Pete Hayes

Pete is a principal at Blu Venture Investors and serves on the Cyber Fund Administrative Committee. After 35 years leading significant divisions within major companies, Pete now focuses his skills and experience on venture capital, private equity and other business advisory activities. Pete is founder and CEO of Middleburg Venture Partners, a boutique advisory firm that focuses on strategy, insight, innovation and investment in the Technology, Media & Telecom sector. Pete is on the board of 10 companies that focus on data centers, luxury consignment & vintage marketplace, managed services, subsea cable, bit exact encoding & cloud acceleration, visual communication, cloud-based call center, and influencer marketing. He is currently the chairman of the board of Seabras, a Subsea Cable company. He recently completed a 5-month role as interim CEO for The Imagine Group. Pete is the former chief sales officer at Equinix, the world’s largest retail data center company. He was previously executive vice president of Commercial Sales and Support at Frontier Communications for 8 years. He worked at Microsoft from 1991 to January 2005 in various leadership positions. Prior to Microsoft, Pete worked at IBM in various sales, technical and management roles.

As an investor, Pete looks for strong, professional, can-do management teams with a clear vision for the business and a CEO who is willing to take coaching and advice. Further, he values an innovative product or solution that clearly solves a need, a solid, believable business plan to grow top line revenue with a reasonable cost structure, a good deal, and companies that would benefit from Blu’s operational experience.