Bruce Leak

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Bruce Leak is an American inventor and entrepreneur, and a co-founder of Playground Global. He helped launch WebTV and is known for his early work on the Macintosh multimedia era. Wired described him as an "Apple Hero" for bringing high-quality video to the Mac before anything similar appeared on Windows.

Education and early work: Leak earned a BS and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science from Stanford University. While at Stanford, he worked at Microsoft on the first versions of Word and Multiplan (Excel). He later held senior roles at Rocket Science Games and General Magic, and began his career at Apple, where he created QuickTime (1991) and 32-bit QuickDraw.

WebTV Networks: In 1995 he co-founded WebTV Networks, which let people access the Internet from their televisions. He served as chief operating officer and later president. Microsoft bought WebTV in 1997, and Leak became president of Microsoft's WebTV Network subsidiary.

Carrier IQ: In 2005 Leak co-founded Carrier IQ, a company that embedded analytics software in mobile devices. He was CEO until late 2006, when Mark Quinlivan took over. Quinlivan left in 2010, and Larry Lenhart became CEO in 2011. Carrier IQ ceased operations in early 2016, with AT&T acquiring some software assets and staff.

Playground Global: In early 2015 Leak co-founded Playground Global with Andy Rubin, Matt Hershenson and Peter Barrett. Playground Global is a venture capital fund and tech incubator that supports hardware startups. By late 2015 it had raised more than $300 million from investors including Google, Hewlett-Packard, Hon Hai Precision Industry (Foxconn), Tencent, Redpoint Ventures and Seagate.