Tamara Steffens

Managing Director, Thomson Reuters Venture Fund

Tamara is a business and sales leader with 20 years of experience driving growth and facilitating successful exits for early-stage consumer and enterprise start-ups. She has scaled teams, infrastructures, and products at six startups and managed field operations, engineering, and customer support divisions at multibillion-dollar organizations like Microsoft and Openwave. She is a master of complex, multi-party deals and has an uncanny ability to envision and successfully evangelize the potential of nascent technology.

Tamara currently leads the global investment team at Thomson Reuters Venture Fund a $100M strategic fund with financial returns as the objective. She previously led investing and venture capital partnerships in North America and India for M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. She was the executive sponsor of the fund’s Female Founders Competition and sat on the board of 11 portfolio companies to provide guidance around sales, go-to-market, and talent acquisition strategies. Before joining M12, Tamara led business development for the broader Office 365 organization and was responsible for building Microsoft Outlook’s mobile strategy from the ground up, to more than 100M users in one year. In this role, she architected, negotiated, and closed one the largest deals in Microsoft’s history: a multibillion-dollar partnership between Samsung, Google, and multiple telecom operators.

Tamara joined Microsoft through the company’s acquisition of email app Acompli, a sale she negotiated as the startup’s Senior Vice President of Business Development. Over the course of her career, Tamara has positioned and facilitated the sales of multiple other startups, including Path (a mobile-only social network, acquired by KakaoTalk), Fusion One (a mobile cloud backup solution, acquired by Synchronoss), and Color (live streaming technology, acquired by Apple). She also helped to facilitate the IPOs of Boingo (WiFi) and Software.com (email).

Tamara started her tech career at Sun Microsystems and Silicon Graphics at the time when major Telecoms were pioneering internet services for the first time. She has a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Michigan State University, where she currently sits on the Marketing Leadership Advisory Board.