Microsoft Mobile Labs Boss Exits for Text Analytics Startup

Jensen Harris, a 16-year Microsoft (MSFT) veteran and head of the company’s Mobile Labs, is leaving to team up with a former colleague to start a text analytics venture called Textio.

Re/code reported that Harris told his Microsoft colleagues last Thursday of his decision to exit this week to team with Kieran Snyder, who worked with Harris on Office, at Textio. The startup is specializing in analyzing company materials such as job descriptions and performance reviews to identify unintended discriminatory text.

Snyder, whose background includes a stint at Amazon (AMZN), is a linguistics expert. The company’s tagline is, “Turn business text into insights.”

“There is big opportunity in the HR space with respect to bias, but there are other interesting opportunities as well,” Harris told Re/code. “I’ve worked my entire adult life at Microsoft. I got to play with a lot of the toys that I wanted to play with.”

While at Microsoft, Jensen led teams working on the Metro UI for Surface and Windows 8/8.1 tablets, the Ribbon user interface for Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote and Outlook’s email user interface.

On his website, Jensen described his days as “leading the incubation team which is imagining and building next-generation hardware and software breakthroughs for Windows Phone, Xbox, Windows, and new kinds of devices.”

Snyder apparently came up with the idea for Textio after writing an article on hidden bias in company documents and subsequently receiving inquiries from businesses to apply her tools and analysis to their materials. At this point, Textio is a two-person operation, with Snyder the chief executive and Harris serving as chief technology officer.

“Our intent would be to ship the first product spring-ish next year,” Snyder said.

In a blog post on the Textio website, Snyder wrote:

“Textio was born of this need that companies have to turn their most essential business documents into actionable insights. And it isn’t just performance reviews. Text is essential to how most businesses operate: product specifications, marketing materials, presentations, emails, help documentation, and more.

Textio takes this mountain of unstructured text and turns it into the data you need to improve your business. By analyzing the text properties of documents at scale, we can help companies understand where their text is helping them achieve their business goals and where it’s getting in their way.”