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THE SILICON VALLEY 100: The Coolest People In Tech Right Now

Posted March 06, 2014 10:00 pm

Megan Rose Dickey

After months of research, debate, and more research, Business Insider is proud to present our annual Silicon Valley 100, the authoritative ranking of the people who matter most in Silicon Valley. The list covers people who backed promising companies and saw big exits; were star executives; created new, interesting things; changed entire industries; and made industry-defining acquisitions or took their companies public.

In sum, these people aren't riding on old reputations. All of them did something of note since our last installment in February 2013, and they won big. And if you feel that we missed someone, tell us - we're not all-knowing, and we love telling stories about amazing people.

In A-Z Order »

The Complete List 1-100 »

Acknowledgments

Thanks to our many readers who took the time to send us nominations. The Silicon Valley 100 was assembled by Megan Rose Dickey, Jillian D'Onfro, Alyson Shontell, Jim Edwards, and Steve Kovach. Copy editing by Elizabeth Wilke and Jill Klausen.

<h3>100. Mike Judge, Alec Berg</h3>

Executive Producers, HBO's "Silicon Valley"

We got word earlier this year that producers Mike Judge and Alec Berg will be launching an Entourage-esque comedy show called "Silicon Valley" on HBO that will poke fun at SV and help pop its arrogance bubble.

The show follows a group of close-knit friends working at a company trying to develop a new search algorithm, and will include cameos from real-life Silicon Valley figures. It airs April 6 on HBO.

<h3>99. Aarthi Ramamurthy</h3>

Founder, Lumoid

<span>Aarthi Ramamurthy is one of the most notable female entrepreneurs out there today. She spent six years at Microsoft working on its popular Visual Studio software development tool and on Xbox Live. </span>

<span>Before founding Y Combinator-backed Lumoid, a startup for letting people test-drive electronics before buying them, she co-founded a bra-fitting company called True&Co.</span>

<h3>98. Naveen Jain, Dr. Reid Rubsamen</h3>

Co-founders, Immunity Project

<span>A team of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying to cure HIV/AIDS. Immunity Project, which is in the current Y Combinator class, has already developed a prototype and completed preliminary lab testing. </span>

<span>The Immunity Project is currently trying to raise $482,000 to fund its final experiment before beginning its Phase I clinical study. So far, more than 1,000 people have pledged over $200,000 to the project.</span>

<h3>97. Heather Hiles </h3>

Founder, Pathbrite

As an education tech founder, it's not always easy to get schools and institutions on board, mostly due to a bunch of bureaucracy. That's why Pathbrite founder Heather Hiles is so impressive. Last year, Pathbrite raised an additional $4 million led by testing behemoth ACT, with participation from Rethink Education for its e-portfolio product for students. Pathbrite has raised $8 million in total to date.

<span>As of March 2013, Pathbrite was in more than 100 universities and school districts. Stanford, for example, purchased 1,000 licenses for students in its design, education, and engineering schools. And as of September 2013, more than 400 schools have used Pathbrite's new learning platform.</span>

<h3>96. Mike Del Ponte</h3>

Founder, Soma

Mike Del Ponte is the genius behind Soma, a sort of Warby Parker of water filters. In July 2013, it closed a $3.7 million round of seed funding led by Baseline Ventures and Forerunner Ventures.

Soma is targeting people who are tired of ugly Brita water filters and are passionate about sustainability. For every biodegradable water filter it sells, Soma donates money to charity.

<h3>95. Taro Fukuyama, Ilya Tokhner</h3>

CEO; Director of Business Development, AnyPerk

After being told he had the worst startup in his Y Combinator batch, Taro Fukuyama had to figure out how to turn the company around. Six pivots later, he landed on AnyPerk. AnyPerk helps put startups on par with Google and Facebook when it comes to perks, offering discounts on things like movie tickets, lift tickets, cell phone plans, Lyft car-sharing rides, and car rentals.

Today, AnyPerk has 28 employees. Last March, the startup raised a $1.4 million seed round from Digital Garage, Ben Lewis, Michael Liou, CyberAgent, and Shogo Kawada.

<h3>94. Grace Garey, Netta Marshall, Chase Adam, Jesse Cook</h3>

Co-founders, Watsi

This year, Watsi became the first charitable company to raise over $1 million in funding from traditional angel investors in Silicon Valley.

