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The Co-Sell program is a key feature of the ScaleUp program, which is what the Microsoft Accelerator program became under the Microsoft for Startups umbrella announced in 2018. What this means is that startup offerings could contribute to a co-sell repository. Microsoft incentivized its salespeople to co-sell partners' offerings just as much as to sell Microsoft's own. The sales force has became incentivized to increase consumption of Microsoft's Azure cloud service, and co-selling startup partners' Azure-based offerings was entirely consistent with this strategy.

The Microsoft journey with startup partnering thus reached an intriguing stage – from business as unusual to business as usual. That is, partnering with startups had become tightly aligned with the core of the company's cloud-first strategy. The decisive reorientation of startup engagement to co-selling in 2018 was arguably the culmination of an evolutionary process over a period of more than a decade – notably kickstarted by the BizSpark program introduced in 2008. Dave Drach, who had been part of the original BizSpark team, commented to me: “BizSpark was originally established to get startups on the platform. Now, everyone gets it. So, since that original problem has been solved, the question is: how to yield more value? The answer: through deep engagement yielding more business impact. Satya Nadella has made Azure core to Microsoft's strategy and is concerned with how to make it work for startups.”

During 2019, I came across various instances of Microsoft helping its current and alumni startup members to connect with large corporations, such as Walmart and Merck, in a way that was consistent with the new emphasis on co-selling solutions. In essence, Microsoft began connecting members of its startup community with that of more recent entrants to startup partnering in a way that was win-win for the two large corporations as well as the startups. That is, Microsoft could help its startup partners get a corporate client while the latter would be able to quickly get access to high-quality startups. As noted at the outset, in 2019, Walmart's CEO Doug McMillon was given a first-hand account of how Walmart was working with startups that were alumni of Microsoft's accelerator program.