Startups get a new funding advocate

Who: Rick LeFaivre, 57.

What he does: Recently joined OVP Venture Partners, a Kirkland venture-capital company.

Background: A technologist and businessman, LeFaivre taught computer science at Rutgers University early in his career and served various management roles at tech companies.

Why Seattle? He once worked in Portland and wanted to return to the Northwest to be closer to his children. His daughter lives in Seattle and his son lives in Portland. "It was the first move I've ever made for personal reasons," he said.

Before OVP: LeFaivre lived in San Diego, where he was executive director of the von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement at the University of California, San Diego, where he incubated university ideas and spun out ventures. While there, he funded 23 projects on campus.

Big ideas: LeFaivre founded IdeaEdge Ventures, an incubator he launched in tech-hot 1999. He wound it down when the model proved more difficult.

Other roles: Vice president of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer; senior vice president of research and development and chief technology officer at Borland International.

Claim to fame: Back when he was an active researcher, he was one of the first people to apply fuzzy reasoning, a way to deal with concepts that are not precise. For instance, if you say a person is tall, it's relative. Compared with another person, he could be short. "It's fuzzy," he said. "That's a funny claim to fame, not a serious one."

Expertise: He's spending a lot of time on the concept of a digital home, the idea that if everything is digital, there's a host of applications that are worthy of being developed for the home.

Boards: LeFaivre sits on the board of WatchGuard, an OVP-funded company in Seattle that has since gone public.

The softer side: He said California and the Northwest are different because there is more collaboration here. "You don't see that in the Valley. It's bigger, of course, but there's also a cut-throat feeling," he said. "The firms here collaborate and they talk. I like the feeling that you see here."

Watch list: He said OVP will be watching two things in the coming year: the impact of China and how to leverage it, and computational biology, the intersection of computer science and biology.

— Tricia Duryee