James Gwertzman

James Gwertzman is a technology entrepreneur. Gwertzman led Microsoft's business of providing cloud services to game developers and publishers, a position that came from the company's 2018 acquisition of PlayFab, a cloud-based, backend-as-a-service for games, which Gwertman founded in 2014 and led as CEO before the acquisition.

He also founded and sold Sprout Games to PopCap Games in 2005 and set up and operated PopCap's office in Asia. Prior to co-founding PlayFab, he played a key role at the non-profit called Code.org in organizing the Hour of Code initiative, which introduces students to computer science. Gwertzman is also the co-founder of the Moonlight Collective, which focuses on creating interactive experiences.

In 2021, he became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and has a focus on investments in the game space. In an interview with Geekwire, Gwertzman says

I will be leaving Microsoft to focus full time on my new career in venture capital. I’m staying in Seattle, though. Seattle is one of the biggest centers of gaming activity in the world and a great base of operations for this new role.