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.
100. Mat Honan
Bureau chief, BuzzFeed SF
BuzzFeed hired Mat Honan at the end of 2014 to lead its new San Francisco office. Since the office opened, Honan has hired 17 reporters dedicated to tech news — most notably Nitasha Tiku, who previously worked at The Verge and Gawker's Valleywag. The intention of Honan's new office is to make the website as a must-read tech-news source, a niche that BuzzFeed has struggled with.
Previously, Honan was a senior staff writer and editor at Wired. Upon being hired at BuzzFeed, he said, "Our coverage will be aggressive and bold, like our hiring, and we’ll look to do the kind of authoritative reporting that asks questions and gets real answers from the most powerful people in this industry."
99. Gagan Biyani, Morgan Springer, Neeraj Berry, Matt Kent
Top: Gagan Biyani and Neeraj Berry; bottom: Matt Kent and Morgan Springer.
Cofounders, Sprig
CEO Gagan Biyani's mission is for Sprig to become "the easiest way to eat healthy in the world." Former Google head chef Nate Keller leads the in-house kitchen staff that prepares each meal delivered by Sprig, the on-demand fresh-food delivery service that launched in November 2013. It offers three meal options daily and aims to deliver the food in 15 minutes.
In April, the company raised $45 million in funding, which spurred its expansion to Chicago from the San Francisco Bay Area.
98. Conrad Chu, Van Tran, Tri Tran
Conrad Chu and Tri Tran.
Cofounders, Munchery
Van Tran, Tri Tran, and Conrad Chu wanted to provide the convenience of a professional chef without the high cost, and in 2011 Munchery was born. The company is similar to Seamless, except your food is made by Munchery's chefs instead of being outsourced to restaurants. Each time you order a meal on Munchery, the company makes an equivalent donation to a charity in your town.
Munchery made headlines in April when it raised a $28 million Series B round. More recently, Sherpa Ventures, a prominent venture-capital firm, announced it was making its "biggest bet since Uber" by endorsing Munchery. At the end of May, the company announced its Series C round of $85 million co-led by Menlo Ventures and Sherpa. Munchery has raised $117.2 million, including contributions from celebrities such as Jared Leto and Edward Norton.
97. Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest
Cofounders, Okta
McKinnon is a Valley A-lister, a former star Salesforce engineer who launched his own company in 2009 without CEO and friend Benioff's blessing. His company has seen massive growth: By September 2014 it had raised $155 million from top VCs. Okta is now valued at about $600 million and is expected to go public by 2016.
McKinnon said there's tremendous value in working for a rapidly growing, successful company before pursuing other endeavors. He called his time at Salesforce a "gift" that taught him what it means to win.
96. Peter Thiel
Thiel started out as Facebook's first outside investor, and PayPal cofounder and CEO. In 2004 he cofounded Palantir Technologies, a computer software and services company specializing in data analysis. He also manages Founders Fund, a leading VC firm that's invested in startups like SpaceX, Yelp, RoboteX, and Spotify.
Thiel made waves in 2011 when he set up a fellowship to pay promising college students $100,000 to drop out of school to pursue startup ideas instead. Of the 84 students who've become Thiel Fellows, only eight have returned to college.
In April, startup incubator Y Combinator announced Thiel had become a part-time partner, joining Groupon founder Andrew Mason, Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, and seven others.
95. John Doerr, Megan Quinn, Matt Murphy, Mary Meeker
Top: John Doerr and Mary Meeker; bottom: Matt Murphy and Megan Quinn
Partners, Kleiner Perkins
Kleiner Perkins is a legendary venture-capital firm in Silicon Valley. Over the past year, Kleiner Perkins has made investments in Slack, Snapchat, Instacart, secretive virtual-reality company Magic Leap, Uber, and others. Nineteen of its portfolio companies have gone public or have been acquired in the past year, including Lending Club and Dropcam.
Earlier this year, Ellen Pao, a former Kleiner Perkins partner, brought a sexual-discrimination case against the firm. Kleiner Perkins successfully defended itself in trial.
94. Rand Paul
US senator (R-Kentucky) and 2016 presidential candidate
Paul has been courting Silicon Valley for years, even meeting with big names like Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel as well as executives at eBay and others. It's part of Paul's strategy to appeal to Silicon Valley libertarians and win their votes in next year's presidential race.
Even further, he's opened an office in the area and has raised donations from Sean Parker and other top investors.
93. Ross Mason
Founder, VP of product strategy, MuleSoft
MuleSoft is, to some, the definition of disruption. Two of its biggest legacy rivals, Tibco and Informatica, left the public markets in leveraged buyouts in 2014 and early 2015, which left room for founder Ross Mason to grow MuleSoft like crazy.
MuleSoft solves the hard problem of integrating cloud applications, especially with a company's existing apps. In 2014 it raised $50 million at an $800 million valuation, and just this past May MuleSoft raised a new $128 million investment at a $1.5 billion valuation. It seems it could be heading toward an IPO.
