By its very nature, the tech industry is full of creative people working on amazing new things.
Even so there are some people that stand out above and beyond. These are the people who change the game. They create mind-blowing technology and startups that alter the industry. Sometimes they do this over and over again.
Jony Ive, Senior Vice President of Industrial Design, Apple
Jony
Ive is the star designer responsible for many of Apple's biggest, most
important products including the MacBook Pro, iMac, MacBook Air, iPod,
iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and iPad Mini.
Word is, he's in charge of Apple's rumored upcoming iWatch, too.
Gabe Newell, cofounder, Valve
Don't call billionaire Gabe Newell the boss of Valve Software, the uber-successful gaming company he cofounded in 1996. The company says it has "no bosses, no middle management, no
bureaucracy. Just highly motivated peers coming together to make cool
stuff." But Gabe is clearly Valve's creative heart and soul. Valve became
famous for its video games (like Half-Life and Portal). Then Newell
launched Steam, an online social gaming site that serves nearly 2,000
titles to over 50 million gamers. Valve’s Source engine is also a wildly popular game development tool.
Julie Uhrman, founder, CEO Ouya
Julie Uhrman has been a game industry exec for a long time, at Vivendi Universal, IGN, GameFly, and other places. Ouya is a new Android-based video game console running its own
version of the Android operating system that Uhrman dreamed up last
year, designd by legend Yves Behar. She put Ouya on Kickstarter to gage interest and the project went
crazy, raising $8.6 million from more than 63,000 people. It's due out
in June.
Yves Behar, founder, Fuseproject.
Flickr / Fortune Live Media
Yves
Behar is the founder of the renown industrial design firm Fuseproject.
While the firm designs lots of products (sports gear, consumer
packaging, fashion), Behar is famous for his tech projects.
These include $8.6 million Kickstarter project, Ouyer; the first $100
“XO” laptop for Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child; and Jawbone
headsets. He even worked on the iGoogle webpage.
Doug Cutting, chief architect, Cloudera
Doug Cutting, founder of Hadoop, left Yahoo for startup Cloudera
Doug
Cutting is an open-source developer who has contributed not one, but
three really important free and open software projects to the enterprise
world. He's probably best known as the creator of Hadoop, the mega important
"big data" technology used by thousands of companies. But he also
created a search engine called Lucene, (a search indexer), and Nutch, (a
spider or crawler). These lead to Solr, a popular enterprise search
engine that competes with Google Search Appliance. All of that work lead him to role of chairman of the Apache
Foundation, the keeper of some of the most important open source
projects in the world.
Jack Dorsey, CEO, Square
Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Jack
Dorsey, a self-taught programmer, cofounded Twitter and was its first
CEO. That's enough of a career maker for anyone, but not for Dorsey. He then turned around and created a brand new mobile payments
industry with Square, a device that turns an iPhone/iPad into a cash
register.
Eben Upton, founder and trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation
Eben
Upton is the designer of a tiny $25 Linux computer that's changed the
face of computers for all sorts of projects for hobbyist to developing
nations. In 2006, Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of
Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory came up with an idea for a cheap and
easy-to-program computer for kids. Eben, who works full time for chip maker
Broadcom, took two years to design the credit-card-sized computer. He and his cofounders also created the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Proceeds from Pi are given away to charity.
Eric Migicovsky, founder, Pebble Technology
Eric Migicovsky designed the Pebble E-Paper Watch when he participated in the Y Combinator startup incubator program. The Pebble is a customizable watch that acts as an accessory to your
smartphone. It links to your smartphone to display messages, control the
phone and, though apps, adding extra features (like becoming a bike
computer). Migicovsky couldn't raise enough cash for Pebble through VCs, so he
took the project to Kickstarter and broke records. Some 68,000 people
donated $10.2 million to fund the project. Thanks to Pebble, Apple is now reportedly chasing the smartphone
watch market. And wearable computers of other types are the latest
trend.
Bre Pettis, cofounder, CEO, MakerBot,
Through
Makerbot, Bre Pettis is ushering in a new area of manufacturing called
"3D printing". Makerbot is basically a robot that builds stuff. Previous 3D printers could run tens of thousands of dollars but the
MakerBot Replicator 2 is $2,200 making it affordable for a lot of
people. 3D printers could one day be found in every home. Bre is also a founder of the New York hacker group NYCResistor and he
produces a popular video/podcasting series for MAKE magazine.
