applications.

Microsoft

In August 1987, Valentine resigned from Intel and took a position at Microsoft, when his former Intel colleague Paul Maritz invited him to join. He spent the next 19 years launching some of the most widely used software products of their time. He led the team that launched Microsoft Exchange Server 4.0, 5.0, and 5.5. As a result of his success with Exchange, he was personally asked by Steve Ballmer in 1998 to rescue the then-failing Windows 2000 project. In one year, Valentine was able to successfully deliver Windows 2000 in December 1999. He then went on to lead the teams responsible for Windows XP, XP SP2, Server 2003, and Windows Vista.

Amazon

In 2006, Valentine moved to join Amazon.com where he worked, built and led the eCommerce Platform team for 8 years, leaving in early 2014.

Post-Amazon

Valentine joined Ivy Softworks, an Innovation Studio in Seattle, in September 2014 where he worked until 2015. Presently, he is the lead investor and CEO for WISErg Corporation. WISErg Corporation is a Redmond-based startup that takes food scraps from the back end of grocery stores and restaurants and turns them into a nitrogen rich organically certified liquid fertilizer.