Peter J. Levine (born October 20, 1960) is an American software executive 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.

Early life

Levine was born in New York City and grew up in

Peekskill Peekskill is a city in northwestern Westchester County, New York, United States, from New York City. Established as a village in 1816, it was incorporated as a city in 1940. It lies on a bay along the east side of the Hudson River, across fr ...

, attending

Hendrick Hudson High School Hendrick Hudson High School is a public high school in Montrose, New York, United States. It draws its students from the neighboring hamlets of Verplanck, Cortlandt Manor, Crugers, the villages of Croton-on-Hudson and Buchanan, and the cit ...

. While attending summer camp in the

Adirondack Mountains The Adirondack Mountains (; a-də-RÄN-dak) form a massif in northeastern New York with boundaries that correspond roughly to those of Adirondack Park. They cover about 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2). The mountains form a roughly circular ...

, he gained a lifelong passion for leadership and the outdoors. Levine earned a BS in engineering from

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

in 1983, and worked as a software engineer on

Project Athena Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM to produce a campus-wide distributed computing environment for educational use. It was launched in 1983, and research and development ran until June 30, 1991. , At ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

, while attending the

MIT Sloan School of Management The MIT Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan or Sloan) is the business school of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT Sloan offers bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs, ...

in 1988 and 1989.

Business career

From 1990 through 2001 he was an early employee of

Veritas Software Veritas Technologies LLC. is an American international data management company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The company has its origins in Tolerant Systems, founded in 1983 and later renamed Veritas Software. It specializes in stora ...

, beginning his career as a software engineer and ending as an executive vice president. Levine was a general partner at

Mayfield Fund Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California Menlo Park ...

from 2002 through 2005, prior to becoming president and CEO of

Xensource Xen (pronounced ) is a type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory a ...

in February 2006. After working to grow the company's business, Xensource was acquired by

Citrix 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 ...

in 2007 for $500 million, with Levine being named a vice president of Citrix. PL Rock

Levine taught marketing and sales at the Sloan School of Management in 2010 and 2011, and at the

Stanford Graduate School of Business The Stanford Graduate School of Business (also known as Stanford GSB) is the graduate business school of Stanford University, a private research university in Stanford, California. For several years it has been the most selective business schoo ...

starting in 2012. In March 2011, Levine became a partner at the Silicon Valley

firm

Andreessen Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Andreessen ...

, leading the firm's investments in enterprise software including

data center A data center (American English) or data centre (British English)See spelling differences. is a building, a dedicated space within a building, or a group of buildings used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunic ...

technology, enterprise applications and mobile computing. Levine has led the firm's investments at

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

(acquired by MSFT in 2018 for $7.5B), Figma (Announced acquisition of $20B by

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. () is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, USA, with 15 globally distributed data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides ...

(DOCN, IPO 2021),

Mixpanel Mixpanel is a business analytics service company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them. Data collected is used to build custom reports and measure user engagement ...

, ShieldAI, Apollo

GraphQL GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. GraphQL was developed internally by Facebook (now Meta) in 2012 before being publicly released in 2015. On 7 Nov ...

, PlanetScale, and a number of other software companies. He became a member of the board of trustees of the

National Outdoor Leadership School NOLS is a non-profit outdoor education school based in the United States dedicated to teaching environmental ethics, technical outdoor skills, wilderness medicine, risk management and judgment, and leadership on extended wilderness expeditions an ...

in 2013 for a term through 2019.

Philanthropy

A lifelong

mountain climber Mountaineering or alpinism, is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending tall mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas. Indoor climbing, sport climbing, ...

, Levine has scaled some major worldwide routes, while using his passion for the environment and education to support many institutions, including

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 ...

Development; Boston University; MIT; NOLS; The Adirondack Scholarship Foundation; and The Honnold Foundation, where he currently works alongside

Alex Honnold Alexander Honnold (born August 17, 1985) is an American rock climber best known for his Free solo climbing, free solo ascents of Big wall climbing, big walls. Honnold rose to prominence in June 2017 when he became the first person to free solo El ...

, founding the Levine Impact Lab, which supports the growth and management of environmentally focused nonprofits.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levine, Peter Living people American computer businesspeople Boston University College of Engineering alumni American venture capitalists Place of birth missing (living people) American company founders MIT Sloan School of Management faculty MIT Sloan School of Management alumni American Jews Andreessen Horowitz 1960 births