William Lai

William Lai is the co-founder and president of [Lolligift](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lolligift), which he founded in 2008 with [Adam Sheppard](http://www.crunchbase.com/person/adam-sheppard) after leaving [Microsoft](http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/microsoft). William is a 20 year software industry veteran. In the last 13 years he has been focused on intrapreneuring in [MSN](http://www.crunchbase.com/product/msn), launching two products from concept formulation. The team he helped found, MSN Messenger v1.0 was nominated for the “Legendary Development Teams of Microsoft” award. His engineering analysis and architecture design for the Messenger server cloud has been time-tested and scale-proven from day one, and continues to form the basis 8 years later as the world’s largest instant messaging platform. Post Messenger, he proposed a product extension for Messenger, Microsoft Alerts, and was funded by executives as a separate team to capitalize on the asset built up by Messenger. In addition to his technical leadership roles, he was the business leader coordinating the marketing and business development effort, and served as the general manager of the 30-persons team during its first 18 months. Since leaving Microsoft, William has been exploring several social media concepts, fine tuning management, development, and operational techniques at the start-up scale. In addition to his ongoing work for lolligift and 8ninths, he currently serves as technical contributor to literacybridge.org, a non-profit that is building a $5 MP3 device for literacy training for the one billion illiterate people around the world. He was appointed by the Bellevue City Council as a Planning Commissioner in 2007, working on policies to guide the city’s growth and development.