Yusuf Mehdi
Senior Vice President, Strategic Partnerships
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As senior vice president of Strategic Partnerships at Microsoft Corp., Yusuf Mehdi oversees strategic partnerships across the company’s personal services businesses, is responsible for large-scale mergers and acquisitions, and forges relationships with early-stage startups and venture capital firms.
Previously Mehdi served as senior vice president and chief advertising strategist; in this capacity he led Microsoft’s advertising strategy across the internal adCenter ad platforms, forged syndication partnerships and led the business related to acquisitions, including the $6 billion (U.S.) purchase of aQuantive Inc.
From 2000 to 2005 Mehdi was senior vice president of the MSN Information Services engineering group, which included the MSN.com portal, the MSN adCenter, an advertising and commerce platform, and MSN Search. In this role Mehdi managed a team of 1,800; led the launch of Microsoft’s first-ever algorithmic search engine, the next-generation adCenter ad platform; and oversaw growth of the MSN.com portal to serve more than 465 million monthly unique users, bringing in more than $1.5 billion in total revenue. Mehdi also was responsible for worldwide sales, marketing and business development for MSN, and during this period MSN became the most popular destination on the Web, garnering more users per month than any other Web service on the Internet. Under Mehdi this business became profitable for the first time.
From 1995 to 1999 Mehdi was responsible for the marketing of Microsoft Internet Explorer versions 1.0 through 5.0, and under his direction Internet Explorer became the world’s most popular software for browsing the Web. Mehdi also played key roles in the launch and marketing of Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 98 and the industry launch of Windows 95.
Before joining Microsoft in 1992, Mehdi was a product manager at Reuters Group PLC, where he helped roll out the first PC-based Reuters Terminal, which became the standard computing platform for the company.
A native of Washington state, Mehdi earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Princeton University and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Washington. He and his wife, Stephanie, have three children and live in the Seattle area.
