The Mercury News | Elevator Pitch: Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Ventures

June 18, 2013

The Mercury News — June 18, 2013 | Peter Delevett

This is a summary. Read original article in full here.

It’s Father’s Day, so in this week’s edition of “Elevator Pitch,” we’re chatting with Ethan Kurzweil of Bessemer Venture Partners.

Kurzweil was just 28 when he broke into venture capital five years ago, and he’s since led the venerable firm’s investments in such high-profile startups as Playdom, Twitch.tv, Reputation.com and Piazza.

His father, Ray, was also an early bloomer. As a high schooler in the 1960s, he was feted at the White House for inventing a computer that could compose its own music. Ray Kurzweil went on to pioneer the flatbed scanner, reading machines for the blind and some of the earliest speech-recognition technology; he’s currently head of engineering at Google.

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