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Ross Mayfield is an American Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of Pingpad. [1] The former CEO [2] of Socialtext, [3] and former Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare. [4] He is also a regular blogger and public speaker.
Mayfield received a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
He began his career in the nonprofit sector with the U.S.-Baltic Foundation, [5] after which he moved to Estonia and served as a scriptwriter for, and advisor to, the Office of the President of Estonia. He also served as marketing director of Levicom, one of the largest privately held telecom groups in Eastern Europe, where he also started an Internet service provider and a web design company.[ citation needed ]
In 1998 he was hired by RateXchange, a business-to-business commodity exchange for telecom, where he quickly progressed from vice president of sales and marketing to chief operating officer and then to president. [6] [7] [8] With the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the company, which had yet to earn any revenue, [9] saw its billion dollar valuation vanish overnight. [10] Ross left in August 2000.
He then served as VP of marketing for Lucida Inc., [11] a Fujitsu spinout,[ citation needed ] before co-founding Socialtext in 2002.
Ross hosted the first Barcamp in 2005 at Socialtext. [12]
In 2012, Mayfield sold his two companies within the same week, Socialtext to Bedford Funding/Peoplefluent and SlideShare to LinkedIn. [13] [14]
Vonage Holdings Corp. is an American cloud communications provider operating as a subsidiary of Ericsson. Headquartered in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, the organization was founded in 1998 as Min-X as a provider of residential telecommunications services based on voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). In 2001, the organization changed its name to Vonage.
Cypress Semiconductor Corporation was an American semiconductor design and manufacturing company. It offered NOR flash memories, F-RAM and SRAM Traveo microcontrollers, PSoCs, PMICs, 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.
Synaptics, Inc. American neural network technologies and computer-to-human interface devices development company based in San Jose, California. It develops touchpads and fingerprint biometrics technology for computer laptops; touch, display driver, and fingerprint biometrics technology for smartphones; and touch, video and far-field voice, and wireless technology for smart home devices, wearables, and automobiles. Synaptics sells its products to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and display manufacturers.
Stephen T. Jurvetson is an American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly a partner of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), he was an early investor in Hotmail, Memphis Meats, Mythic and Nervana Systems. He is currently a board member of SpaceX among others. He later co-founded the firm Future Ventures with Maryanna Saenko, who worked with him at DFJ.
Michael Morhaime is an American video game developer and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Dreamhaven, located in Irvine, California. Morhaime is best known as the co-founder and the former president of Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, Inc., that was founded in 1991 as Silicon & Synapse. He served on the Vivendi Games executive committee from January 1999, when Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. became a subsidiary of Vivendi Games, until July 2008.
Socialtext Incorporated was a company based in Palo Alto, California, that produced enterprise social software for companies. It offered an integrated suite of wiki tools and social software applications, including microblogging, user profiles, directories and other collaboration tools. They also maintained mobile apps for individual tools.
Mayfield, also known as Mayfield Fund, is a US-based venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage to growth-stage investments in enterprise and consumer technology companies. Founded in 1969 and based in Menlo Park, California, it is one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture capital firms.
Vodafone Ghana, formerly Ghana Telecom, is the national telecommunications company of Ghana.
Brightcove, Inc. is an American software company based in Boston, Massachusetts, that produces an online video platform. Founded in 2004 by Jeremy Allaire and Bob Mason, the company went public in 2012, and in 2024 was acquired by Bending Spoons.
Diane B. Greene is an American technology entrepreneur and executive. Greene started her career as a naval architect before transitioning to the tech industry, where she was a founder and CEO of VMware from 1998 until 2008. She was a board director of Google and CEO of Google Cloud from 2015 until 2019. She was also the co-founder and CEO of two startups, Bebop and VXtreme, which were acquired by Google and Microsoft, for $380 million and $75 million.
John "Jack" F. Gifford was an American engineer and businessman best known as a founder and former CEO, President and Chairman of the Board of Maxim Integrated Products, an analog and mixed signal semiconductor company, located in San Jose, California. He served as the company's CEO until his retirement in 2007.
Sandra “Sandy” Carter is an American businesswoman, speaker and author. She was a general manager at IBM from 2013 to 2016, vice president at Amazon Web Services from 2017 to 2021 and is currently the chief operating officer at Unstoppable Domains.
The "PayPal Mafia" is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and/or developed additional technology companies based in Silicon Valley, such as Tesla, Inc., LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, Affirm, Slide, Kiva, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer. Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign at some point in their studies.
The Cape Silicon Initiative or Silicon Cape is a regional ICT business networking NPO and community in the Western Cape, South Africa.
Eric Vishria is a general partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley. Previously, he was CEO and co-founder of Rockmelt and served as vice president at Yahoo following Yahoo's acquisition of Rockmelt.
Kevin Systrom is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He co-founded Instagram, the world's largest photo sharing website, along with Mike Krieger.
Greg Green is a is a businessman and entrepreneur based in the Spokane-area, who began his career in the telecommunications industry in the mid-1980s. He is the founder of Tel-West.
Julie Hanna is an Egyptian-born technologist, entrepreneur, investor and board director. She serves as Executive Chair of the Board of Kiva., peer-peer lending and crowdfunding pioneer. She is Special Advisor to X, Alphabet's Moonshot Factory and Venture Partner at Obvious Ventures.
Chuck Davis is an Internet entrepreneur, and Chairman and CEO of Prodege, LLC, an El Segundo, California-based online marketing and consumer research company.