Aaron Levie, cofounder, CEO Box
Aaron Levie, Box
Flickr/Kevin Krejci
Aaron Levie was born to be the CEO of a successful company. He launched 15 startups as teen and finally came up with the winning idea while in college, quitting school to launch his company. Box is a collaboration file-sharing software-as-a-service that's
become very popular with enterprise companies. That's because it offers
IT departments more security and control than consumer file sharing apps
like Dropbox. Levie has now pushed Box into becoming a platform, with more than
17,000 developers building custom apps and using Box for the file
sharing portion. He's also a super funny guy who performs magic tricks when the mood strikes.
Martin Casado, networking guru, VMware
Martin
Casado invented a breakthrough technology called OpenFlow which ushered
in a whole new way to build corporate networks called Software Definied
Networking. SDN lets companies buy less networking hardware (routers/switches)
while making networks easier to design and scale. It will overhaul the
$40 billion network equipment industry. Casado cofounded a startup, Nicira, which was bought by VMware for
$1.26 billion last summer and he's now helping VMware do for the network
hardware industry what it did for the computer server industry. Casado's work has set off a firestorm of investment and acquisitions of other SDN startups, too.
Perry Chen, CEO, Kickstarter
It took Perry Chen seven years to get Kickstarter off the ground.
The idea came to him when he was trying to put on a concert and
couldn't raise the funds to do it. He thought how much easier it would
be if people could just fund the project by buying the tickets
themselves.
Flash forward to today, where Kickstarter has proven crowdsourced
funding not only works, it can raise millions. While Kickstarter isn't
limited to tech, many of its tech projects have been game changers like
the Pebble smartwatch and the Ouya game console.
Ben Kaufman, founder, Quirky
Ben Kaufman of Quirky
youtube/entrepreneuronline
Ben Kaufman, the 23-year-old founder of Quirky, has changed the way inventors get their products manufactured. Quirky is actually Ben's third company. He started his first in high
school to create a product that won Best of Show at Macworld in 2006.
When he returned to Macworld in 2007, he asked the 30,000 attendees to
suggest and sketch his next product. The Bevy was born, a case/bottle
opener for the iPod Shuffle, and it was a big success, selling in 28
countries. Kaufman realized that crowdsourced design was a game changer. He sold
his first company and launched an online collaboration company. Then he
sold that and launched Quirky, which brings at least three new
crowdsourced consumer products to market each week.
Tony Fadell, founder and CEO, Nest
The beautiful, programmable Nest thermostat is changing the way people think about smart homes and saving energy. That's thanks to Tony Fadell, who came to fame by leading the Apple team that created the iPod and the first three iPhones. Before Apple, Fadell built products for Philips Electronics and has more than 100 patents to his name.
Bryan Cantrill, SVP, Engineering, Joyent
In
2005, at age 31, Bryan Cantrill set the IT world on fire by inventing
something called "DTrace" a realtime way to test software problems that
changed diagnostics forever. He was working for Sun Microsystems at the time. After Oracle acquired Sun, Cantrill moved to cloud company Joyent. There he became the face of "node.js" another technology setting the programming world on fire.
Jode.ns is used by Microsoft, Uber, LinkedIn, Yahoo, eBay and many others to build online apps.
Ben Silbermann, cofounder, Pinterest
Pinterest has proven that Facebook isn't the be-all of social media sites. Pinterest lets people share stuff through posting photos and links.
It came from Silbermann life-long love of collecting things, from
insects to stamps. Silbermann did a short stint at Google where he learned to think big.
But he left that job to launch his own company. With his friend Paul
Sciarra he created a few failed iPhone apps before they launched
Pinterest. Pinterest struggled at first, but because Silbermann couldn't face
another failure, he doubled down on improving the site. Today it has
more than 40 million users.
Clara Shih, CEO and founder, Hearsay Social
Clara Shih cut her teeth as an engineer for Microsoft and then moved on to roles with Google and
Salesforce.com before developing the first social business application for Facebook, called Faceforce, in 2007. The she penned the bestselling business book,
The Facebook Era, now used as a marketing textbook at Harvard Business School. Today she runs Hearsay Social, a popular enterprise social marketing
tool used by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Allstate, among others. Shih is also on the board of Starbucks.
