Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and technical advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. As of December 2024, he was 45th wealthiest according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index with an estimated net worth of US$37.8 billion.
Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists. Khosla was named the top venture capitalist on the Forbes Midas List in 2001 and has been listed multiple times since that time. As of January 2025, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$9.2 billion.
The Adecco Group is a Swiss–French company based in Zürich, Switzerland. It is the world's second largest human resources provider and temporary staffing firm. It is a Fortune Global 500 company and is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange.
Padmasree Warrior is an Indian-American businesswoman and technology executive. She is known for her leadership roles in technology firms like Cisco where she served as the CTO for seven years, and at Motorola where she was the CTO for five years. She also served as the CEO of Nio USA, an electric car maker. Currently, she is the founder and CEO of Fable, a curated reading platform focused on mental wellness. She also serves on the board of directors of Microsoft and Spotify.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Daniel Nicholas Quine is a computer scientist. He is the AI and Engineering lead for education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Jeffery D. "Jeff" Black is an American chief executive officer and chief strategy officer associated with the information technology industry. He also is a programmer and inventor, holding six patents.
Bret Steven Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is most notable for leading the team that co-created Google Maps and his tenures as the CTO of Facebook, as the chairman of Twitter, Inc.'s board of directors prior to its acquisition by Elon Musk, and as the co-CEO of Salesforce. Taylor was additionally one of the founders of FriendFeed and the creator of Quip. Since 2023, he is the founder of Sierra, chairman of OpenAI, and a board member of Shopify.
Chris C. Kemp is an American entrepreneur who, along with Dr. Adam London, founded Astra, a space technology firm based in California, in 2016. He served as the chief information officer (CIO) for the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and as NASA's first chief technology officer (CTO) for information technology. While at NASA, Kemp partnered with Google and Microsoft and helped in the creation of Google Moon and Google Mars. He worked with the White House to develop the cloud computing strategy for the United States Federal Government and co-founded OpenStack, an open-source software project for cloud computing. He was also one of the founders of Nebula, a company that from 2011 to 2015, worked to commercialise the technology.
Adam D'Angelo is an American internet entrepreneur. He is best known for his role as the co-founder and CEO of Quora, based in Mountain View, California.
An entrepreneurial ecosystem or entrepreneurship ecosystems are peculiar systems of interdependent actors and relations directly or indirectly supporting the creation and growth of new ventures.
Andrew W. Houston is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, an online backup and storage service. According to Forbes, his net worth is about $2.2 billion. Houston held 24.4% of voting power in Dropbox before the company filed for IPO in February 2018.
Eric Ries is an American entrepreneur, blogger, and author of The Lean Startup, a book on the lean startup movement. He is also the author of The Startup Way, a book on modern entrepreneurial management.
Vishal Sikka is an Indian entrepreneur the founder and CEO of Vianai, former CTO of SAP AG, and former CEO of Infosys. He currently also serves on Oracle's board of directors, the supervisory board of the BMW Group and as an advisor to the Stanford Institute of Human-Centered AI.
Francis Aurelio deSouza is an American entrepreneur and business executive. He is co-founder of SynthLabs, and a member of the Board of Directors of Deel Inc.
Dan Dăscălescu is a Romanian-American entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, who co-founded the ship-based seed accelerator project Blueseed in an attempt to allow entrepreneurs to start companies near Silicon Valley without US visa restrictions. He is also a public speaker and former software engineer at Google and Yahoo! and ambassador for The Seasteading Institute, a think tank researching ocean communities.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is a commercial bank division of First Citizens BancShares. The bank was previously the primary subsidiary of SVB Financial Group, a publicly traded bank holding company that had offices in 15 U.S. states and over a dozen international jurisdictions.
Modar Alaoui is a Moroccan-American serial tech entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley, California in the United States. Alaoui is the founder and CEO of Eyeris Technologies, Inc., an artificial intelligence software company for automotive in-cabin sensing AI and sensor fusion technologies inside autonomous vehicles (AV) and highly automated vehicles (HAV).
Young Sohn (Korean: 손영권) is a Korean-American business executive and investor. He currently serves as Chairman of the Samsung Semiconductor Advisory Board, Chairman of the Board at HARMAN International, and is a Founding Managing Partner at Walden Catalyst Ventures. He is also a board member of Cadence Design Systems and ARM. Previously he was the president and chief strategy officer of Samsung Electronics. He also served as CEO of two successful public Silicon Valley companies, Inphi Corporation and Oak Technology, and has been recognized as "the best-connected chip executive in the semiconductor industry." Sohn co-founded the Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), one of the world’s largest global startup competitions, inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). He was also a senior advisor to the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners.
Travis May is an American entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Shaper Capital, founder and former CEO of Datavant and previously co-founded and was the CEO of LiveRamp.
