Bill Bowes (July 5, 1926 – December 28, 2016) was a

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

philanthropist Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives, for the Public good (economics), public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private goo ...

, and co-founder of

U.S. Venture Partners U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) is a venture capital investment firm specializing in early-stage ventures in enterprise software, cybersecurity, consumer, e-commerce, healthcare, and IT-enabled healthcare services. The venture capital partnership ...

. He co-founded U.S. Venture Partners in 1981.

Early life and education

Bowes was born in 1926 in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. He has a B.A. in Economics from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, an M.B.A. from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

Career

Bowes worked with the investment bank Blyth & Co. Inc. He was also involved with Cetus, a biotechnology company and was a member of its board from 1972 to 1978. He was the founding shareholder, first Treasurer and Chairman of

Amgen Amgen Inc. (formerly Applied Molecular Genetics Inc.) is an American multinational biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Thousand Oaks, California. One of the world's largest independent biotechnology companies, Amgen was established in T ...

. He also invested in

Leroy Hood Leroy "Lee" Edward Hood (born October 10, 1938) is an American biologist who has served on the faculties at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the University of Washington. Hood has developed ground-breaking scientific instrum ...

's protein sequencer, and served on the board of directors for

Raychem The Raychem Corporation was founded in Redwood City, California, in 1957 by Paul M. Cook, James B. Meikle, and Richard W. Muchmore. Led by Cook and second-in-command Robert M. Halperin, Raychem became a pioneer of commercial products realized thr ...

from 1961 until the late 1970s. Bowes is also the founding partner at

Philanthropy

Bowes contributed to the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and also served on the advisory committee for the Harvard Partners Center for Genetics and Genomics.

References

American venture capitalists Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences alumni Harvard Business School alumni 1926 births 2016 deaths American company founders {{US-business-bio-1920s-stub