THE SILICON VALLEY 100: The most amazing and inspiring people in tech right now
Business Insider
With new startups launching, constant fundraising, and endless chatter, the who's who of Silicon Valley is always changing, and only a lucky few come out on top.
After months of research and debate, Business Insider is proud to present the Silicon Valley 100, our annual list of the people who matter most in Silicon Valley.
To compile the list, we looked at who won big in the past year: star executives, industry-changing acquisitions, top VCs, promising companies shifting industries, and more. This list isn't about long-standing reputations; it's about who's done notable things since spring 2014.
Did we miss anyone? Let us know in the comments below, because we love telling stories about amazing people.
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The list was compiled by Business Insider's technology editors. Additional reporting by Christi Danner and Tanza Loudenback. Photo research by Melia Robinson.
25. Ryan Graves
Head of global operations, Uber
Ryan Graves is head of global expansion at Uber. This year he also became a billionaire. Uber’s valuation has skyrocketed over the past year to as much as $50 billion.
Graves previously worked as a database administrator at General Electric before landing a stint at Foursquare that he acquired by working for them for free after the company initially turned him down. In 2010 he tweeted at Travis Kalanick, looking for a job, and the rest is history. Five years later, Ryan Graves is still with Uber. His stake in the company is now worth about $1.4 billion.
24. Garrett Camp
Garrett Camp is one of three Uber employees to have been made billionaires by the company. Camp's stake in Uber is worth an estimated $5.3 billion, according to Forbes.
After cofounding Uber with Travis Kalanick, Garrett Camp created his own startup studio called Expa. Today, Expa works with founders to help build companies. Camp is now Uber's chairman and adviser. The restaurant-reservation app Reserve was launched from Expa,raising $15 million.
23. Larry Page
Cofounder, Google
When Page took over as Google's CEO, he wanted to reinvigorate the company's vision. Today the company continues to dominate search, makes a ton of money with ads, and is leading a number of other innovative projects, including Google Glass. In the past year, Google generated nearly $18 billion in profits — money that Page will be able to use to forward his grand visions for granting internet access to the world.
Page also appointed senior vice president of product Sundar Pichai to becoming the "second most important person in the company," leaving Page free to make his grand visions a reality.
22. Jony Ive
Chief design officer, Apple
Sir Jony Ive has played a huge part in Apple’s signature design for years, most recently with the release of the Apple Watch. The watch is Apple's first product in a new category since the company launched the iPad in 2010. It debuted to mixed reviews: Some analysts say people care less about it than even the iPod. An analytics firm estimates Apple has sold 2.79 million units of the Apple Watch since its debut in early 2015.
In May, Sir Jony, formerly Apple's senior VP of design, was promoted to the role of chief design officer. Two other Apple executives — Alan Dye and Richard Howarth — will take over Ive’s role starting this summer.
21. Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, and Joe Gebbia
Cofounders, Airbnb
With at least $1.5 billion each, Airbnb founders Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia, and Brian Chesky are some of the world’s youngest billionaires. The home-sharing site raised $475 million in Series D funding last year and it is now raising at a rumored $24 billion valuation. It’s available in 34,000 cities and been used by more than 30 million guests.
20. Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp
Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp.
Cofounders, Pinterest
Pinterest, an online scrap-booking site that lets users organize photo pins onto different boards, is now worth $11 billion after raising a $367 million round of funding in March, followed by another $186 million in May. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Fidelity Investments, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
The site continues to grow and adapt its business model, most recently releasing new options for advertisers. Instead of just choosing to pay for views or clicks on promoted pins, advertisers can choose to pay with a cost-per-engagement model or cost-per-action model. Pinterest just lost its head of partnerships however, Joanne Bradford. The rumor is Pinterest wasn't generating as much revenue as it should have.
19. Mark Zuckerberg
Cofounder/CEO, Facebook
Facebook has been quietly busy under its leader and CEO. This year, Facebook acquired a video startup called QuickFire, which could let it take on Siri. Facebook received criticism for Internet.org, the company’s initiative to provide free internet access around the world, despite making changes to address net-neutrality concerns.
At Facebook’s annual F8 developers' conference, David Marcus, who was hired from PayPal to head up messaging products at Facebook, made big announcements regarding the Facebook Messenger app — expansion into e-commerce and mobile payments inside the app. And Zuckerberg has been talking up Internet.org, his plan to bring cheap Internet access to millions of people in developing countries, every chance he gets.
18. James Park
CEO, Fitbit
James Park is the CEO of Fitbit, the maker of the popular fitness trackers. After filing to go public in May, the company made its debut as a public company this month. Fitbit opened at $30.40 a share, up 52%. The company had priced its IPO at $20 a share, above expectations. Its opening price valued the company at $6.3 billion.
