Peter Currie (businessman)

Last updated
Peter L. S. Currie
Born1956 (age 67–68)
Nationality American
Alma mater Williams BA Econ/French
Stanford MBA 1982
OccupationBusiness executive

Peter L. S. Currie (born 1956) is an American business executive who was the chief financial officer for Netscape from 1995 to 1999. [1] [2] Currie has been described by Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Vascellaro as one of the "Silicon Valley wise men". [3] He was among the advisors to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about business matters in 2009. [4] He is an investor in Internet start-ups and serves on the boards of numerous firms. [5] He is president of Currie Capital and was a charter trustee of Phillips Academy; [6] from July 2012 to June 2020, he served as the president of the school's board of trustees. [7] [8] [9]

Contents

Education and career

Currie graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1974 [6] and earned a B.A. degree from Williams College in 1978 and an M.B.A. degree from Stanford University. [6] He worked in various capacities at Morgan Stanley including holding the title of Principal from 1982 to 1989. [6] He held various management positions at McCaw Cellular from 1989 to 1995 before joining Netscape. [6]

Netscape rise and fall

Netscape was a key player that "fueled the Internet revolution," according to a report in "The New York Times," and Currie was an executive vice president who worked under its CEO James L. Barksdale and founder Marc Andreessen. [10] [11] Netscape developed the Secure Sockets Layer Protocol or SSL for securing online communication which is still widely used as well as JavaScript. Currie became its chief financial officer in 1995 [6] when the company went public. [12] He was Chief Administrative Officer at Netscape from July 1997 until March 1999. [6] In addition to financial management, Currie was responsible for human resources, information technology, facilities, and operations departments. [6]

Currie owned at least 37,500 shares of stock in Netscape which he sold in 1996, according to one report. [13] Netscape was valued at $5 billion in November 1995. [14] In 1999, Netscape was bought by America Online and became a holding company. [6]

Netscape was seen as the first Internet superstar which had a meteoric rise but the firm was undone by numerous forces including well-established software firms such as Microsoft. In a conference in 2005, Currie described how "hectic and crazy things were" during the tumultuous years in the mid 1990s. [15]

Other ventures

In 1999, Currie and Barksdale and others formed a venture capital firm called Barksdale Group to invest in business start-ups, and raised at least $180 million according to one report. [16] As an investor and consultant, he focused on the enterprise software sector of the business. [6] Currie invested in an Internet start-up called Flipboard in 2010. [5] Currie claims affiliations with Corsair Communications, Critical Path, Inkling, Listen.com, Kodak Imaging Network, Kontiki, IPVALUE Management, Oracle America, Tellme Networks, Zantaz, InfoSpace.com, Clearwire, CNET, Safeco, and Palamon Capital Partners. [6] He serves on the board of directors for oilfield services giant Schlumberger. [17] [18] In 2016, Twitter released Currie from its board. [19]

Currie's advice was sought by Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg in 2010. [3]

Related Research Articles

Netscape Communications Corporation was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California, and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors in the so-called first browser war, with its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than one percent in 2006. An early Netscape employee, Brendan Eich, created the JavaScript programming language, the most widely used language for client-side scripting of web pages. A founding engineer of Netscape, Lou Montulli, created HTTP cookies. The company also developed SSL which was used for securing online communications before its successor TLS took over.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Andreessen</span> American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer (born 1971)

Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen also co-founded Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites and an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.

James Love Barksdale is an American executive who served as the president and CEO of Netscape from January 1995 until the company merged with AOL in March 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Susan Decker</span> American businesswoman (born 1962)

Susan Lynne Decker is an American businesswoman. She was president of Yahoo! Inc in 2007 and 2008, leading the operations of the company while Jerry Yang was chief executive officer. In 2017, Decker co-founded a social networking platform called Raftr.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Parker</span> American entrepreneur and philanthropist (born 1979)

Sean Parker is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and was the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement. He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. On the Forbes 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Zuckerberg</span> American businessman (born 1984)

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American businessman. He co-founded the social media service Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms, of which he is chairman, chief executive officer and controlling shareholder. Zuckerberg has been the subject of multiple lawsuits regarding the creation and ownership of the website as well as issues of user privacy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Hambrecht</span> American investment banker

William R. Hambrecht is an American investment banker and chairman of WR Hambrecht + Co which he founded in 1998. He helped persuade Google to use an Internet-based auction for their initial public offering (IPO) in 2004, instead of a more traditional method using banks and other financial companies to find buyers. He is credited with popularizing this "OpenIPO" model, using Dutch auctions to allow anyone, not just investing insiders, to buy stock in an IPO, potentially raising more money for startups. Some of the companies he has helped have an IPO like this include Overstock.com, Ravenswood Winery, Andover.net, and Salon.com.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bill Neukom</span>

William Horlick Neukom is an American former managing general partner of the San Francisco Giants baseball team ownership group. He held this position from May 2008 to December 31, 2011, and he was the managing partner when the Giants won the World Series in 2010, the first World Series win since the team had moved to California in 1958. Prior to holding this position, he was President of the American Bar Association in 2007–08. He was the principal legal counsel for Microsoft for almost 25 years. He was also the chairman of the law firm of Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP in Seattle, now part of K&L Gates. He is a co-founder & CEO of the World Justice Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger McNamee</span> American businessman and venture capitalist

Roger McNamee is an American businessman, investor, venture capitalist and musician. He is the founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. Prior to co-founding the firm, McNamee co-founded private equity firm Silver Lake Partners and headed the T. Rowe Price Science and Technology Fund.

