David Yu (born 6 November 1967) is an American businessman and investor. He is the former CEO of Internet betting exchange Betfair and an active tech investor.
Yu studied computer science at UC Berkeley and Stanford. [1] He moved to London from California in 2000 at the behest of his employer Alta Vista. [2]
He became chief technology officer of Betfair in 2001. He was promoted to the position of CEO in January 2006 during a turbulent time for the company that saw the shakeup of the positions of CEO and Chairman with Sir Robert Horton being forced out as Chairman. [3] As an IT enthusiast, Yu's promotion to the helm was unusual. [4] He took the company public on the London Stock Exchange in October 2010. [2] David Yu stood down as CEO and from the Board on 31 December 2011 after a 60% drop in share value in the year after listing and the subsequent appointment of Breon Corcoran as his replacement.
He is also an early stage tech investor. He was among a group of individual investors and firms that invested seed money in TransferWise (now Wise), a payment transfer company. [5]
Cypress Semiconductor was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoC programmable system-on-chip solutions, analog and PMIC Power Management ICs, CapSense capacitive touch-sensing controllers, Wireless BLE Bluetooth Low-Energy and USB connectivity solutions.
Mark Jonathan Pincus is an American Internet entrepreneur known as the founder of Zynga, a mobile social gaming company. Pincus also founded the startups Freeloader, Inc., Tribe Networks, and Support.com. Pincus served as the CEO of Zynga until July 2013, then again from 2015 to 2016.
John Wendell Thompson is an American technology executive who was the chair of Microsoft from 2014 until June 2021, and chair of Illumina from 2021 until 2023. He is a former chief executive of Virtual Instruments, a vice-president at IBM and the former chief executive of Symantec. Thompson later became an independent director on the board of Microsoft, and in February 2014, was named chairman. He led the search for Microsoft's next CEO; as a result, Satya Nadella was selected.
Thurman John "T. J." Rodgers is an American billionaire scientist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Cypress Semiconductor and holds patents ranging from semiconductors to energy to winemaking. Rodgers is known for his public relations acumen, brash personality, and strong advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. He stepped down as Cypress CEO in April 2016 and Director in August 2016 after serving for 34 years.
Sir Robert Baynes Horton was a British businessman. He was a director of the European Advisory Council and of Emerson Electric Company. He spent 30 years working for BP, formerly British Petroleum. He became Chief Executive and Chairman of the Board of BP in March 1990, but was forced out in 1992.
Jerry Colonna is an American venture capitalist and professional coach who played a prominent part in the early development of Silicon Valley. Colonna has been named to Upside magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People of the New Economy, Forbes ASAP's list of the best VCs in the country, and Worth's list of the 25 most generous young Americans. He is a co-founder and CEO of the executive coaching and leadership development company, Reboot. He is the host of the Reboot Podcast. He also serves as chairman on the Board of Trustees at Naropa University.
Shantanu Narayen is an Indian-American business executive. He has been the chairman, president, and chief executive officer (CEO) of Adobe Inc. since December 2007. Before this, he was the company's president and chief operating officer since 2005.
Jay Steven Adelson is an American Internet entrepreneur. In 2014 Adelson co-founded Center Electric with Andy Smith. In 2013 he founded Opsmatic, a technology company that improves productivity on operations teams. In 2015 Opsmatic was bought by New Relic. Adelson's Internet career includes Netcom, DEC's Palo Alto Internet Exchange, co-founder of Equinix, Revision3 and Digg, and CEO of SimpleGeo, Inc. In 2008, Adelson was named a member of Time Magazine's Top 100 Most Influential People in the World and was listed as a finalist on the same list in 2009.
Simon Allerton Cawkwell a British stock market commentator, share trader, and author, best known for writing a thrice-weekly diary at the now dissolved T1ps.com, publicly identifying companies whose share price he believes will fall and betting his own money on such falls. He is currently an author, public speaker + podcaster, known as Evil Knievil, his best known output is Evil Diaries on the Master Investor website.
John William Gurley is an American businessman. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in San Francisco, California. He is listed consistently on the Forbes Midas List and is considered one of technology’s top dealmakers.
Bill Liao is an Australian entrepreneur. He is a venture partner with SOSV and recognised as one of the Top 100 minority ethnic leaders in technology by the Financial Times.
The Cape Silicon Initiative or Silicon Cape is a regional ICT business networking NPO and community in the Western Cape, South Africa.
Domo, Inc. is an American cloud software company based in American Fork, Utah, United States. It specializes in business intelligence tools and data visualization.
Wise is a UK-based foreign exchange financial technology company founded by Estonian businessmen Kristo Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus in January 2011. Wise specializes in cross-border payment transfers. As of 2023, it offers three main products: Wise Account, Wise Business, and Wise Platform.
CurrencyFair is an online peer-to-peer currency exchange marketplace. CurrencyFair is headquartered in Ireland and also has employees in the UK, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong, Poland and Singapore.
Circle began as a peer-to-peer payments technology company that now manages stablecoin USDC, a cryptocurrency the value of which is pegged to the U.S. dollar. It was founded by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville in October 2013. Circle is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. USDC, the second largest stablecoin worldwide, is designed to hold at or near a stable price of $1. The majority of its stablecoin collateral is held in short-term U.S. government securities.
Adam Nash is the CEO and co-founder of Daffy, a new fintech platform focused on charitable giving. Nash has been influential in fintech most notably as a serial angel investor, advisor, and board member in over 100 companies such as Acorns, Gusto, Figma, and Opendoor. His investments are geared towards making financial tools more accessible to the public via tech-enabled products. Nash’s interest in democratizing access to technology and its communities extends through his non-profit work starting in 2011 with Oshman Family JCC and most recently as the co-Chairman of ICON, a non-profit organization with the mission of creating a community in Silicon Valley for those who are passionate about Israeli technology & innovation and harnessing the strength of this community to help Israeli entrepreneurs & startups.
Flexport Inc. is an American multinational corporation that focuses on supply chain management and logistics, including order management, delivery, trade financing, insurance, freight forwarding and customs brokerage. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California, has thousands of employees and has annual revenues of more than $3.3 billion.
Arjun Sethi is an American internet entrepreneur, investor and executive. He is co-founder and partner at venture capital firm Tribe Capital. He previously was partner at Social Capital and served as an executive at Yahoo! where he launched Yahoo! Livetext. Before that, he was co-founder and CEO of MessageMe and he was CEO of Lolapps, the developer behind Ravenwood Fair.