Peter Levine

Research Statement

Peter J. Levine has over twenty years experience in the software industry as an executive and a venture capitalist, playing key roles in engineering, sales, marketing and management at companies of all sizes. Mr. Levine is a Lecturer teaching S351, "Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations," with James M. Lattin, Robert A. Magowan Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Bio

Peter J. Levine is a recognized technologist and business leader. Levine is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a high tech venture capital firm that supports entrepreneurs through angel investments to large-scale funding, and also the senior vice president of strategy at Citrix Systems, Inc., a leading provider of virtual computing solutions.

At Citrix, Mr. Levine is responsible for managing relationships with entrepreneurs, startups and venture firms to help further the company’s innovation and product vision. He joined Citrix in 2007 through the $500M acquisition of XenSource Inc., where he served as President and CEO since February 2006.

Under Mr. Levine’s leadership, XenSource introduced enterprise-class virtualization solutions based on the open source Xen (R) hypervisor; executed business agreements with companies such as Dell, HP, Microsoft, NEC and Symantec; and achieved cult status for XenSource with thousands of enterprise customers worldwide. Levine initially joined Citrix as senior vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Cloud Division, responsible for revenue, product management, business development and strategic direction.

Prior to XenSource, he was general partner and managing director of Mayfield Fund from June 2002 to February 2005, focused on investing in infrastructure and enterprise software companies and helping them tackle difficult operational issues.

Prior to Mayfield, Levine spent 11 years at Veritas Software Corp., joining the startup as one of its first software engineers. Mr. Levine helped to grow the organization from no revenue to more than $1.5B, and from 20 employees to more than 6,000. He served as director of OEM sales, vice president of marketing and senior vice president of OEM sales and business development, as well asbeing a key member of Veritas’s senior management team. When he left Veritas Software in 2001, Mr. Levine was executive vice president for strategic and platform operations, responsible for worldwide marketing, OEM sales, business development (M&A, venture fund), and several new product and platform development groups.

Prior to Veritas, Levine was a software engineer for MIT’s Project Athena, where he worked on a variety of distributed computing projects.

Peter Levine holds a BS degree in Engineering from Boston University and attended the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the past several years, Levine was a lecturer of entrepreneurship at the Sloan School of Management.

Academic Degrees

• BS Engineering, Boston University, 1983

Teaching

Degree Courses

2017-18

GSBGEN 566: Dilemmas. Decisions.

GSBGEN 566 is an elective course offered to 2nd-year MBA and MSx students. The goal of this course is to improve students'' judgment in confronting challenging, real business situations encountered in the normal progression of corporate activities...

STRAMGT 351: Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations

The focus of this class is on the challenges and key issues associated with the creation and management of a professional sales organization. Our emphasis is developing and managing the selling effort of business-to-business and business-to-...

2016-17

GSBGEN 566: Ethics in Action - It's Never Black and White / Decisions Have Consequences

GSBGEN 566 is an elective course offered to 2nd-year MBA and MSx students. The goal of this course is to improve students'' judgment in confronting ethical situations encountered in the normal course of business activities. Classes use the...

STRAMGT 351: Building and Managing Professional Sales Organizations

The focus of this class is on the challenges and key issues associated with the creation and management of a professional sales organization. Our emphasis is developing and managing the selling effort of business-to-business and business-to-...