It is with great sadness that we share the news of Peter Hsing’s passing on July 17.  On behalf of the Columbia community, we send our deepest condolences to Peter’s family, colleagues at Merus Capital, and all who knew and loved him.  Peter’s unwavering commitment to the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board (EAB) and to our community during his time had an immeasurable impact on the School of Engineering, and on countless students and young entrepreneurs.  Peter was a vibrant presence at many of our events and a tireless ambassador for Columbia in the Bay area.  His energy was indelible, and he will be greatly missed.

Peter Hsing co-founded Merus Capital in 2007, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Palo Alto investing in entrepreneurs developing real software solving real problems.  Prior to forming Merus, Peter was Managing Director of the Corporate Strategy Group at Microsoft, where he and his team led Microsoft into the era of Cloud services, from the acquisition of Microsoft’s first SaaS company in 2005 to driving the business cases for Exchange Online and Azure.  More broadly, his team was also responsible for identifying and evaluating new growth opportunities in online advertising, marketplaces, payments, enterprise Software-as-a-Service, and cloud platform services.

Before moving to Seattle, Peter was a technology investment banker at JP Morgan in Hong Kong for 2 years, management consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers for 5 years, and a marketing intern at IBM for 3 years (part-time while attending Columbia).  Peter graduated with an MBA in Finance from Wharton and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University (’90).

Peter enjoyed running (NYC Marathon ‘09, St Petersburg Marathon ‘12, Run Free Marathon ’13) and cycling (Sequoia Century ‘09, ADA-120k ’09, Marin Century ‘10, Sea Otter Century ‘12).  He was 51.