Ironically, being different and standing out is something that Austin Ogletree has, over the years, grown accustom to. His passion for people and technology led him to attend North Carolina A&T, where he studied Industrial & Systems Engineering and served as the Student Body President. Yet from his first Silicon Valley internship at 19, he knew that this precedent of “only-ness” had just begun for him as a black, male engineer.

Today, Austin is the youngest Partner Manager for Microsoft Search Advertising, commonly referred to as Bing Ads. Since joining Microsoft, Austin has naturally become a catalyst for diversity and inclusion by recruiting top talent from HBCUs across the nation, by hosting over 100 students for the 39th annual Minority Student Day, and by re-chartering the southern California chapter of Blacks at Microsoft (within weeks of joining the company).

In the future, Austin hopes that his background in innovation and passion for empowering others will position him at the nexus of both the legal and tech communities. As an aspiring intellectual property attorney, he hopes to understand how disruptive technologies can be used to solve the world’s most complex socio-economic concerns as they relate to both media and technology.