19 Facts About Peter Rinearson

Peter Rinearson is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former vice president of Microsoft.

Peter Rinearson spent his 20s writing for the Seattle Times, for which he covered politics, Boeing, and Asia.

In 1984, Peter Rinearson won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for a series he wrote on Boeing's development of the 757.

Peter Rinearson was a national semifinalist for NASA's Journalist in Space project, cancelled in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger tragedy.

From 1995 to 1999, Peter Rinearson assisted Bill Gates in writing a newspaper column carried by the New York Times Syndicate.

Peter Rinearson has served as a member of the national advisory board of the Poynter Institute, which provides continuing education for working journalists.

Peter Rinearson is inventor on eight issued US patents, granted between 2006 and 2017.

Peter Rinearson co-wrote The Road Ahead with Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold.

Previously in the 1980s, Peter Rinearson wrote how-to books on using Microsoft Word in MS-DOS, for Microsoft Press.

In 1988, Peter Rinearson founded Alki Software, which created third-party products for Microsoft Word.

In 1995, Peter Rinearson co-founded a nine-person digital design company, Raster Ranch, that focused on 3D modeling for television, games, and the Web.

Two years later, Peter Rinearson spun off from Alki a subsidiary, Intype, which created Babynamer.

Intype was an attempt to get the newspaper industry, where Peter Rinearson had started his career, to embrace community content before Web startups gained a strong foothold.

The Newspaper Association of America used Intype's technology, but when no newspapers followed suit Peter Rinearson sold Intype to Oxygen Media in 1999.

Peter Rinearson moved from Oxygen to Microsoft, where as a corporate vice president he was on the five-person senior leadership team of the Information Worker business unit, which published Microsoft Office and other productivity software.

Peter Rinearson's teams developed Office-based software solutions for industry partners, and incubated potential products.

Peter Rinearson supervised Microsoft's corporate intranet, libraries, archive, and Center for Information Work.

In 2018 and 2019, Peter Rinearson was a member of the advisory board of Athira Pharma, a Seattle company developing a potential therapy for chronic, progressive neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Peter Rinearson is married to Jill Chan Peter Rinearson, whose father, former King County Superior Court Judge Warren Chan, was the first Chinese American to occupy a judicial post in the United States.