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Their latest funding was raised on 06.04.2015. Their latest investor Redpoint. Their latest round Series A
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Founders3
Matt Hershenson
Matt Hershenson, a Founding Partner at Playground Global, knew he was going to be an engineer from an early age. As a teenager, he had an after-school job at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, where his size made him ideal for running cables under the raised floors in labs and machine rooms and above the dropped ceilings in the offices. He also learned how to repair and maintain the Computer Science Department’s Xerox Altos. His earliest professional experience was at Apple, where he worked first in manufacturing engineering in Apple’s “Mac Factory” and later worked in the PowerBook group on the design of Apple’s line of PowerBook laptops. In 2000, Matt co-founded Danger, which went on to produce the first consumer smartphone. After creating nine versions of the T-Mobile Sidekick and beginning the process of going public, Danger was purchased by Microsoft. Matt stayed at Microsoft for two years after the acquisition, serving as a Partner in Hardware Engineering. Leveraging his mobile hardware experience, Matt joined Google’s Android team as Director of Hardware. At Google, Matt built the Android hardware team to span all aspects of hardware development - from chip design to regulatory compliance and everything in-between. Matt and his team shipped over 10 generations of devices across phones, tablets, and streaming receivers. In late 2014, Matt joined up with the founding team to start Playground. The idea was to invest in transformative companies with multigenerational impact, while working side-by-side with portfolio companies to help them advance faster than if they were on their own. Today, Matt is still unafraid of technological risk. His reasoning is: if you’re going to go through the trouble, you might as well create something with significance. Matt lives in the Bay Area with his wife of over 20 years and three children.
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Peter Barrett
Peter Barrett is a Founder, General Partner, and CTO of Playground Global. Peter believes the computing revolution—and arguably even the industrial revolution—haven’t happened yet. He is drawn to the toughest challenges at the boundaries of deep tech and hard science. Peter has been writing software since he was a teenager. At 19, his first security program caught the attention of the NSA. From his first company, Rocket Science Games, he’s had an adventurous career in technology from creating the first widely used video codec in the early 90s, building the world’s most popular IPTV platform at Microsoft, cloud intelligence for automotive at CloudCar and now quantum and optical computing, robotics and artificial intelligence at Playground. He holds over 100 patents. At Playground, Peter delights in the opportunity to deeply collaborate with entrepreneurs and help create transformative companies with multigenerational impact. He thrives on technologies that lie somewhere between improbable and impossible and companies whose success will help move civilization forward. Peter lives in Palo Alto with his wife, two children, a surly cat, and a friendly dog.
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Bruce Leak
Bruce Leak is a Founding Partner at Playground Global.From an early age, his intellectual curiosity led to a fascination with computers and emerging technology, and later informed his career path which took him from the frontier days of Apple and Microsoft, to entrepreneurship, to his time at Playground investing in complex ideas with the potential to change the world. With a Master’s in Electrical Engineering from Stanford, Bruce spent two summer internships at Microsoft. There, he tested an early prototype of Microsoft Word for the original IBM PC and later worked on the first versions of Microsoft’s Macintosh applications. His first full time role was with Apple’s System Software team where he led the company’s efforts on 32-bit Color Quickdraw which became the foundation of true color display on Mac screens and led to the birth of Quicktime. Bruce spent five years at Apple expanding the Quicktime team, shipping several versions of the product and speaking at developer conferences. Bruce was later recruited by Steve Perlman to General Magic, and they set out to build a color version of the platform for gaming. In 1993, Bruce joined forces with Peter Barrett and Steve Blank to form Rocket Science Games, where he hired many members of the Quicktime team, supported developers, and built the gaming platform. Bruce’s next venture was WebTV, which he founded with two General Magic alumni, Steve Perlman and Phil Goldman. WebTV was acquired by Microsoft and the company went on to ship the first DVR products for Echostar and DirectTV. After founding several startups selling technology and services to mobile phone operators and automotive OEMs and traveling the world, Bruce joined Andy Rubin, Peter Barrett, and Matt Hershenson to found Playground Global—the venture capital firm they wish existed when they were building their own companies. From robotics to quantum computing to groundbreaking medical advancements, Playground’s true north is leaving a lasting impact for generations to come. Bruce lives in Palo Alto and can still be found adventuring outdoors by kayak and by land. He is passionate about wildlife conservation, preserving natural habitats, and supporting animal sanctuaries.
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Bruce Leak
Employee Profiles40
Allison Braley
Operating Partner, Marketing and Communications
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