According to its IPO filing, Fitbit earned $745.4 million in revenues last year, sold 10.9 million devices, and had nearly 7 million paid active users.
17. Elon Musk
Elon Musk has been busy. Last summer he announced he would be building a SolarCity plant in Buffalo, New York. The facility will be "one of the single largest solar panel production plants in the world," Musk said.
In addition, Musk announced he’d be building a five-mile-long Hyperloop track in Texas, designed for companies and students to test his design for a super-fast transportation system that will move people at 500 miles per hour in little "pods." Another Hyperloop track is set to be built starting in 2016, halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
16. Art Levinson
CEO, Calico
Calico is a company Google launched in September to try to cure death by tackling aging and illness. Headed up by Apple chairman and former Genentech CEO Art Levinson, Calico is focused on extending human life. To that end, it’s teamed up with research-based biopharmaceutical company AbbVie.
In September, the companies announced a partnership to invest up to $1.5 billion to research, develop, and bring to market drugs that could help prolong human life by fighting age-related diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's.
15. Lynda Weinman and Bruce Heavin
Cofounders, Lynda.com
In April, online-learning website Lynda sold to LinkedIn. The deal, a $1.5 billion cash-stock blend, closed in Q1. Most of Lynda's employees joined LinkedIn following the acquisition, which lets LinkedIn's 350 million users access the platform for skill building and education, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said.
Founded in 1995 by Lynda Weinman and her husband, Bruce Heavin, Lynda.com lets users learn business, technology, software, and creative skills through videos. People can access Lynda on their own, and corporations and schools can purchase subscriptions.
14. Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe
Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe.
Cofounders, Oculus
Virtual-reality company Oculus was acquired by Facebook in March 2014 for $2 billion. Since then, founder Palmer Luckey and CEO Brendan Iribe have had a busy year. Oculus revealed its final Oculus Rift headset, announced a partnership with Microsoft, and announced that the Oculus Rift headset will finally be available in the first quarter of next year.
Last year, Iribe announced that he was donating $31 million to the University of Maryland. As a result of the Facebook deal, Luckey’s net worth is more than $500 million.
13. Suresh Batchu and Ajay Mishra
Cofounders, MobileIron
In June 2014, MobileIron became the third enterprise tech company in a month to successfully go public. MobileIron offers a product that helps enterprises manage their fleets of tablets and smartphones.
When it went public, MobileIron raised about $100 million, selling 11.1 million shares for $9. Investors liked the stock, which closed up 22% at $11.02.
12. Rob Bearden
CEO, Hortonworks
Rob Bearden’s company, HortonWorks, went public in December. HortonWorks distributes and supports an open-source technology called Hadoop, which was invented at Yahoo to store and arrange huge amounts of web data on low-cost hardware.
Hortonworks priced at $16 on its opening day and jumped almost 50% to over $24. HortonWorks raised about $100 million and was valued at about $1 billion at the time it went public.
11. Mikkel Svane, Alexander Aghassipour, and Morten Primdahl
Alexander Aghassipour, Morten Primdahl, and Mikkel Svane.
Cofounder/CEO; cofounder/chief product officer; cofounder/CTO, Zendesk
Mikkel Svane is the CEO of Zendesk, an enterprise cloud-based customer-service software company that handles businesses' technical and customer support. He took his company public in May 2014 despite early 2014's shaky SaaS market.
Zendesk ended up pricing its shares at $9, much less than the $12.50 per share it valued itself at just a couple months before. But Zendesk shares popped 49% on the day the company went public and have jumped nearly 150% so far. Zendesk is now worth roughly $1.7 billion.
Correction: An earlier version of this article excluded cofounder Morten Primdahl from the article. The text and photo have been changed to reflect the correction.
10. Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith
Cofounder/CEO, cofounder, Box
Box, which offers online storage and document collaboration tools for enterprises, went public in January, and investors ate up its stock. Box opened at $20.20, up 44%. Its IPO was priced at $14. On its first day, it closed at $23.23, up 66%.
When Box released its prospectus last year, it shocked the tech community with its high burn rate. After delaying its IPO several times, it finally got out the door and went public this year. "I’m living the life I dreamed of as a 12-year-old. I don’t have hobbies. I want to build a big company, and this is it,” he told Forbes' Victoria Barret.
9. Stewart Butterfield
Cofounder/CEO, Slack
Slack is a workplace-communication app. Slack has group- and private-chat features and lets users share files and work collaboratively. Slack was originally an internal tool used by CEO Stewart Butterfield's team at Tiny Speck, the company that made the multiplayer game Glitch, but Butterfield decided to spin it out into its own product and company.
Slack's growth as an enterprise communication tool has been organic — it hasn't spent any money on marketing. It's one of the fastest-growing enterprise apps of all time. Slack recently confirmed that it raised $160 million at a $2.8 billion valuation. That means it more than doubled its value since October, when it raised $120 million at a $1.12 billion valuation.
