Kevin Harvey (venture capitalist)


Kevin Harvey is a founding member of and general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. He was ranked No. 27 on the 2011 Forbes Midas List and was No. 59 in 2012.

Education and Career

Harvey graduated in 1987 with a B.S.E.E. degree in engineering from Rice University. While in college, he founded software company StyleWare, which Apple later purchased and continued to develop as ClarisWorks.
Harvey founded and was president of Approach Software, where he led the development of the first end-user client/server database for Microsoft Windows. Lotus Development acquired Approach Software in 1993.
In 1995, Harvey began his wine project planting vines in his backyard and making wine in his garage. This lead him to become the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where he had his first harvest in 2004. Rhys Vineyards has produced award winning wines and wine critic Antonio Galloni has called it, "one of the finest wineries in the United States."
In August, 2019, Kevin Harvey agreed to pay $3.76 million in penalties after his company bulldozed a protected wetland and filled in a stream bed to build a vineyard in Mendocino County. This settlement represents one of the largest ever involving water quality on the North Coast. The damage to the stream is so extreme that regulators determined the stream system to be beyond saving, and large portion of the fine will go towards improving two other nearby stream systems.

Benchmark

At Benchmark, Harvey has invested in a number of companies that have gone to complete successful IPOs, including Red Hat and Proofpoint. He also led the firm’s investments in such companies as BOKU, Broadbase Software, Bytemobile, CollabNet, CloudPassage, Eucalyptus Systems, Highlight, Ingenio, Kana, Metaweb, MySQL, oDesk, oFoto, RemarQ Communities, Rightscale, Tellme Networks, Terracotta, When.com, Zimbra, and Minerva University.
Harvey serves on the boards of Upwork, Rightscale, Proofpoint, and Minerva.