Pete Higgins is an American technologist and

venture capitalist Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number ...

. An early employee of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

, Higgins is now a partner and co-founder of the Seattle-based venture capital firm Second Avenue Partners. He serves on the board of directors for the

Brookings Institution The Brookings Institution, often stylized as Brookings, is an American think tank that conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics (and tax policy), metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, global econo ...

and was a former trustee of

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, his alma mater.

Activity

Prior to founding Second Avenue Partners, Higgins spent 16 years at Microsoft Corporation. Higgins was a member of the Office of the President, reporting directly to CEO

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

. He was group vice president of the Interactive Media Group at Microsoft from 1996 to 1998. From 1995 to 1996, he was group vice president of Applications and Content, responsible for Microsoft Office consumer and online applications, desktop finance, hardware and

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

. From 1992 to 1995, he was senior vice president of the Desktop Applications division, where he was responsible for developing, marketing and localizing

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

. Higgins also serves on advisory boards for the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Higgins, Pete Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American business executives American technology company founders American venture capitalists