It is also the first Y-Combinator company to nab investor Paul Graham for its board of directors. Watsi allows anyone to give as little as $5 to fund someone's medical care, and 100% of the money is donated. The mission of this startup is so beautiful, you just have to root for its success.

<h3>93. Erin Teague</h3>

Director of product management, Yahoo

Erin Teague worked as the growth product manager for the mobile-only social network Path for two years and is responsible for the company's astounding user growth in 2013. In the spring, the app was growing by 1 million new users per week. It hit the 10-million-user mark in April. She worked on the product team at Twitter for two years before joining the Path team.

<span>Last fall, she joined Yahoo with a director of product management role.</span>

<h3>92. Wayne Sutton</h3>

Founder, PitchTo

PitchTo helps startups perfect their pitches by letting the community rate and scrutinize each one. To date<span>, PitchTo has raised an undisclosed amount of money from angel investors. </span>

Founder Wayne Sutton recently teamed up with AT&T to try to make a difference in Silicon Valley by inspiring students in Oakland, Calif. to improve their digital literacy. In April 2013, Sutton helped organize one of the city's first food hackathons.

<span>In 2011, Sutton founded the first-ever minority-led startup incubator in Silicon Valley called NewMe.</span>

<h3>91. Alexander Asseily, Hosain Rahman, Matt Hunter</h3>

Co-founder and Chairman; Co-founder and CEO; Senior Software Product Designer, Jawbone

Jawbone quietly raised more than $100 million in a debt round of financing back in September because, Jawbone says, demand for its Up fitness tracker is high. In February of 2014, we got word that the company is raising $250 million at a $3.3 billion valuation.

A lot of the success of the fitness-tracking band Jawbone Up is thanks to Matt Hunter. Hunter designed the latest version of the Jawbone Up app that accompanies the wristband. Hunter is also regarded as one of the top designers in technology. Prior to joining Jawbone, Hunter founded Textslide and EightBit.me.

Jawbone also bought BodyMedia, a 14-year-old wearable fitness startup, for $100 million last year.

<h3>90. Paul Maritz</h3>

CEO, Pivotal

<span>Paul Maritz, the former CEO of VMware, launched a 1,300 employee cloud computing spin-out called Pivotal last year.</span>

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prior to founding Pivotal, Maritz served as chief strategist of EMC and CEO of VMware. While at VMware, Maritz helped transform the company into a leader in cloud computing. </span>Martiz was also reportedly in the running for the CEO position at Microsoft<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, but he wasn't interested in the job. </span>

<h3>89. Ramona Pierson</h3>

CEO, Declara

Ramona Pierson has survived worse things than most people can imagine. In 1984, Pierson got hit by a drunk driver and fell into an 18-month coma. After recovering, Pierson eventually launched her first startup, SynapticMash, an education software company that sold to Promethean World for $10 million in 2010.

Now, Pierson is running social learning startup Declara. The aim is to help people sift through tons of content when they're not exactly sure what they're looking for. Last September, Declara raised a $5 million seed round from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, and Data Collective.

<h3>88. Charles Hudson</h3>

Venture capitalist, SoftTech VC

Charles Hudson is a well-known face in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem because he has his hands in both sides of the business, both as a founder at Bionic Panda Games and now an investor at SoftTech Ventures.

Previously, Hudson founded Social Gaming Summit, one of the leading conferences in the free-to-play games space. He was also the VP of Business Development for Serious Business, a company that Zynga later acquired in 2010.

<h3>87. Rose Broome, Zac Witte</h3>

Co-founders, HandUp

HandUp is proof that the tech industry does care about the homeless. Rose Broome and Zac Witte launched their crowdfunding platform for the homeless back in August.

In its pilot stage, there are about 100 homeless people who receive cash donations via text or email. Within the last couple of months, the pair landed a seed investment from serial entrepreneur and angel investor Jason Calacanis. To date, HandUp has raised $200,000.

HandUp is also part of startup accelerator Tumml, which gives entrepreneurs $20,000 to help them solve urban issues.

<h3>86. David Drummond</h3>

Chief Legal Officer, Google

When Edward Snowden leaked documents revealing the NSA is allegedly tapping Google's servers and private networks, David Drummond, the company's chief legal officer, expressed his outrage and urged the need for dramatic reform in government intelligence policy.

In the wake of Snowden's many revelations, major tech companies have been put under a microscope, and Google has taken the lead in being as transparent as possible about government requests for user info.

