Aaron Contorer

Aaron Contorer

Chief of Products and Partnerships

"Democracy is the best antidote the world has found for problems ranging from unfairness to war. I am honored to be able to use my technology and management skills to help advance democracy."

Aaron Contorer spent 10 years at Microsoft where he was an executive on Windows, MSN, and Visual Studio, building and running product development teams of up to 200 professionals. He helped lead the conversion of MSN from proprietary to Internet standards, and from his early work on Windows networking he holds several patents in distributed systems and network security. He also served as Bill Gates’ technical advisor. He holds nine “Ship-It” awards from Microsoft for successful delivery of products to market.

Aaron has also served as CTO of startup companies in the fields of printing, business decision optimization, and high-end Web server infrastructure. He was one of the creators of the shareware business model as well.

Aaron has degrees in computer science and psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was one of the original Internet software developers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and conducted research in usability and information delivery for government and scientific clients.