8. Marc Benioff
Cofounder/CEO, Salesforce
More than just a self-made billionaire CEO, Marc Benioff is a force for equal rights. Recently he made headlines for his plan to ensure equal pay for both men and women at Salesforce, through which the company will examine the salaries of all 16,000 employees. "My job is to make sure that women are treated 100% equally at Salesforce in pay, opportunity, and advancement," he said.
He also made waves when he threatened to reduce the company's investment in Indiana after the state passed a law that allowed business owners to refuse service to gay married couples. Pressure from Benioff and other business leaders eventually helped convince Indiana lawmakers to revise the law.
Benioff is regarded as a tech visionary, and his company continues to see record growth. Salesforce ended its last fiscal year with $5.37 billion in revenue, a major milestone for a 100% cloud-computing company. He's also a major force in his home town of San Francisco: The Salesforce Tower is under construction and will be the tallest building in the city when done, and a childrens' hospital named after Benioff opened earlier this year.
7. Nick Woodman
Founder/CEO, GoPro
GoPro, the company that makes wearable sports cameras, priced its IPO at $24 a share when it went public in June. Woodman became a billionaire when his company went public, and his whole family became millionaires too. GoPro went public at a $2.6 billion valuation.
6. Renaud Laplanche
Founder/CEO, Lending Club
Renaud Laplanche is the CEO of Lending Club, one of the world's biggest online lending marketplaces. Last year, Lending Club's IPO was the largest among all US tech companies. Laplanche founded Lending Club to let people provide low-cost financing to their peers. Now, it lets institutional investors do the same.
The online credit marketplace raised $870 million in its IPO last December. Today, it's valued at $6.5 billion.
5. Sundar Pichai
Senior vice president, Google
In October, Sundar Pichai was promoted by Google CEO Larry Page as the company's new senior VP of products. It's a big promotion for Pichai, who's now in charge of Google's core products, including search, maps, research, Google+, Android, Chrome, infrastructure, commerce, ads, and Google Apps. Before, he was head of Android and Chrome.
Since being promoted, Pichai has spearheaded the announcement of Android M, the new-generation version of Android, Google Photos, an app for Apple iOS and Android that offers automatic image sorting and unlimited photo storage, offline Google Maps, and more.
4. Jack Dorsey
One of Twitter’s founders, Jack Dorsey was named the company’s interim CEO this spring. Embattled CEO Dick Costolo announced that he would be stepping down effective July 1. Dorsey, who is also the CEO of payments company Square, said he would lead both companies concurrently.
Just after news broke that Dorsey would step in as Twitter’s interim CEO, reports surfaced that Square was planning to go public. Sources say the company may have already filed a confidential registration document with the SEC, which is permitted for companies with less than $1 billion in revenue. Square's most recent fundraise came late last year, when it raised $150 million at a reported $6 billion valuation.
3. Tim Cook
CEO, Apple
Over the past year, Apple has rolled out two major new products under Tim Cook's leadership, the iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch. In addition, Apple has announced plans to break into music streaming with the launch of Apple Music. It also announced iOS 9 and rolled out a new line of MacBooks.
Last October, Apple CEO Tim Cook made waves and was lauded by activist groups when he came out as gay, becoming the first and only openly gay CEO in the Fortune 500.
2. Travis Kalanick
CEO/cofounder, Uber
Uber, which turned five this year, is the most valuable private tech company in the world. The ride-hailing company, which has raised $5.9 billion at a $41 billion valuation, could soon be worth as much as $50 billion with a new cash infusion.
Uber operates in 311 cities and 58 countries. While the company is working to overcome regulatory hurdles, Uber has its sights set on plans bigger than just chauffeured transportation. The company has rolled out features like UberEATS and UberRush to test out logistics and delivery services. In May, Uber poached 40 Carnegie Mellon robotics researchers for its own Pittsburgh-based labs. Presumably, this will allow Uber to create self-driving cars.
1. Elizabeth Holmes
Founder, CEO, chairman, Theranos
When she was a sophomore at Stanford in 2003, Elizabeth Holmes founded healthcare-technology company Theranos (a few months later, she dropped out to focus on the company). Today, she's America's youngest female billionaire with a net worth of $4.6 billion.
Theranos is a $9 billion biotech company that has a new approach to blood testing. Its goal is to make clinical testing cheaper and faster. Theranos wants to conduct blood tests for health issues through a single finger stick rather than by having to draw vials of blood in a doctor's office. Theranos has drawn skepticism from the scientific community in part because Theranos is cagey about how its tests actually work. But for now, Holmes is on top of the world. Today, her blood tests are used in places like Walgreens.
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