Carnegie Mellon University
September 23, 2015

I Never Learned To Spell “Successful”

By Shilo Rea

I Never Learned To Spell “Successful”

Javier Soltero (DC’98) attended Carnegie Mellon University at the dawn of the Internet era. Since then, Soltero – an information systems major with a concentration in computational finance – has climbed to the top of the technology industry.

However, Soltero’s path to becoming the corporate vice president of Outlook Program Management at Microsoft was not without hurdles. He will share his experiences with the CMU community on Wednesday, Oct. 7 from 12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. in the College of Fine Arts’ Kresge Theater.

“I Never Learned To Spell ‘Successful’” is the first lecture in the Dietrich College Entrepreneurs Speaker Series and is also sponsored by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

“Most of my experience comes from failure, and I’ll share how those failures all played a key role in helping me build a career as an entrepreneur in the technology field,” Soltero said.

At Microsoft, Soltero leads the team responsible for the vision and strategy for the Outlook client and cloud service across all platforms. Prior to this role, he was the general manager of Outlook Mobile, the most downloaded iOS and Android Microsoft mobile app.

Soltero joined Microsoft in 2014 when Acompli, the startup he co-founded, was acquired. In 18 months, he led Acompli to great success, building a world-class team of developers and launching the product to rave reviews.

Before starting Acompli, Soltero was at VMware where he was the chief technical officer of SaaS & Application Services. He was responsible for driving advanced development and strategy for application level cloud services, bringing more than 15 years of experience in designing and developing infrastructure management technologies.

Soltero joined VMware after the acquisition of SpringSource in 2009. Three months prior, SpringSource had acquired Soltero’s Hyperic, the leader in large-scale web infrastructure management software, where he was the co-founder and CEO.

He has also held chief architect and senior engineering positions at a number of enterprise software and consumer internet companies including Netscape, where he was responsible for early internet messaging, application servers and e-commerce technologies.

Throughout his career, Soltero has been actively involved in various open source communities as both user and contributor to projects like JBoss and Apache Tomcat. He is also an active advisor to a number of open source and SaaS startups.

Soltero’s talk is free and open to the public.