Bellevue software startup adds former Microsoft executive, Xbox co-founder to board of directors

November 3, 2017 2:25 pm

Recurrence, a software startup in Bellevue, has added former Xbox co-founder Ed Fries to its board of directors.

“This is absolutely great news,”Brayden Olson, CEO of Recurrence, said. “We’ve been pursuing a new board member, and we got our No. 1 pick. He’s a perfect fit for the company.”

Fries has an impressive pedigree. He spent 17 years at Microsoft, where he served as vice president of games and helped create the Xbox. His expertise will be tremendously useful for Recurrence as the company creates new products, Recurrence leadership said.

“Ed brings decades of game industry expertise and connections. In addition, he will help us get in front of important conferences, and he will help us demonstrate to the industry that gamification is working,” Olson added.

Fries is equally excited.

“I’ve spent a lot of my professional life involved in game development and the evolution of game technology,” Fries said. “To see game design and game play techniques adding so much value to the field of education is truly exciting. I’m really looking forward to joining the Recurrence team and becoming a part of the next generation of learning software.”

Recurrence’s first product is a business game, called “The Signature Case Study,” in which students enact various high level executive roles, such as CEO or chief financial officer, as they guide an airline through a series of challenges and crises, each of which is based on real-world data. Working as a team, students make crucial decisions, from business strategy to budgeting, that will determine the fate of the airline.

The response from both students and professors has been overwhelmingly positive. As a result, the game has been quickly adopted by prestigious universities and colleges across the country, such as the University of Washington, the University of Colorado (Boulder), Penn State University and Florida International University.

The addition to Fries joining Recurrence’s board of directors, he is expected to accelerate the adoption of “The Signature Case Study” nationally and globally.