Obituary: Angel investor Bob Arnold helped dozens of entrepreneurs take flight

Robert Arnold. Photo via The New York Times

Seattle lost one of its most prolific angel investors last month when former banking executive Robert Arnold died at the age of 84 after a brief illness. Arnold was one of the most active angel investors in the Pacific Northwest, using his skills as a banker as well as his love of people to discover… Read More…

Remembering Bill Hill: The most important operating system is Homo Sapiens 1.0

Bill Hill

“I always talk about this to folks at Microsoft, especially to developers. What’s the most important operating system you’ll write applications for? Ain’t Windows, or the Macintosh, or Linux. It’s Homo Sapiens Version 1.0. It shipped about a hundred thousand years ago. There’s no upgrade in sight. But it’s the one that runs everything.” That… Read More…

George Rathmann, 1927-2012: Biotech pioneer led Amgen and Icos

George Rathmann

George Rathmann, the biotechnology pioneer who served as the first CEO of Amgen and Icos, has died at the age of 84 from complications from pneumonia. Rathmann joined Amgen in 1980 in its infancy, going on to lead the company as it developed treatments such as Epogen — for anemia — Neupogen – a method for… Read More…

Micron CEO Steve Appleton, 51, dies in plane crash

appleton

Steve Appleton, the CEO and chairman of semiconductor company Micron Technology, died this morning in a small plane crash in Boise, Idaho, the company said in a statement a short time ago. Appleton, 51, was an avid pilot. He was the only person in the plane at the time of the accident at the Boise… Read More…

Matt Steckler, 1975-2011: A creative force with a million crazy ideas

Matt Steckler

No idea was too small, too silly or too offbeat for Matt Steckler, a Seattle developer and entrepreneur who died this past weekend at his home in Bellevue at the age of 36. “He was a passionate, creative entrepreneur. He was before his time on many fronts,” recalled his mom Karen Steckler. Many of Steckler’s… Read More…

Google engineer Steve Lacey victim of Kirkland car wreck

Steve Lacey

Google engineer Steve Lacey, 43, a veteran of the Seattle region’s tech community who worked for more than a decade at Microsoft, died Sunday in a car crash in Kirkland. KING 5 News reports that that Lacey was the victim of a road rage incident in which he hadn’t been involved. A widely respected software engineer… Read More…