92. Or Arbel
Cofounder, CEO, Yo
Yo is the almost stupidly simple communication tool that briefly took the tech world by storm in 2014. The one-word correspondence app started out as a side project for Arbel, but it went viral and last year was valued at about $10 million.
Arbel is planning on bringing Yo back with Yo 2.0, which will include your location, a photo, or just the good old original "yo."
91. Amanda Bradford
Founder, CEO, The League
Bradford's app The League is like a curated Tinder for elites, and it raised $2.1 million in seed funding earlier this year to play matchmaker to the most successful and ambitious singles. The League launched in San Francisco at the beginning of 2015 and just opened up to the New York market as well, where a targeted group of 2,500 users were allowed to sign up.
The goal, Bradford says, is to make more power couples, and help people date "intelligently." She's now eyeing London.
90. Liz Wessel and JJ Fliegelman
Liz Wessel and JJ Fliegelman.
Cofounders, Campus Job
Founded by former Googler Liz Wessel, Campus Job is a marketplace for college kids looking for internships and jobs. About 90% of the positions offered on Campus Job are paid, and the startup sees 10,000 new college-aged users signing up weekly.
Campus Job was born out of a campus-rep company that Wessel had started with a fellow student at Penn; it's an alternative to a college career service center and Symplicity, a job board employers have to pay for postings on. It recently went through the startup accelerator Y Combinator and raised over $9 million in May, bringing its total funding to $10.3 million.
89. Aarthi Ramamurthy
Founder, Lumoid
Aarthi Ramamurthy is the founder of Y Combinator-backed Lumoid, a try-before-you-buy gadget marketplace that lets people test-drive electronics before they buy them. It allows potential consumers try out the expensive products they're thinking of buying — like the Apple Watch, which users can rent for between $45 and $55 (and usually retails for $349 and up).
Ramamurthy spent six years at Microsoft working on its popular Visual Studio software-development tool and on Xbox Live, and also cofounded a bra-fitting company called True&Co.
88. Kyle Vogt
CEO, Cruise
Vogt, a Y Combinator alum, created driverless-car company Cruise not to manufacture driverless cars but to enable any car to become a driverless car. "We're trying to reuse as many concepts and behaviors as you already have in your car, such as a single button to control the cruise control," says Vogt. "Whatever speed you're going becomes the target speed."
So far Cruise has raised one undisclosed seed amount, back in January 2015. The Cruise system costs $10,000 and can be installed in a few hours.
87. Jason Johnson and Yves Behar
Jason Johnson and Yves Behar.
Cofounders, August
Jason Johnson and designer Yves Behar (known for designing the Jawbone UP fitness band) are out to take "the internet of things" by storm with a new app called August, which aims to make the house key obsolete. Using a lock, along with an app and Bluetooth, August can unlock your home and generate temporary keys that would allow plumbers, cleaners, or houseguests inside at specified times.
Johnson and Behar's product went on sale in the fall of 2014 and just raised a new $38 million round led by Bessemer Venture Partners to produce August en masse.
86. Adam Cahan
Senior vice president of mobile, Yahoo
Adam Cahan formerly worked at Google on mobile initiatives and joined Yahoo a few months before Marissa Mayer, but he soon found himself in the CEO's office, tasked with heading up the expansion of mobile for Yahoo.
This became a massive growth opportunity for Cahan, who built up a team of over 600. His investment in mobile helped begin to put Yahoo on par with Facebook and Google, which already had thousands of people working on apps before Yahoo expanded into the territory.
85. Ev Williams
Founder, Obvious Ventures
Ev Williams, one of the cofounders of Twitter and Medium, just raised a boatload of money for his VC firm, Obvious Ventures, last month: $123,456,789, to be precise. This is its first-ever fund.
Williams says the numerically consecutive amount was "absolutely intentional," and that the firm is out to use the money to make positive change in the world. Obvious Ventures wants to invest in companies that are tackling those challenges head-on. Obvious Ventures' three main areas of investment are "sustainable systems," "healthy living," and "people power," according to cofounder James Joqauin.
84. Andrew Rubin, PJ Kirner, Alan Stokol
Andrew Rubin, PJ Kirner, Alan Stokol.
Cofounders, Illumio
Rubin is the cofounder of Illumio, the buzzed-about startup that raised $42.5 million from investors at hugely successful companies like Salesforce and Yahoo before it even came out of stealth mode. The company offers Adaptive Security Platform — a cutting-edge security software designed for the cloud.
In April, Business Insider reported Illumio to be worth $1 billion, a stunning number for a company that's six months old. Rubin has also been a seed investor in Powermat and Tory Burch for more than 10 years.