Getting the public to regain trust in the Web and and major tech companies like Google isn't an easy task, but Drummond is tackling it valiantly, insisting that trust is to encourage innovation.

<h3>85. Max Levchin</h3>

Founder, Glow

In four months, PayPal founder Max Levchin helped 1,000 women get pregnant thanks to his new fertility app Glow. Glow uses data to analyze the best time for a woman to get pregnant.

In August, Levchin landed a $6 million Series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund. Just last month, Glow launched its service for enterprise. The first two companies to partner with Glow are hot startups Eventbrite and Evernote.

<h3>84. Jeff Weiner</h3>

CEO, LinkedIn

LinkedIn continues to surpass Wall Street expectations with user growth, revenues, and profits. Jeff Weiner, who joined the company when it was struggling in the shadow of Facebook, deserves credit for spurring innovation and disciplined execution.

LinkedIn's market value has passed $23 billion and it currently employs over 5,000 people. Worldwide, LinkedIn has over 277 million members.

Fun fact: When LinkedIn reported a monster quarter in February where its revenues beat expectations by $25 million, Weiner decided to give every employee an iPad.

<h3>83. David Lawee</h3>

VP of Corporate Development, Google

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">David Lawee moved away from his position as head of mergers and acquisitions at Google to lead a stealthy late-stage investment fund called Google Capital earlier last year. Just last month, Google Capital officially launched to invest in growth-stage companies. </span>

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In May, Google acquired a minority stake in LendingClub, a service that helps people pay off loans, with interests rates typically lower than credit cards. At the time, LendingClub was approaching $2 billion in funded loans.</span>

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Lawee led the investment and is now a board observer at LendingClub. He's also</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> led investments in big companies like </span>SurveyMonkey<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, and Renaissance Learning</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span>

<h3>82. Rob Lloyd</h3>

President, Cisco

Cisco CEO John Chambers keeps pushing off retirement, but if he does make good on his promise to leave as early as 2015, Rob Lloyd is the new front runner.

Cisco has been trotting him out all over the place speaking in public, doing news conferences with the press.

As of fiscal year 2013, Lloyd's compensation is estimated to be around $16,228,551.

<h3>81. Dave McClure</h3>

Venture Capitalist and Founding Partner, 500 startups

Since launching his 500 Startups accelerator program in 2010, Dave McClure has invested in a slew of companies all over the world.

In October, McClure announced that his firm has officially backed more than 500 startups since launching in 2010.

It also confirmed its second fund, which closed at $44.1 million in July. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This year, 500 Startups aims to back at least 200 companies. </span>

<h3>80. Diane Greene</h3>

Founder, (unnamed stealth startup)

The co-founder and former CEO of VMware, Diane Greene, has something new up her sleeve this year that looks like it will challenge the company that ousted her in 2008.

Greene's stealth startup is focused on virtual storage and will target cloud and service providers as customers. So far, we've heard it's lured at least three VMware employees away from their jobs.

She also just finished her first year on Google's board of directors.

<h3>79. Tristan Walker</h3>

Founder, Walker and Company

Early Foursquare employee Tristan Walker launched his own startup, Walker and Company, in December 2013 to better serve the African-American community.

The first brand, Bevel, sells premium razors and shaving cream geared toward black men. Walker has already snagged $2.4 million from Upfront Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Collaborative Fund, Sherpa Ventures, and the William Morris agency's Charles King.

<h3>78. Balaji Srinivasan </h3>

Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Balaji Srinivasan is the one of the newest partners at VC firm Andreessen Horowitz.

He's also the founder of a stealth bitcoin-mining hardware company called 21E6, which is believed to be backed by some of the richest people in Silicon Valley. Bitcoin mining is a way to acquire the digital currency without paying for it.

Srinivasan had previously co-founded genetic testing company Counsyl. As of December 2013, the company was testing somewhere around 3 to 4% of all births in the U.S. Given that it charges around $500 to $600 per test, the company is on an annual revenue run-rate of about $60 million to $80 million per year.

<h3>77. Frederic della Faille, Melvyn Hills</h3>

Co-founders, Frontback

Photo app Frontback caught fire last year, amassing 200,000 downloads in just one month. The app has users take two pictures (one of what they're seeing in front of them, and the other with their phone's front-facing camera) and it stitches them together.

