A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship includes all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that do not intend to go public, startups are new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to become successful and influential.
L. John Doerr is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the President and his administration with advice and counsel in trying to fix America's economic downturn. In 2017, related to Forbes, he was recognized the 40th Richest in Tech. Forbes ranked Doerr as the 196th richest person in the world, with a net worth of US$ 9.8 billion as of April 12, 2023. Doerr is the author of Measure What Matters, a book about goal-setting, and Speed & Scale: An Action Plan for Solving Our Climate Crisis Now.
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.
Heidi Roizen is a Silicon Valley executive, venture capitalist, and entrepreneur.
Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.
Lisa Gansky is an American entrepreneur and author.
The Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology (MEST) is an Africa-wide technology entrepreneur training program, seed fund, and incubator headquartered in Accra, Ghana. The three-phased institution was founded in 2008 to provide training, investment, and mentoring for aspiring technology entrepreneurs with the goal of creating globally successful companies that create wealth and jobs locally in Africa.
Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc., formerly known as Samasource and Sama, is a training-data company, focusing on annotating data for artificial intelligence algorithms. The company offers image, video and sensor data annotation and validation for machine learning algorithms in industries including automotive, navigation, augmented reality, virtual reality, biotechnology, agriculture, manufacturing, and e-commerce. Sama's mission is to expand opportunity for low-income individuals through the digital economy. One of the first organizations to engage in impact sourcing, Sama trains workers in basic computer skills and pays a local living wage for their labor.
Babak "Bobby" Yazdani is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and investor specializing in early-stage, private U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies.
Alexa von Tobel is the founder and CEO of LearnVest.com, a personal finance website, and the founder and Managing Partner of Inspired Capital. Von Tobel is the author of the New York Times bestseller Financially Fearless, which debuted on December 31, 2013, and the author of Financially Forward, which debuted on May 14, 2019. In April 2014, von Tobel was selected as an inaugural member of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship, alongside Steve Case, Reid Hoffman, Tory Burch and others. Von Tobel is the host of Inc.'s The Founders Project with Alexa von Tobel podcast.
Alexia Bonatsos, née Tsotsis, is a venture capitalist and former co-editor of TechCrunch, a technology news website. In 2011, she was listed by Forbes magazine as among the top 30 under 30 in the Media category.
Joshua M. "Josh" Linkner is an American entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and author. He founded several companies including ePrize, an interactive promotion agency, where he served as CEO and Executive chairman. Writing for The Wall Street Journal, Gwendolyn Bounds noted that ePrize is targeted at small businesses that don't have the resources to do this type of marketing themselves but cautioned that the service is not of the pay-per-sale type.
Sumaya Kazi is an American entrepreneur. At the age of 23, Kazi founded her first company The CulturalConnect. She later founded and was the CEO of San Francisco-based technology company Sumazi, a social intelligence platform used by brands, celebrities and enterprises. Kazi held one of the first social media management positions at a Fortune 500 company leading social media at Sun Microsystems until its acquisition by Oracle.
Gagan Biyani is an American of Indian descent serial entrepreneur, marketer, and journalist. He was a co-founder of Udemy, an online education company, and was co-founder and CEO of Sprig, a food delivery company.
Alfred, also known as Hello Alfred, is a resident management software application that enables real estate developers and property managers to provide in-home services and experiences to their residents. Residents in Alfred buildings are assigned a personal home manager, or Alfreds, who are W-2 company employees, and can make requests in the company's app. The Alfred platform integrates with Real Page, Yardi and Entrata so that building management teams can operate their buildings through a single platform.
This is a timeline of online work-focused networking service LinkedIn.
Ido Leffler is an Israeli-born Australian entrepreneur, investor, and advisor. He is the co-founder of Yoobi, Yes To Inc., Cheeky, Brandless, and Beach House Group.
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, professor, and business executive in the electronic design automation industry. She is the co-founder and managing partner at Pear VC. In 2021, she ranked #29 on Forbes' Midas List.
Michelle Zatlyn is co-founder, president, and chief operating officer of the cybersecurity firm Cloudflare. She also serves on the company's board of directors.
Camille Hearst is a female African-American entrepreneur and innovator, credited in several online news publications for her decades-long contribution to the technology, social network, digital music service and product design sectors. In addition, she is recognized as a leading woman of color in entrepreneurship. In 2016, she broke barriers as a Women C.E.O. and a founder of color with her startup, Kit.
