Seattle

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Walt is an experienced and award-winning communication professional with a record of cooking up game-changing ideas for industry leaders including bgC3, CNN, Coursera, Microsoft, Nickelodeon, and PBS, as well as for start-ups which you haven’t heard of yet.

 

Walt spent many years as a writer and producer in television before moving into public relations, product management, and marketing. He has spoken before thousands of consumers and press on many products and technologies, managed multiple global project teams, and crafted countless stand-out presentations for C-suite executives.

 

Walt directed the team charged with articulating Microsoft’s strategy and vision following Bill Gates’ departure, enhanced global T&E leader Concur’s value proposition, paving the way for its acquisition by SAP for $8.3 billion, and developed the positioning and messaging for the world’s largest open online education platform to help it grow from 1.5 million students in 2012 to 15 million in 2015. His awards include the George Foster Peabody, a DuPont Columbia award, Gracie Allen’s Grand Award, and the Phyllis Young Award. An Emmy winner himself, he has, along with Mr. Rogers, lost an Emmy to Sesame Street and Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

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Walt received his Bachelor of Arts in poetry at Northwestern University. He serves on a number of boards from his home on an island in the Pacific Northwest where he lives with his family, and a respectably-sized menagerie of animals.