From Wisconsin to global tech ambassador for Microsoft, Brad Smith stays grounded in Midwest roots (2024)

A joint announcement in May with President Joe Biden that Microsoft will spend $3.3 billion on its Mount Pleasant data center and invest in training more than 100,000 tech workers was a homecoming of sorts for Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Born in Milwaukee, Smith 65, has returned to the state frequently as a Microsoft executive, making personal appearances for the launch of Microsoft's Tech Spark skills training, its Titletown Tech business development partnership and even a book signing in Appleton.

As president and vice chairman of Microsoft, Smith leads a team of about 2,000 business, legal and corporate affairs professionals that's based in 54 countries and operates in more than 120 countries.

According to his Microsoft biography, he is "responsible for spearheading the company’s work and representing it publicly on a wide variety of critical issues involving the intersection of technology and society" that include artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, environmental sustainability, immigration and human rights.

Here's a look at Smith's journey from Wisconsin to Microsoft headquarters.

Wisconsin roots still resonate for Microsoft President Brad Smith

Smith's father worked for Wisconsin Bell, the telephone company that is now part of AT&T, and his job required several relocations during Smith's life. That included about five years in Mount Pleasant before the family moved to Appleton, where Smith graduated from Appleton West High School.

During the announcement with Biden, Smith spoke briefly about his personal connection to the area and even to the 2-square-mile site where Microsoft is building its data center in Mount Pleasant's Wisconsin Innovation Park.

"From the age of 9 to 14, I literally lived just three miles from here," he said. "Our family dog came from a farm that's now part of the land on which we are building."

More: Microsoft's growth could top $10 billion. Mount Pleasant had site ready for failed Foxconn

Brad Smith's pre-career years at Princeton and Columbia

After high school, Smith headed east to attend Princeton university, where he earned a bachelor's degree and met his wife, Kathy Surace-Smith. After graduating in 1981, the couple moved to New York, where each studied law at Columbia University.

Post graduation, Smith clerked for a federal judge and in 1986 joined Covington & Burling, a Washington, D.C., law firm where he initially stood out as the first lawyer at the firm to use a personal computer. Smith has said on multiple occasions that having access to a computer was a condition of accepting a job with the firm.

"Happily, they said yes," Smith said on a 2020 Microsoft webcast. "It was such an unusual request for someone to make at that time that everybody in this large law firm of about 250 lawyers said, there’s this weird kid on the eighth floor who seems to know something about computers."

His work at Covington & Burling focused on legal issues involving software, first in Washington and then in the company's London office where the clients included Microsoft. He made partner in 1993, the same year that Microsoft offered a new, more tempting role: leading its Paris-based legal team for Europe.

In 2002, he was named Microsoft’s general counsel, and helped set the company on a new path, one that was focused on shifting away from a historically combative posture on antitrust lawsuits and legal issues.

Bloomberg at the time reported that Smith prepared a PowerPoint presentation for Microsoft's leadership during the interview process that contained just a single slide. "Time to make peace," it said.

His bosses, who had just been through a four-year antitrust fight, agreed.

"I felt like I not only got the job, I got something of a mandate," Smith told Bloomberg.

From lawyer to a Microsoft tech ambassador, politician and lawyer

Smith became Microsoft's president in 2015, and that mandate continues to inform much of what he does at Microsoft.

When he was in Appleton in 2019 for a book signing for "Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age," a bestseller he wrote with Carol Ann Browne, Microsoft's head of external communications, Smith told the Appleton Post Crescent that his job hit the trifecta in fulfilling his teenage desire to be either an ambassador, a politician or a lawyer.

"I sometimes joke that, in fact, my job involves all three," Smith said.

There's a need for all three skills in the complicated and fast moving world of evolving technology, whether it's advocating for online privacy, pushing for government regulation of AI or working with other companies to resolve disputes and form partnerships to address emerging issues.

The New York Times in a 2021 called Smith "the tech world’s envoy."

Of course, his work also includes leading the legal team that represents Microsoft in often contentious global litigation and regulatory issues, but it also has another side that extends beyond strictly technological issues into other intersections with society such as:

• Filing lawsuits and lobbying to protect the legal rights of the children of immigrants provided by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, a social justice and workforce issue.
• Representing Microsoft at global business and climate forums.
• Heading Microsoft's philanthropic efforts.
• Working to support the communities and countries in which Microsoft does business.

In a post on Microsoft's website, Smith outlined four pillars that inform Microsoft's mission: creating opportunities, earning trust, protecting people's rights and empowering communities, and addressing sustainability in the face of climate change.

"Now is the time for urgent action," he wrote. "Those of us that can do more, should do more. But the challenges we face are complex, and no one company, sector, or country can solve them alone.”

More: Microsoft president: Wisconsin a 'really important state' for the tech giant. Here's why

Honoring an upbringing, world view that was forged in Wisconsin

During a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interview prior to the Mount Pleasant announcement, Smith spoke about how his understanding of the region's sensitivity surrounding Foxconn International holding's failure to live up to its multibillion dollar expectations in Mount Pleasant and his upbringing in Wisconsin play into the company's "under promise and over deliver" approach to data center development.

"Recognizing a little bit of the history associated with it, plus, I just think, you know, having been born and raised in Wisconsin, in the Midwest, it's just a better way to go through life," Smith said.

Such references come regularly when Smith returns to Wisconsin - memories of schools he attended, his life in the communities he lived in as a child, his connection to the Green Bay Packers.

Last year, Smith gave $3 million to a capital campaign for a new Appleton Public Library. The gift earned Smith naming rights, but you won't see his name or Microsoft's on the building. Instead, he chose to name it for Vira Stoner and Tom Fanning, two of his former teachers at Appleton West High School.

"I have many fond memories of growing up in Appleton and time spent at the Appleton Public Library," Smith told the Appleton Post Crescent. "Great books and great librarians, as well as great teachers and great schools, provided me with the foundation for my future."