Microsoft BizSpark

» see bizspark.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

BizSpark launched on November 5, '08 at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The pitch was the startup-tier version of DreamSpark. qualifying companies had to be less than three years old with annual revenue under one million dollars. a microsoft partner referral was also required. inside the eligibility window you got three years of free licenses for the windows-stack developer tools that mattered. visual studio professional, sql server, sharepoint, windows server, msdn. azure credits showed up later as the program added cloud services.

the program scaled to over 38,000 startups across more than 100 countries during its run. about 13,000 of those were US-based. the rest spread across europe and asia. it was advertised at every microsoft developer event of the late 2000s and early 2010s, usually as the path students took after their dreamspark license ran out and they got serious about shipping a product.

on february 14, '18, microsoft sent the closure email. BizSpark was folded into the broader Microsoft for Startups umbrella, which combined the cloud-credits program with the older Microsoft Ventures accelerator. existing members got their remaining benefits through transition windows, then the BizSpark name disappeared from the microsoft developer portal.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually offered ~

the value of BizSpark depended on which stack you were on. for a microsoft-shop startup building a saas product on asp.net with sql server backends, the three-year window covered the entire critical path to revenue. for a startup that had already standardized on linux with python or postgres, the BizSpark license catalog was effectively zero value. the program target was the founder who would have used the microsoft stack anyway and just needed the money problem solved early.

this was the same defensive bet microsoft made with DreamSpark at the university tier. by 2008 the open-source toolchain on linux was eating into microsoft's developer mindshare faster than at any time before. giving away the licenses to early-stage founders was a calculated cost of paying for future enterprise customers, on the theory that once a startup grew past the BizSpark cap it would stay on the microsoft stack and start paying real license fees.

~ how it landed in turkey ~

BizSpark showed up at every IsteAnkara / startup-istanbul event between 2010 and 2016. the program had local microsoft partners who could refer turkish startups, and most of the small-team SaaS plays of that era went through it. cs grads who had been on DreamSpark in school often rolled their first product onto BizSpark by default when they raised seed money.

i did not start a company in that window. i was a salaried engineer through the whole BizSpark era, which kept me on the other side of the eligibility line. i watched it operate from the outside, on conference banners and in slack channels of friends who had quit their jobs and were burning the three-year clock.

~ what replaced it ~

microsoft for startups is the named successor. the model shifted from per-product license keys to azure cloud credits, which is the same shape every cloud vendor's startup program eventually took. AWS Activate, Google for Startups, both run the same playbook. the per-license benefit that defined BizSpark stopped mattering once everyone was deploying to a hosted backend anyway.

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