Gideon Lee Yu is a Korean-American technology, media and sports investor, executive and advisor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matt Cohler</span> American venture capitalist

Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.

James W. Breyer is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. Breyer has invested in over 40 companies that have gone public or completed a merger, with some of these investments, including Facebook, earning over 100 times cost and many others over 25 times cost. On the Forbes 2021 list of the 400 richest Americans, he was ranked #389, with a net worth of US$2.9 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Kelly (entrepreneur)</span>

Christopher Michael Kelly is an American entrepreneur, attorney, and activist. From September 2005 to August 2009, he served as Chief Privacy Officer, first General Counsel, and Head of Global Public Policy at Facebook. As an early leader at Facebook, he helped shape it into one of the most successful businesses in history. In 2010, Kelly was a candidate in the Democratic primary for California Attorney General. Since his departure from Facebook and campaign for Attorney General, he has become an investor in films, restaurants, and technology start-ups. Kelly became a co-owner of the NBA's Sacramento Kings in May 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Facebook</span>

Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as TheFacebook on February 4, 2004, before changing its name to simply Facebook in August 2005. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 or older.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike McCue</span> American businessman

Mike McCue is an American technology entrepreneur who founded or co-founded Paper Software, Tellme Networks, and Flipboard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Rimer</span>

Danny Rimer OBE is a partner at Index Ventures, a global venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1992. Rimer opened the firm's London office in 2002 and its San Francisco office in 2012. He has become a leading voice on venture capital in Silicon Valley and Europe, and has been actively involved in various philanthropic and cultural activities.

The technology company Facebook, Inc., held its initial public offering (IPO) on Friday, May 18, 2012. The IPO was one of the biggest in technology and Internet history, with a peak market capitalization of over $104 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jessica Lessin</span> American journalist (born 1983)

Jessica E. Lessin is an American journalist who serves as editor-in-chief of the technology website The Information, which she founded in December 2013. Lessin had previously spent eight years at The Wall Street Journal covering the technology and media industries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Priscilla Chan</span> American pediatrician and philanthropist (born 1985)

Priscilla Chan is an American philanthropist and a former pediatrician. She and her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, a co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms, established the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in December 2015 with a pledge to transfer 99 percent of their Facebook shares, then valued at $45 billion. She attended Harvard University and received her medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meta Platforms</span> American multinational technology conglomerate

Meta Platforms, Inc., doing business as Meta, and formerly named Facebook, Inc., and TheFacebook, Inc., is an American multinational technology conglomerate based in Menlo Park, California. The company owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp, among other products and services. Meta ranks among the largest American information technology companies, alongside other Big Five corporations Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft. The company was ranked #31 on the Forbes Global 2000 ranking in 2023. In 2022, Meta was the company with the third-highest expenditure on research and development worldwide, with R&D expenditure amounting to US$35.3 billion.

References

  1. ↑ Michelle Quinn (June 24, 1995). "Netscape Will Go Public With Stock Sale in August". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  2. ↑ New York Times (April 29, 1999). "Microsoft Lawyer Suggests Netscape-AOL Conspiracy". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  3. 1 2 JESSICA E. VASCELLARO (March 3, 2010). "Facebook CEO in No Rush To 'Friend' Wall Street". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  4. ↑ "Yu, Zuckerberg and the Facebook fallout". Reuters. Apr 1, 2009. Archived from the original on April 3, 2009. Retrieved 2010-10-14. In a back-to-the-future move, former Netscape CFO Peter Currie will be the key adviser to Facebook about financial matters,
  5. 1 2 "IPad App Flipboard Gives VCs 10.5M Reasons To Love It". Wall Street Journal. July 22, 2010. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Executive profile (2010). "Currie Capital LLC". Bloomberg Businessweek. Archived from the original on October 7, 2012. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  7. ↑ Phillipian Staff (February 10, 2011). "Trustees Convene For Weekend Deliberations". The Philippian. Retrieved 2011-02-21.
  8. ↑ "Currie '74 Elected to Succeed Tang as Board President July 2012". Phillips Academy. 15 February 2011. Archived from the original on 16 March 2013. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  9. ↑ "New members join Andover Board of Trustees". Phillips Academy. 19 July 2012. Archived from the original on 29 October 2013. Retrieved 29 July 2012.
  10. ↑ Chronicle Staff Report (July 23, 1997). "Tandem Beats, Netscape Meets Street Estimates". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  11. ↑ STEVE LOHR (November 10, 1997). "Defying a Juggernaut; Netscape Maneuvers for Position in a Microsoft-Ruled World". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  12. ↑ Michelle Quinn (August 15, 1995). "ON TECHNOLOGY -- Netscape Suffers Market Madness". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  13. ↑ "Officials to Sell Netscape Stock". The New York Times. Associated Press. March 1, 1996. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  14. ↑ HERB GREENBERG (November 29, 1995). "BUSINESS INSIDER -- How Do You Spell Powerful Bull Market? N-E-T-S-C-A-P-E / Also, Novato High takes lead again in stock contest". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  15. ↑ Alan T. Saracevic (October 23, 2005). "Silicon Valley: It's where brains meet bucks". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  16. ↑ Chris Gaither and Alan Krauss (January 9, 2002). "Barksdale Closes Venture Fund". The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-10-14.
  17. ↑ "SCHLUMBERGER N.V. - DEF 14A". www.sec.gov. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  18. ↑ Alster, Norm (2017-01-13). "Rebuilding Infrastructure May Be Profitable for the Very Rich". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-04-02.
  19. ↑ "DEF 14A". www.sec.gov. Retrieved 2020-04-02.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.