Steve Waterhouse is an entrepreneur and investor in the blockchain space.
Recent career
Waterhouse was a partner at Pantera Capital from 2013 to 2016. Waterhouse left Pantera in 2016. In 2016 Waterhouse was featured in an article in Forbes about "phone porting" and cryptocurrency. His medium article, describes his current interest as being a combination of decentralized architectures and security. Waterhouse spoke at Techcrunch Disrupt, London with Ethereum founder, Vitalik Buterin and former CEO of Blockstream Austin Hill.
Waterhouse was previously at Fortress Investment Group where he started the Digital Currency Fund with Chairman Pete Briger and Mike Novogratz in 2013. Dan Morehead joined in June 2013 to lead the effort. The fund was not approved by the Fortress board and instead Pantera Capital was invested in by Fortress and subsequently by Benchmark Capital and Ribbit Capital. Pantera went on to invest heavily in Bitcoin and other venture investments. Pantera invested in notable companies including Bitstamp, Xapo, Circle, 21, Chain, Civic, Zcash, Korbit and Polychain.
Co-founder
Prior to Fortress, Waterhouse was CTO and co-founder of RPX Corporation, a firm focused on defending clients against patent trolls. RPX was funded by Kleiner Perkins, Charles River and Index Ventures. RPX went public in 2011. Prior to RPX, Waterhouse was an EIR at Foundation Capital and angel investor and advisor and involved in investments in Powerset, Jumpcut, Flutter and Tideway.
JXTA
Prior to Foundation Capital, Waterhouse ran the JXTA peer to peer group at Sun Microsystems under Bill Joy and Mike Clary after the acquisition of Infrasearch, a distributed search engine which was funded by Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway and other angels and included Doug Cutting, Excite search engineer and developer of Lucene and Hadoop. He also founded and ran the Honeycomb project, a distributed storage product for fixed data. Honeycomb was released by Sun as a product in 2004.
Ultimode
Before Sun, Waterhouse was co founder and CEO of Ultimode, a boutique data miningconsulting firm based in Berkeley together with Wray Buntine, Jon Oliver and Rohan Baxter. Ultimode developed tools for NASA Ames for data modeling of Mars Rover samples and for Cygnus corporation for glucose monitoring on watches. Ultimode also developed early personalized text technology for Internet companies including eBay and Craigslist and was acquired by Dynaptics Corporation in 2001.
Education
Waterhouse holds a PhD from Cambridge University specializing in the application of mixtures of experts to speech recognition and general classification and regression problems. He is the author of 19 patents and has co authored numerous journal and conference papers in the fields of neural networks, speech recognition and peer to peer networking. Waterhouse was awarded the Isaac Netwon prize for outstanding PhD research from Cambridge in 1996. At Cambridge he represented the university in rowing and Waterpolo.
Author
Waterhouse is the author of a book on Internet technology from 1995 entitled "Building Intranets using Front Page and IIS".
Partner
Waterhouse was also a partner at Project One Gallery with his partner Brooke Waterhouse. Project One Gallery was a night club and contemporary art gallery in the design district of San Francisco from 2008 to 2013. Notable art shows included Ben Eine, Chor Boogie and Jet Martinez. Project One was sold to the owners of Mighty and renamed Mercer in 2013.