In October, Frontback reportedly turned down an acquisition offer from Twitter and instead raised $3 million.

The app was built in just four weeks.

<h3>76. David Mark Byttow, Chrys Bader</h3>

Co-founders, Secret

Secret is the latest social app to go viral, and it's filled with a boatload of Silicon Valley insights and rumors.

The app, which launched last month, was founded by ex-Googlers David Mark Byttow and Chrys Bader.

The idea behind Secret is to let you share anonymously with your friends. It's kind of like secret-sharing app Whisper, but the difference is that all of the secrets are from your friends, or a friend of a friend.

Secret has raised $1.4 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan through Initialized Capital, Index Ventures, Matrix Partners, SV Angel, and Fuel Capital.

<h3>75. Sundar Pichai</h3>

Senior Vice President, Chrome and Android

Sundar Pichai, formerly only in charge of Chrome, got a promotion in March 2013 to head up Android, taking over the role of Android founder Andy Rubin.

The vast majority (nearly 80%) of smartphone owners are Android users. Android is becoming more hospitable to developers as it becomes less fragmented, and as Android app sales bring in more revenue.

<h3>74. Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett</h3>

Founders, GitHub

In 2012, social coding startup GitHub raised a massive $100 million round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz after bootstrapping since 2008.

More than a year later, we can see the effect that funding had on the company. GitHub doubled the number of projects that it was hosting in 2013, and is now home to about 10 million software projects.

Although GitHub doesn't publically disclose revenue, co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner has put it in the ballpark of "millions and millions a year," largely thanks to its enterprise clients who pay to keep their GitHub code out of public view. That's a huge success because when GitHub raised the funding, the company said it wanted to use the money to break into enterprise.

<h3>73. Chris Cox</h3>

VP of Product, Facebook

Chris Cox is one of the Facebook employees Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg trusts the most. Cox first joined Facebook as an engineer in 2005 and helped build the News Feed.

Now, Cox is in charge of News Feed and all of the advertising people at Facebook report to him. In December 2013, Facebook made some changes to its News Feed in an attempt to better distinguish between high-quality and low-quality content.

Plus, Cox and his team just released a Flipboard-like reader called Paper.

<h3>72. Kevin and Julia Hartz</h3>

Co-founders, Eventbrite

Husband and wife team Kevin and Julia Hartz have been able to grow their once-tiny ticketing company into the enormous Eventbrite which, after a $60 million funding round in April, is now worth a reported $650 million.

Admittedly, some have argued the round was completely unnecessary, and that the company raised too much money to date.

<h3>71. Simon Khalaf</h3>

President and CEO, Flurry

Simon Khalaf is gearing up to take his mobile analytics company public as Flurry continues to grow into a massive business.

In September, Khalaf told Business Insider that an IPO is inevitable for Flurry. At that time, Flurry had a net-revenue run-rate of about $100 million. To date, Flurry has taken $50.5 million in funding from investors.

<h3>70. Chris Griffin</h3>

Founder, Betable

Since unveiling the world's first real-money gaming platform in 2012, Chris Griffin has secured $23 million in venture funding.

In November of last year, Betable raised an $18.5 million round of funding led by Venture51, valuing the company somewhere between $80 million and $100 million.

<h3>69. Brian Krzanich</h3>

CEO, Intel

After Intel's Paul Otellini retired, Brian Krzanich got the tough job of making Intel relevant in mobile, growing its cloud businesses and tackling the wearable tech space.

By the end of this year, Kraznich aims to sell 40 million tablets with Intel processors, up from 10 million in 2013. Based on Krzanich's performance at CES, it sounds like Intel has quite a lot up its sleeve this year.

<h3>68. Peter Thiel</h3>

CEO, Founders Fund; Chairman, Palantir Technologies

Peter Thiel, the founder and former CEO at PayPal, continues to be a relevant thought leader who has his hands in just about everything.

Many of the companies in his portfolio had an amazing year. SpaceX successfully launched a satellite into orbit, Facebook had its first-ever $1 billion-plus mobile-ad revenue quarter, and Lyft became a real threat to Uber.<span>

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Meanwhile, Thiel continues to pay 20 students $100,000 to drop out of school and start a company.

