Ed Fries
General Partner
1Up Ventures
Ed Fries created his first video games for the Atari 800 in the early 1980s. He joined Microsoft in 1986 and spent the next ten years as one of the early developers of Excel and Word. In 1996 he left the Office team to pursue his passion for interactive entertainment and created Microsoft Game Studios. Over the next eight years, he grew the team from 50 people to over 1200, published more than 100 games including more than a dozen million+ sellers, co-founded the Xbox project, and made Microsoft one of the leaders in the video game business. In 2004, Ed retired as a Microsoft Vice President and began working as a board member and advisor with entrepreneurs in the video game business as well as serving on the board of many non-profit organizations including the International Game Developers Association, the Pacific Science Center and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2019 Ed joined with some friends to launch 1Up Ventures, a venture fund to support indie game developers around the world.
