Kevin R. Harvey is an American

businessperson A businessperson, businessman, or businesswoman is an individual who has founded, owns, or holds shares in (including as an angel investor) a private-sector company. A businessperson undertakes activities (commercial or industrial) for the ...

and

venture capital 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 ...

ist. He is a founder and

general partner General partner is a person who joins with at least one other person to form a business. A general partner has responsibility for the actions of the business, can legally bind the business and is personally liable for all the partnership's debts an ...

Benchmark Capital Benchmark is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that provides seed money to startups. History The firm's most successful investment was a 1997 investment of $6.7 million in eBay for 22.1% of the company. In 2011, it invested $12 mill ...

. As a software entrepreneur, he founded companies such as StyleWare and Approach Software in the 1990s and was recognized for it. Harvey is also known for founding Rhys Vineyards and its offshoot Aeris. Harvey was ranked No. 27 on the 2011 ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

Midas List The ''Forbes'' Midas list is the annual ranking by ''Forbes'' magazine of the most influential and best-performing venture capital investors. Described by Kara Swisher as the "Oscars for venture capitalists in tech," the Midas List uses parameter ...

and was No. 59 in 2012.

Early life and education

Harvey was born in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nort ...

and spent his early life in

Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...

. For his college education, Harvey attended

Rice University William Marsh Rice University (Rice University) is a Private university, private research university in Houston, Houston, Texas. It is on a 300-acre campus near the Houston Museum District and adjacent to the Texas Medical Center. Rice is ranke ...

and graduated with a BS degree in

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

in 1987.

Career

The first company Harvey founded was StyleWare, a software company which was based in

Houston Houston (; ) is the most populous city in Texas, the most populous city in the Southern United States, the fourth-most populous city in the United States, and the sixth-most populous city in North America, with a population of 2,304,580 in ...

and was a publisher of more than ten software products, including Multiscribe. In 1988, Claris Corporation, a subsidiary of

Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...

, acquired the company. After the purchase, the Styleware continued to develop it as

ClarisWorks AppleWorks was an integrated office suite containing a word processor, database, and spreadsheet. It was developed by Rupert Lissner for Apple Computer, originally for the Apple II platform and launched in 1984, and was later reworked for the ...

. Harvey founded Approach Software and served as its

president President most commonly refers to: *President (corporate title) *President (education), a leader of a college or university *President (government title) President may also refer to: Automobiles * Nissan President, a 1966–2010 Japanese ful ...

. He led the development of the first end-user client/server database for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

Lotus Development Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2- ...

acquired Approach Software in 1993.

Benchmark Capital

Harvey co-founded Benchmark Capital in 1995. The firm has invested in multiple companies, including

eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...

OpenTable OpenTable is an online restaurant-reservation service company founded by Sid Gorham, Eric Moe and Chuck Templeton on 2 July 1998 and is based in San Francisco, California. In 1998, operations began with a limited selection of restaurants in S ...

Snapchat Snapchat is an American multimedia instant messaging app and service developed by Snap Inc., originally Snapchat Inc. One of the principal features of Snapchat is that pictures and messages are usually only available for a short time before the ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and

Uber Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...

. Some companies have gone to complete successful IPOs, including

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

and Proofpoint. As a general partner at Benchmark Capital, Harvey also led the firm's investments in such companies as BOKU, Bytemobile (now part of

Citrix Systems Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...

CollabNet CollabNet VersionOne is a software firm headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, United States. CollabNet VersionOne products and services belong to the industry categories of value stream management, devops, agile management, application lifecycl ...

, CloudPassage, Eucalyptus Systems (acquired by HP), Highlight (acquired by

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

), Ingenio (acquired by

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

Metaweb Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a San Francisco-based company that developed Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was co-founded by Danny Hillis, Veda Hlubinka-Cook and John Giannandrea in 2005 ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

oDesk Upwork Global Inc., formerly Elance-oDesk, is an American freelancing platform headquartered in Santa Clara and San Francisco, California. The company was formed in 2013 as Elance-oDesk, after the merger of Elance Inc. and oDesk Corp. The merg ...

, oFoto (acquired by

Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak ) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorpor ...

