Ex-Microsoft exec invests in tech workers

Faced with a harrowing shortage of tech workers, an email start-up is
foregoing venture funding to offer its employees more equity in the company.



Chromium, a Seattle-area

start-up, is at work on what founder and former
Microsoft executive Eric Engstrom calls "a new kind of email."

Engstrom would not give details of the technology, but he did say that the
company, which is self-funded, will take the stock it would otherwise have
given to first-round venture capitalists and give it to its employees
instead.

"The rarest commodity is not money, it's talent," said Engstrom, former
general manager for Internet access at Microsoft and former general manager
of DirectX media.

The Chromium team is three-fourths of the way through the email product,
which will run on both Linux and Windows, he said.

Engstrom, like other ex-Microsoft employees, is using the fortune he earned
from Microsoft stock options to fertilize new businesses.



Other examples of post-Microsoft entrepreneurs include Brad Silverberg, chief executive
of wireless communications company
Ignition; Alex St. John, chief executive of 3D animation start-up WildTangent,
which last month closed a second round of venture funding worth $17 million
dollars; and former Microsoft product manager Darby Williams, who with
other Microsoft millionaires started the ill-fated Cook Express.

Engstrom is known for his testimony in Microsoft's landmark antitrust
trial, in which he gave a spirited
defense of Microsoft's behavior toward Apple Computer.