Richard Fade

Richard Fade is a Partner at Ignition Partners based in Bellevue, Washington, where he focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise infrastructure software, virtualization, and cloud services. Before joining the venture capital firm in 2004, he spent 16 years in executive roles at Microsoft, serving as Senior Vice President of the OEM division and Vice President of Desktop and Consumer Applications during the Office 97 launch. His investment portfolio includes several successful exits, such as StorSimple, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012, Likewise, which sold to EMC, and WHIPTAIL, which was purchased by Cisco in 2013. Fade currently serves on the board of Onehub and previously co-founded the Autism Center at the University of Washington. His career centers on scaling enterprise technology companies by leveraging his extensive operational experience in global software development and licensing.