Mitchell David Kapor is an American entrepreneur best known for his work as an application developer in the early days of the personal computer software industry, later founding Lotus, where he was instrumental in developing the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. He left Lotus in 1986. In 1990 with John Perry Barlow and John Gilmore, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and served as its chairman until 1994. In 2003, Kapor became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation, creator of the open source web browser Firefox. Kapor has been an investor in the personal computing industry, and supporter of social causes via Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center. Kapor and his wife, Freada Kapor Klein, invest in social impact tech startups that seek to narrow gaps in opportunity and access for underrepresented communities and attempt to eliminate barriers to full participation across the tech ecosystem. Kapor and Klein take a comprehensive approach to removing barriers in education and the workplace for all and fixing the leaks at every stage of the tech pipeline. Kapor serves on the board of SMASH, a non-profit founded by Klein to help underrepresented scholars hone their STEM knowledge while building the networks and skills for careers in tech and the sciences.
Peter Andreas Thiel is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 328 on the Forbes 400 in 2018, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.
Y Combinator is an American seed accelerator launched in March 2005 and was used to launch over 2,000 companies including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Optimizely, Zenefits, Docker, DoorDash, Mixpanel, Heroku.
Sean Parker is an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, most notable for co-founding the file-sharing computer service Napster, and serving as the first president of the social networking website Facebook. He also co-founded Plaxo, Causes, Airtime.com, and Brigade, an online platform for civic engagement. He is the founder and chairman of the Parker Foundation, which focuses on life sciences, global public health, and civic engagement. On the Forbes 2016 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked #722 with a net worth of US$2.4 billion.
TechCrunch is an American online publisher focusing on the tech industry. The company specifically reports on the business related to tech, technology news, analysis of emerging trends in tech, and profiling of new tech businesses and products. It was one of the earliest publications to report extensively on tech startups and funding.
Google.org, founded in October 2005, is the charitable arm of Google, a multinational technology company. The organization has committed roughly US$100 million in investments and grants to nonprofits annually.
Jean Case is an American businesswoman. She is Chairman of the Board of National Geographic, CEO of the Case Foundation, and a philanthropist, investor, technology industry pioneer and author of Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose (2019). She, along with her husband, AOL co-founder Steve Case, created the Case Foundation in 1997 and they joined the Giving Pledge in 2011, committing to give away a majority of their wealth.
The Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation was an office new to the Obama Administration, created within the White House, to catalyze new and innovative ways of encouraging government to do business differently. Its first director was the economist Sonal Shah. The final director was David Wilkinson.
Prezi is a presentation software company founded in 2009, with offices in Budapest, San Francisco, and Riga.
Holden Karnofsky is the chief executive officer of the Open Philanthropy Project and a co-founder and board member of GiveWell.
FundRazr is a Canadian crowdfunding site and Facebook app first released in 2009. It allows users to begin crowdfunding campaigns by creating pages and/or embed fundraising apps on their Facebook pages to raise money for causes such as medical care, memorials, and animal rescue causes.
AngelList is a U.S. website for startups, angel investors, and job-seekers looking to work at startups. Created in 2010, the platform has a mission to democratize the investment process and to help startups with their challenges in fundraising and talent. It started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startups to raise money from angel investors free of charge.
The Portland Incubator Experiment, often abbreviated as PIE or PIE PDX or stylized as Pie, is a business incubator based in Portland, Oregon that provides mentorship and resources to select startup companies. Co-founded by Renny Gleeson and Rick Turoczy, PIE is run by the Portland-based advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy (W+K). The program was informally launched in 2009 before converting to a formal structure in 2011. PIE participants are chosen by a selection committee, following an application process. Startups receive seed money and spend three months developing their businesses with support from W+K and participating mentors. Companies that have provided financial assistance and mentorship include The Coca-Cola Company, Google, Intel, Nike, Inc. and Target Corporation.
Optimizely is an American company that makes customer experience optimization software for other companies. The Optimizely platform technology provides A/B testing tools, in which two versions of a web page can be compared for performance, and multivariate testing. Optimizely also enables personalization, which may be used for making data-driven decisions. The personalization capability can be used for serving online advertising.
The Founders Pledge is a program based in the UK managed by Founders For Good Ltd., where entrepreneurs make a commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business. It launched on June 10, 2015.
Startup India is an initiative of the Government of India.
Technology companies in the New York City metropolitan area represent a significant and growing economic component of the New York metropolitan area, the most populous combined statistical area in the United States and one of the most populous urban agglomerations in the world. In the region's Silicon Alley, new establishments include those of Israeli companies in New York City, at a rate of ten new startups per month, and the technology sector has been claiming a greater share of New York City's economy since 2010. Tech:NYC, founded in 2016, is a non-profit organization which represents New York City's technology industry with government, civic institutions, in business, and in the media and whose primary goals are to attract tech talent to the city and to advocate for policies that will help tech companies grow.
A unicorn bubble is a theoretical economic bubble that would occur when unicorn startup companies are overvalued by venture capitalists or investors. This can either occur during the private phase of these unicorn companies, or in an initial public offering. A unicorn company being one which is valued at, or above, $1 billion US dollars.
Elevate Capital is a privately-owned venture capital firm based in Portland, Oregon, that focuses on early-stage investments in startup companies and particularly those companies led by women, minorities, and veterans. The firm manages the Elevate Capital Fund that invests in early-stage companies and the Elevate Inclusion Fund that invests in startups run by women and minority entrepreneurs.
Deep tech, or deep technology startup companies are based on substantial scientific advances and high tech engineering innovation. They require lengthy R&D, take a long time to reach commercial application, and often require large investments to achieve commercial success. The underlying intellectual property of deep tech innovations is usually well-protected and hard to reproduce, making it a strong competitive advantage or barrier to entry.