<h3>67. Brit Morin</h3>

Founder, Brit+Co

Brit Morin, widely referred to as the Martha Stewart of Silicon Valley, raised $6.3 million last year from prominent Silicon Valley elites like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Index Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, and Aileen Lee and Oak Investment Partners, for her domestic lifestyle brand Brit & Co. As part of the investment, Tina Sharkey and Oak Investment Partners' Fred Harman joined the board of directors.

That's a huge win for Morin given that Harman coached Arianna Huffington and Bleacher Report to exits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

<h3>66. Jessica Lessin</h3>

Founder, The Information

<span>Former Wall Street Journal tech reporter and editor Jessica Lessin officially launched her own tech news site in December called The Information. To read all of its articles, you have to shell out $399 a year or $39 a month. </span>

Already, The Information has broken news regarding Apple's iWatch, YouTube's new CEO, Square's latest funding round, and Google's EnergySense project.

<h3>65. James Beshara </h3>

CEO, Crowdtilt

<span>James Beshara's startup Crowdtilt is solving a pretty common problem: group payments, which makes it possible to divvy up a bill between friends. Last year alone, Crowdtilt raised $35 million. </span>

In December of last year, investors rewarded the company with $23 million in Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In March 2013, Crowdtilt raised a $12 million Series A round, also led by Andreessen Horowitz. </span>

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Crowdtilt has raised about $37 million to date.</span>

<h3>64. Meg Whitman</h3>

CEO, Hewlett Packard

When Meg Whitman joined HP in 2011, she only earned a salary of $1 a year because the company was really struggling.

But now that she's been able to turn the company around, HP directors say she deserves $1.5 million. Under Whitman's leadership, HP's stock has rebounded back to the near-$30 mark from before she first started. Whitman has also since distanced herself from Microsoft and Windows 8, showing a preference toward Chromebooks.

<h3>63. Ann Miura-Ko</h3>

Co-founding Partner, Floodgate

<span>As co-founding managing partner at venture capital firm Floodgate, Ann Miura-Ko has led seed investments in TaskRabbit, Lyft, Modcloth, Refinery29, Boxbee, and NewsCred. </span>

<span>She also lectures at Stanford University, where she recently started a new class to teach highly technical graduate students how to be successful entrepreneurs in the field of big data. </span>

<span>Two of her portfolio companies, Lyft and Refinery29, both had years of note. Refinery29 raised a total of $25 million last year, and Lyft raised a total of $75 million. </span>

<h3>62. Caesar Sengupta</h3>

VP of Product Management for Chromebooks, Google

In 2013, Chromebooks started to become a serious threat to PCs as PC vendors fled their partner-turned-competitor Microsoft. It was also the year when Googlers themselves started to embrace the Chromebook, especially the Pixel.

S<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">engupta was one of the engineers responsible for creating Chrome OS and the Chromebooks. He leads the project internally today at Google.</span>

<h3>61. Kara Swisher, Walt Mossberg</h3>

Co-CEOs, Revere Digital; Co-Executive Editors, Re/Code

When Dow Jones and AllThingsD split, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg decided to start their own tech site called Re/Code.

Swisher and Mossberg are two of the best news breakers in the tech industry, but it's particularly impressive that every single person from the D team decided to join them at their new venture.

Re/Code has about 20 people on its editorial staff and is backed by NBC Universal and Windsor Media. Swisher and Mossberg are the majority stakeholders.

<h3>60. Jason Johnson, Yves Behar</h3>

Founders, August

The Internet of Things is all the rage lately, so it's no wonder startup August was able to snag $8 million for its smart locks from Maveron Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Industry Ventures, Rho Ventures, and SoftTech VC.

With August, you'll never have to worry about getting locked out of your house because the system is entirely keyless. August also gives you total control of who can enter your home and when. August will start shipping its locks later this year.<span>

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Head of Corporate Development and Partnerships, Facebook

Remember that time Beyoncé announced her new album out of the blue on Instagram?

Well, that's all thanks to Dan Rose, Facebook's head of corporate development and partnerships. Rose and his team had been in talks with Beyoncé for months, and reportedly leaped at the opportunity to announce the album on Instagram, a Facebook-owned photo-sharing app.

<h3>58. Makinde Adeagbo</h3>

Engineering Manager, Pinterest

Makinde Adeagbo is something of an engineering superstar, bouncing between major tech companies. He spent 3.5 years at Facebook, and became one of the go-to engineers to improve the site speed and overall performance.