83. Josh Reeves, Edward Kim, Tomer London
Cofounders, ZenPayroll
ZenPayroll CEO Josh Reeves believes it's easier than ever to be an entrepreneur. Whether or not that's true, it certainly seems easy for Reeves, whose payroll-processing startup raised a $60 million series B round, led by Google Capital, in April.
The recently revealed laundry list of angel investors includes celebs like Ashton Kutcher and Jared Leto, former head of the US Small Business Administration Karen Mills, and a list of famed startup CEOs from Evernote, Eventbrite, Stripe, Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey, WordPress, and Instagram. Founders from PayPal, Yahoo, Reddit, Nest, Twitter, HubSpot, and Mint also contributed.
82. Eric Migicovsky
Founder and CEO, Pebble
Migicovsky's Pebble smartwatch smashed through its Kickstarter goal almost instantly, raising nearly $14 million by the end of March — the most-funded Kickstarter campaign in history.
The company's marketing strategies are pretty ingenious as well, especially with the introduction of the Apple iWatch to the market. In the fall, Pebble slashed the price of its smartwatch to $99, just before the launch of the iWatch, and it's introducing new features to the next generation of watch, the Pebble Time, which are key ingredients missing from the iWatch.
81. Ed Lee
Mayor, San Francisco
Since he was first elected, Lee has aligned himself with the city's startup culture, visiting a new Silicon Valley-area startup every week. A survey conducted by Lee's administration found that, in general, San Franciscans really like the Silicon Valley tech industry and don't cite it as the main cause for the high cost of housing there.
Lee, who's up for reelection this year, found himself amid controversy a couple years ago when he gave rapidly expanding Twitter a tax break to move to a bigger office downtown rather than leave the city.
80. Renee James
President, Intel
James is the No. 2 executive at Intel and seems to be everywhere these days, mainly thanks to her audacious goal to hit "full representation" of women and minorities at Intel by 2020 and have its workforce mimic actual demographics, which would mean a male-female ratio closer to 50-50. Intel has always rated high as a place for women in tech, but James is taking it further, and Intel is investing $300 million to reach its goal.
James, who has been described as "bullheaded, impatient, and very smart" by former Intel CEO Andy Grove, could be starting a model that might be duplicated by other tech companies in Silicon Valley, where women and minorities have historically been underrepresented.
79. Andy Rubin
Managing director, Playground Global
Andy Rubin, best known as the founder of Android — which Google bought in 2005 — left Google in the fall of 2014 to found a VC firm that will invest in robotics. Rubin was involved in robotics-related work at Google, but now he'll be providing hardware companies with the capital to go full-throttle in the robotics industry.
His venture, which he's calling Playground Global, has already raised a $48 million fund, and with Rubin as the managing director, and an A-list board of directors that includes ex-Googler Matt Hershenson, former Microsoft executive Peter Barrett, and WebTV cofounder Bruce Leak, hardware companies can start lining up for funding.
78. Sam Altman
Founding partner, president, Y Combinator
Sam Altman, founding partner and president of Y Combinator, one of the most coveted startup accelerators in the country, has been outspoken this year about his disdain for the rate at which many startups burn through cash. The "mega bubble" in Silicon Valley won't last forever, he said, and he advises startups to spend "almost comically low" amounts of money as the next round of funding may not be as easy to get.
Altman has invested in Product Hunt and BloomThat, among others, and his accelerator is where companies like Airbnb and Dropbox got off the ground. Y Combinator also just raised its first official fund so it can invest in startups in an even bigger way financially.
77. Chamath Palihapitiya
Founder, Social+Capital Partnership
Called "the future of venture capital," Palihapitiya helped desktop and mobile messaging app Slack raise its recent $160 million round of funding in record time, praising the company on Twitter: "There are many tools that are good with small groups or departments, but Slack is the first product that has utility for the entire company." At 38, he's younger than most VCs but still one of the most prominent and most successful.
With an estimated net worth exceeding $1 billion, the part Golden State Warriors owner is viewed as one of the most successful former Facebook employees of all. He's also pretty much pledged to give all his money away to other world-changers when he dies.
Palihapitiya recently sold his stake in Tinder at a $500 million valuation to IAC.
76. Bill Gurley
General partner, Benchmark Capital
As general partner at Benchmark Capital, Gurley invested in DogVacay, WeWork, Cyanogen, Uber, and many other startups — but he's also repeatedly warned of the impending "tech bubble" in Silicon Valley. In a SXSW keynote, he warned that Silicon Valley's optimism could lead to the demise of some of these $1 billion-valuated "unicorn" companies. It's unsettling for tech founders to hear, for whom achieving unicorn status is a badge of honor.
His latest battle cry is that the tech sector is in a "dry bubble," where lots of money is being poured into private companies but few liquidity events are happening.
Gurley is a board member of Uber, the world's largest private company worth $50 billion, and his firm is invested in $20 billion Snapchat.
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