Sebastian Thrun, VP and Fellow at Google,
Self-driving cars have the power to change the world and
Sebastian Thrun is at the center of making them a reality. Thurn has been a god in the field of artificial intelligence and
robotics for a long time, leading Stanford's AI department since the
early 2000's and building self-driving vehicles since 2004.
Thrun founded Google X, the group lead by Sergey Brin and home to Google's self-driving car and Google Glass. He also cofounded startup Udacity, which offers free interactive
college classes to make college more interesting and affordable to
everyone. And he still teaches at Stanford.
Alex Kipman, Microsoft, developed Kinect
Alex
Kipman led the development team that spent several years building
Kinect, which is arguably the coolest product Microsoft has ever
produced. Kinect is a gesture-based game controller for Microsoft's Xbox game.
But it has also lead to truckloads of "Kinect hacks" where people find
creative uses for the controller. Kipman has worked on other important products at Microsoft, too, from its software developer tools to Windows.
Min-Liang Tan, cofounder, Creative Director, Razer
Min-Liang
Tan cofounded Razer in 1998 with the goal of building the best gaming
PCs and accessories, designed by scientists and tested by top gamers. His PCs and tablets won awards and became popular but that wasn't
enough. Tan decided to experiment with the design process itself. He
launched the Project Fiona PC which was built through crowdsourcing. Some 10,000 people participated in choosing features, weight/thickness, chipsets, even price. And that's how Tan created Razer's newest gaming tablet, the Edge.
Stephen Wolfram: A new kind of search
Stephen Wolfram is the scientist behind the Wolfram Alpha
"computational search engine" which aims to do nothing less than "to
make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to
everyone."
It's like morphing Google and a scientific calculator. The site
created buzz this year at the SXSW conference as one great example of
the big data trend. Wolfram has been an acclaimed physicist and scientists for decades,
known in that world for creating Mathematica, a popular language for
scientific software development.
Anne Wojcicki, 23andme
23andme is a biotech company that makes it easy and affordable for consumers to do home genetic testing.
It is literally saving lives by helping people discover if they are at risk for genetic diseases like breast cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's. Biologist Anne Wojcicki may have saved her own husband's life
with this company. She's married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin, who
is at risk for Parkinson's. Her team of biologists made a huge discovery
about a gene that reduces the risk of getting Parkinson's.
Garrett Camp, cofounder Uber, Stumbleupon
Garrett
Camp's resume says it all. He's a cofounder and chairman of Uber, the
car service that's turning the ancient taxi-cab business on its ear. He had previously founded Stumbleupon, the addictive social sharing site used by 25 million people. He recently launched a third company, BlackJet, that aims to do for
private jet travel what Uber did to taxis. It lets you book individual
seats on private jets at business-class prices.
He's also the founder of SeriesG, for angel investments.
Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit
TaskRabbit is a service for outsourcing small jobs and errands. Leah Busque, conceived of TaskRabbit when working as a software engineer at IBM. She wanted to build a Web and mobile site where neighbors could arrange to do simple tasks for each other. TaskRabbit has raised nearly $25 million,
including participation from Tornante Company, former Disney CEO
Michael Eisner’s new investment firm and has lead to a cottege industry
of other task-running sites.
Robby Walker, cofounder, Cue
Robby Walker co-founded Zenter.
Robby
Walker's first company, Zenter, was snapped up by Google in 2007 before
it even launched. Zenter, an online "PowerPoint killer" app became part
of Google's Apps presentation software. Then Walker stuck around Google
for three years improving the presentation software used by Apps.
He's now working on a cool Ycombinator startup called Cue launched
with a teenage cofounder, Daniel Gross. Cue is a mobile app that turns
all of your email, calendars, social media streams into a manageable day
planner. Like Gross, Walker was a child coding prodigy. He began attending college at age 9, earned a doctorate by 22 and sold Zenter to Google at the ripe old age of 23.
This guys are really Techy, they got me thinking how easy it is to use your creativity to be RICH!
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