Next, he got snapped up by Dropbox, where he helped improve sharing on the Dropbox platform with things like Dropbox Links, which lets anyone share and preview any file in someone's Dropbox from the Web. In July 2013, he left the huge cloud storage company to become Pinterest's engineering manager.

<h3>57. Ron Conway</h3>

Special Advisor, SV Angel

<span>Ron Conway is not your average Silicon Valley investor. </span>

Within the last year, Conway has tackled issues like gun violence and homelessness in San Francisco.

Just recently, Conway and others in Silicon Valley launched the first of four $1 million challenges aimed at innovating in the gun control space. The goal is to use technology to make guns safer, thereby reducing the number of deaths due to gun violence. Last year, Conway backed startups like Watsi and Medium.

<h3>56. Mike McCue</h3>

Founder and CEO, Flipboard

Social reading app Flipboard is one of the best tools for discovering and reading news.

Last year, the startup raised $50 million in a round led by Rizvi Traverse Management and Goldman Sachs, bringing its valuation to $800 million.

<h3>55. Anne Wojcicki</h3>

CEO, 23andMe

2013 was full of ups and downs for Anne Wojcicki, CEO of the health and ancestry startup 23andMe. The company kicked off the year by discounting its DNA kits to an affordable $99. It built a genetic research community of more than 10,000 people with Parkinson's disease - the largest Parkinson's community in the world. But in November 2013, the FDA ordered 23andMe to stop marketing its health-related genetic tests.

Despite the FDA's cease-and-desist, Wojcicki stands behind the data 23andMe gives its customers. She wrote in November she remains committed to working with the FDA to ensure 23andMe is a trusted consumer product. She also admitted that the company had fallen behind schedule in responding to FDA feedback.

23andMe has raised $188 million to date from investors including Mohr Davidow Ventures, Sergey Brin, Google Ventures, and Genentech.

<h3>54. Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger</h3>

Co-founder and CEO; Co-founder and Lead Software Engineer, Instagram

Since Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold Instagram to Facebook in 2012, the app has continued to grow and change.

Late last year, Instagram launched Instagram Direct, a new feature that lets users send private photos, videos, and messages to up to 15 friends at once. Instagram also successfully introduced ads into users' streams without any major revolt.

The app doubled its user base<span> in 2013. Official numbers haven't been released since September, but we can peg Instagram's user base at about 180 million monthly active users. </span>

<h3>53. Brian McAndrews</h3>

CEO, Pandora

Brian McAndrews, an ad veteran who formerly held roles at Madrona Venture Group, Microsoft, and aQuantive, took over Joe Kennedy's role as chief executive at Pandora in September.

On the first day of trading following the announcement of McAndrews' new position, Pandora's stock went up by $2.50 a share - a nearly 12% jump.

Despite increased competition from iTunes Radio, Pandora just had its most profitable quarter since its IPO. <span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.5em;">

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<h3>52. Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp</h3>

Co-founder and CEO; Co-founder, Pinterest

Last year alone, Pinterest raised a total of $425 million. Its latest $225 million round gives the social sharing site a $3.8 billion valuation.

Pinterest also recently acquired image recognition and visual search startup, VisualGraph, to build out its data science team.

Founder and CEO, One Medical Group

Going to the doctor shouldn't have to be a pain. That's why One Medical Group makes it dead simple to set up same-day appointments with top-notch doctors. For $199 a year, you can make appointments online, chat with your doctor via email, and avoid hanging out in waiting rooms.

In March, One Medical raised a $30 million Series F round led by Google Ventures, with participation from Benchmark, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Maverick Capital, and Oak Investment Partners.

One Medical has doctors' offices in San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C., Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

<h3>50. Edwin Khodabakchian, Cyril Moutran</h3>

Co-founders, Feedly

When Google shut down its beloved Reader product, a lot of people flocked to Feedly. A month after Reader disappeared, Feedly emerged as the top RSS traffic referrer.

In August, Feedly kicked off a paid version of its RSS service, adding custom sharing, power search, a speed boost, integration with other apps, and more. It limited the release to 5,000 people, and it only took eight hours for 5,000 $99 lifetime-subscriptions to get snatched up. Around that same time, Feedly was touting more than 13 million users.

<h3>49. Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, Jeff Jordan, Chris Dixon </h3>

Partners, Andreeseen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz - the venture capital firm with investments in hot companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, GitHub, Twitter, Foursquare, Lyft, and Fab - announced this year that it's raising $1.5 billion for its fourth fund.

