Funders Journey: Geoff Harris from Flying Fish Ventures

The Seattle Angel Conference program is aimed at bringing more Angel Investors into the startup ecosystem. Strong Angel investors lead to stronger startups. Some of our alumni discover a passion for the investing process and lean in on the efforts. In our Funders Journey series, we are talking to Seattle Angel Conference alumni who engaged more deeply in Investing. Our alumni are now in all of the Angel Networks in the community. In addition, several funds have our alumni as founders. Geoff Harris is a partner at Flying Fish Ventures. We will explore his journey from Microsoft to being active as a venture partner. Geoff Harris spent 15 years at Microsoft in engineering leadership and executive leadership positions. His career at Microsoft began in digital media where he ran the Windows Media Player Team. He then moved on to the mobile space where he founded the first Mobile Services Team within Microsoft, growing the team from zero to 250 in just over a year, which included a medium-sized international acquisition. Geoff was then General Manager for the Speech and Natural Language Team where he led advancements in speech recognition and Natural Language Processing which were shipped in Xbox, Windows Phone and Cortana. Geoff was an active angel investor with a portfolio of more than 40 investments. He has become heavily involved in promoting angel investing within Seattle in an effort to grow the funding ecosystem for local startups. Geoff is an avid musician. Geoff holds a BA in political science from Brown University.