), RemarQ Communities (acquired by Critical Path, Inc.),

RightScale RightScale was a company that sold software as a service for cloud computing management for multiple providers. The company was based in Santa Barbara, California. It was acquired by Flexera Software in 2018. History Thorsten von Eicken, a for ...

, Tellme Networks, When.com (acquired by

America Online AOL (stylized as Aol., formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City. It is a brand marketed by the current incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. ...

Zimbra Zimbra Collaboration, formerly known as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) before 2019, is a collaborative software suite that includes an email server and a web client. Zimbra was initially developed by LiquidSys, which changed their name ...

, and

Minerva University Minerva University (formerly Minerva Schools at Keck Graduate Institute) is a private university headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was established in 2012 using $25million in venture funding from Benchmark Capital. The university ...

. Harvey serves on the boards of Upwork and Minerva.

Wine

In 1995, Harvey began his wine project planting vines in his backyard and making wine in his

garage A garage is a covered structure built for the purpose of parking, storing, protecting, maintaining, and/or repairing vehicles. Specific applications include: *Garage (residential), a building or part of a building for storing one or more vehicle ...

. This lead him to become the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the

Santa Cruz Mountains The Santa Cruz Mountains, part of the Pacific Coast Ranges, are a mountain range in central and Northern California, United States. They form a ridge down the San Francisco Peninsula, south of San Francisco. They separate the Pacific Ocean from ...

, where he had his first harvest in 2004. Rhys Vineyards has produced award-winning wines.

Antonio Galloni Antonio Galloni is an American wine critic. He is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Vinous for which he is also the lead critic covering the wines of Bordeaux, California, Italy, and Champagne. From 2006 to 2013, Galloni was a wine ...

, a

wine critic Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made from Fermentation in winemaking, fermented grapes. Yeast in winemaking, Yeast consumes the sugar in the grapes and converts it to ethanol and carbon dioxide, releasing heat in the process. Different ...

, has called it, "one of the finest wineries in the United States." Rhys Vineyards has developed eight estate

vineyard A vineyard (; also ) is a plantation of grape-bearing vines, grown mainly for winemaking, but also raisins, table grapes and non-alcoholic grape juice. The science, practice and study of vineyard production is known as viticulture. Vineyards ...

s. Six of these, including Alpine, Family Farm, Home, Horseshoe, Mount Pajaro and Skyline, are located in the

Santa Cruz Mountains AVA The Santa Cruz Mountains AVA is an American Viticultural Area centered on the Santa Cruz Mountains. Its territory expands three California counties, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Mateo. Established in 1981 by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and ...

. Two more vineyards, Bearwallow and Clarke Ranch, are located in

Mendocino County Mendocino County (; ''Mendocino'', Spanish language, Spanish for "of Antonio de Mendoza, Mendoza) is a County (United States), county located on the North Coast (California), North Coast of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United Sta ...

. Rhys Vineyards has also developed a ninth estate vineyard, Centennial Mountain, devoted to Italian grape varieties. These wines are sold under the Aeris label. As part of this project, the Aeris team brought in two Sicilian grape varieties,

Carricante Carricante is a white wine indigenous to Sicily, Italy. This late-ripening vine is the main variety used in the Etna DOC. It is usually found blended with Catarratto and Minella bianca. As a varietal wine, Carricante produces a fresh, straw-y ...

and

Nerello Mascalese Nerello is a name given to two varieties of red wine grapes that are grown primarily in Sicily and Sardinia.J. Robinson ''Vines, Grapes & Wines'' pg 213 Mitchell Beazley 1986 *''Nerello Mascalese'', which is named after the Mascali area in Catan ...

, that are not known to have been grown in California prior. ''

The San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and Michael H. de Young. The pa ...

'' has described Carricante as "The best white wine you have never tasted". Aeris also owns two vineyards in

Sicily (man) it, Siciliana (woman) , population_note = , population_blank1_title = , population_blank1 = , demographics_type1 = Ethnicity , demographics1_footnotes = , demographi ...

and these wines are also sold under the Aeris label.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Harvey, Kevin Living people American computer businesspeople American venture capitalists Rice University alumni Year of birth missing (living people) People from Sunnyvale, California