In April 2013, the firm teamed up with Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures to fund startups building apps for Google Glass. The new fund is called the Glass Collective.

<h3>48. Doug Mack, Ali Pincus, Susan Feldman</h3>

CEO; Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer; Co-Founder and Chief of Merchandising, One Kings Lane

The home decor site One Kings Lane raised a huge round of funding - $112 million to be exact - last month, bringing its valuation to nearly $1 billion. The company has also made some recent strategic hires, bringing former Zappos CTO Arun Rajan onboard to lead its technology initiatives.

The company plans to use the funding to hire, expand its technology, and build out its inventory. To date, the company has raised $229 million.

<h3>47. Angela Ahrendts, Denise Young Smith </h3>

Head of Retail; Head of Human Resources, Apple

In October 2013, Apple announced the hiring of former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts <span>as the company's new head of retail.</span>

Then, in February 2014, Apple appointed Denise Young Smith to lead its worldwide human resources division. The pair are in charge of the future of two of Apple's most important assets: its chain of stores and its talent.

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">(It's also great to see Apple shaking up its previously male-dominated top ranks.)</span>

<h3>46. Phil Libin</h3>

CEO, Evernote

This company makes one of the best organizational apps we've ever seen, not to mention a host of other apps - like Skitch - and even physical products, like scanners and styluses.

Evernote has 80 million registered users and 2013 revenue was up 2.5 times what it was the year before. Libin has said he'd like to take Evernote public within the next two or three years.

<h3>45. Hunter Walk, Satya Patel</h3>

Principals, Homebrew

Hunter Walk and Satya Patel were able to raise $35 million in a matter of months to invest in early-stage startups through their new VC firm, Homebrew. Since launching in July, Homebrew has backed startups like Plaid.io, Shyp, theSkimm, and UpCounsel.

Walk and Patel are two former Google employees who have tons of connections in Silicon Valley. Both Patel and Walk joined Google in 2003. Walk stayed until 2013, while Patel did stints at Battery Ventures and Twitter.

<h3>44. Marc Benioff</h3>

Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Salesforce.com

Under the leadership of Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com made its largest acquisition ever, spending $2.5 billion to buy mobile marketing company ExactTarget.

Also, in Q1 2014, Salesforce delivered its first-ever $1 billion-plus revenue quarter.

<h3>43. Eric Migicovsky</h3>

Founder and CEO, Pebble

Pebble, arguably the hottest smart watch on the market, recently unveiled its high-end Pebble Steel smart watch and its app store for wearable tech. Now, Pebble wearers have easy access to a selection of more than 500 apps specifically made for smart watches.

To date, there are more than 300,000 Pebble watches on wrists all over the world.

<h3>42. Peter Fenton, Yuri Milner </h3>

Partner, Benchmark Capital; Partner, DST Global

<span>When Twitter went public, its largest outside investors hit the jackpot. </span>

<span>Benchmark Capital and DST Global both cashed very pretty checks from the IPO. </span>

Because of the growth of a number of his portfolio companies throughout 2013, Fenton will likely see a significant number of other companies go public this year.

Milner, on the other hand, helped fund a new award for scientists that rewards curing disease and extending human life.

<h3>41. MG Siegler</h3>

General Partner, Google Ventures

<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">MG Siegler, a well-known Apple fanboy, shocked the industry when he left CrunchFund and </span>joined Google Ventures <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">in May to focus on seed and early-stage investments.</span>

In his spare time, Siegler continues to blog for TechCrunch.

In general, Google Ventures had a great year, making 75 new investments in 2013, including a hefty backing of the hot transportation startup Uber.

<h3>40. Andy Rubin</h3>

Manager of Robotics division, Google

In March 2013, Andy Rubin stepped down from his position as the head of Google's Android mobile operating system to "start a new chapter" at the company. We didn't know what that chapter would be until December, when Google announced that he would be in charge of the company's new robotics division.

As head of this division, Rubin will lead some of Google's typical "moonshot" projects, including work with the powerful military robots the company acquired when it bought Boston Dynamics.

<h3>39. Sam Shank</h3>

Co-founder and CEO, HotelTonight

<p class="slide-title">HotelTonight lets you book last-minute, overnight stays at discounted rates. In 2013, it raised a $45 million Series D r

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