Paul Muckleston

Paul Muckleston was most recently the Chief Operating Officer for Microsoft’s world-wide Public Sector business. Paul has enjoyed a successful and diverse career at Microsoft in various leadership roles based in New Zealand, France, Germany and the United States, travelling professionally to 70+ countries.

Paul brings hands-on experience in developed and developing markets, start-ups and mature organizations, governance, strategy development, organization transformation and people leadership. He has deep expertise in revenue accountability, channel strategy, go-to-market models and global operations leadership.

Paul knows firsthand how to scale businesses globally having been on senior leadership teams across Europe and Asia and for 6 years in Seattle based global leadership roles. These global roles had responsibility across 100+ countries, direct teams of >250 FTEs, indirect orgs of >3,000 FTEs and revenues from <$60M growth businesses to >$20B mature operations. Paul’s developed a keen sense for balancing the differences in country culture, size and scale with consistent performance and execution accountabilities.

Along the way, Paul has developed excellent stakeholder management skills: working with external regulators, government officials and the media; building deep relationships with the CEOs of key partner and customer organizations; bringing together sometimes fractious and very diverse peers on a leadership team or a board to achieve successful outcomes together.

Paul is an investor, advisor and board member in various technology companies and VC funds in New Zealand the USA along with being an active member of both the Seattle and New Zealand chapters of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO). Paul is a judge for the 2023 NZ Hi-Tech Awards, a CEO mentor for the Marketing Academy’s APAC Fellowship Program and a mentor / presenter with the Ministry of Awesome’s startup accelerator program.

Paul’s a passionate, creative catalyst for change whose core values are health, family and accomplishment (in that order!). He is inspired to build personal, professional, and family resilience, along with making an impact with families of children with learning differences. Paul & his wife Dr Maritza Farrant have two teenage children, Jackson and Zara who along with their two dogs have recently moved back to New Zealand.