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.
Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $600 billion by January 2023. The company's accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forbes characterized the company in 2012 as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley.
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.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
TechCrunch is an American online newspaper focusing on high tech and startup companies. It was founded in June 2005 by Archimedes Ventures, led by partners Michael Arrington and Keith Teare.
Sarah Maria Austin is an American author and tech entrepreneur. 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.
Ben Parr is an American journalist, author, venture capitalist and entrepreneur. He is the author of Captivology: The Science of Capturing People's Attention, a book on the science and psychology of attention and how to capture the attention of others. He is the President and co-founder of Octane AI, a marketing automation and conversational marketing company for E-commerce. He was previously a venture capitalist, the co-editor and editor-at-large of Mashable, and a columnist and commentator for CNET. In 2012, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30.
Facebook is a social networking service originally launched as FaceMash on October 28, 2003, before changing its name to TheFacebook on February 4, 2004. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and college roommates and fellow Harvard University students, in particular Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes. The website's membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United States and Canada, corporations, and by September 2006, to everyone with a valid email address along with an age requirement of being 13 and older.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April, 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by AUM.
Startup Digest is a media company that publishes curated email newsletters on startup events and educational content in more than 300 cities. Startup Digest was founded by Christopher McCann and Brendan McManus in 2009.
Ryan Junee is an Australian-American entrepreneur. He is the founder of Parsable and is based in San Francisco.
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.
The Muse is a New York City-based online career platform founded in 2011 by Kathryn Minshew, Alexandra Cavoulacos, and Melissa McCreery.
Clinkle was a mobile payments company founded in 2012. In 2013 they raised $25 million and the product launched to college students on September 24, 2014.
The history of Twitter can be traced back to a brainstorming session at Odeo.
Fast Forward is the first startup accelerator to focus solely on nonprofit-based technology enterprises, it was founded by Shannon Farley and Kevin Barenblat in 2014. The accelerator provides support, mentorship, and access to financial capital for emerging companies that aim to improve the world, by focusing on poverty, education access, improving health, and environmental degradation.
Cheryl Sew Hoy is an entrepreneur, speaker and angel investor, best known for being the founding CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC), a government-funded agency to support entrepreneurship in Malaysia and ASEAN.
Ankur Jain is an American entrepreneur and investor who is the founder and CEO of Bilt Rewards, the first loyalty program that allows renters to earn points on rent. Jain has grown the company to a valuation of $1.5 billion since its launch in June, 2021.
Gogobot was an online travel business headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company was rebranded Trip.com in November 2016 and acquired by the Ctrip Group in 2017. Founded in 2010, by Travis Katz and Ori Zaltzman, by 2014 the company was the fifth most visited travel-planning site in the United States.
