Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and software engineer who was the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, executive chairman of Google from 2011 to 2015, executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020.
Robert Louis Johnson is an American entrepreneur, media magnate, executive, philanthropist, and investor. He is the co-founder of BET, which was acquired by Viacom in 2001. He also founded RLJ Companies, a holding company that invests in various business sectors. Johnson is the former majority owner of the Charlotte Bobcats. He became the first African-American billionaire in 2001. Johnson's companies have counted among the most prominent African-American businesses in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way that a virus spreads from one person to another. It can be delivered by word of mouth, or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet and mobile networks.
Blair Hull is an American businessman, investor, Democratic politician, and philanthropist.
John Wendell Thompson is an American technology executive who was the chair of Microsoft from 2014 until June 2021, and chair of Illumina since 2021. 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.
Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing and founding the free and open-source web software WordPress, and its parent company Automattic.
A social networking service or SNS is an online platform which people use to build social networks or social relationships with other people who share similar personal or career content, interests, activities, backgrounds or real-life connections.
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 2022 list of the world's billionaires, he was ranked No. 1,096 with a net worth of US$2.8 billion.
Chris Hughes is an American entrepreneur and author who co-founded and served as spokesman for the online social directory and networking site Facebook until 2007. He was the publisher and editor-in-chief of The New Republic from 2012 to 2016.
Samuel Evans Wyly is an American businessman. He first appeared on Forbes's list of richest Americans in 2000 with a net worth of $750 million, and he remained on that list throughout 2010 with a net worth of $1 billion. His initial wealth was acquired following the public offering of University Computing Company. His recent wealth stems from ownership stakes from Sterling Software and Michael's, an American art supply store. In 2010 following a series of investigations, Wyly was charged with federal tax fraud by the SEC and IRS. Following his settlement with federal authorities, and declared bankruptcy in 2014.
Sarah Maria Austin is an American author, tech entrepreneur, and Internet personality. She is the CMO and co-founder of metaverse funding platform, QGlobe, and former CEO at Broad Listening, an artificial emotional intelligence agent. She is the chairperson of the board of directors at Coding FTW, a nonprofit organization that promotes diversity and equal rights in the technology sector.
Robert Wolf is the former Chairman and CEO of UBS Americas as well as the president and chief operating officer of UBS# Investment Bank.
HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006.
Edward Saatchi is a British businessman and filmmaker. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) of artificial intelligence-powered virtual being company Fable. He was formerly a producer at Oculus Story Studio and the CEO and co-founder of political technology company, NationalField.
Aharon Wasserman is an entrepreneur and software designer. Currently he serves as the Vice President of Creative and Marketing for NGP VAN, the data company at the center of the Democratic Party's technology infrastructure. He co-founded NationalField, a company started on the 2008 Obama campaign to help monitor the daily activities of the sprawling grassroots effort with Justin Lewis and Edward Saatchi.
Barack Obama won the 2008 United States presidential election on November 4, 2008. During campaign, by using social media and mobilizing the general public online, Obama was able to raise awareness and financial support of his campaign Obama used over 15 social networking sites.
Will Byrne is an activist and entrepreneur. Will was named one of Forbes’s 30 Under 30, and his writing has appeared in Forbes and Fast Company.
Shervin Kordary Pishevar is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, super angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and former executive chairman of Hyperloop One and a co-founder and managing director of Sherpa Capital, a venture capital fund which has invested in companies including Airbnb, Uber, GoPuff, Cue Health, Slack, Robinhood, Munchery and Postmates.
Dylan Field is an American technology executive and co-founder of Figma, a web-based vector graphics editing software company. Field founded Figma in 2012 with Evan Wallace, who he had met while the two were computer science students at Brown University. In 2012, Field received a Thiel Fellowship—a $100,000 grant conditioned on his leaving school to begin working full-time on the company. Field moved to San Francisco with Wallace, where the two spent four years preparing the software for its first public release in 2016.
