Power Players: San Francisco’s Tech Leaders – Zuckerberg, Brin, Page, Hoffman and more

Mark Zuckerberg

Age: 27

Estimated Net Worth: More than $18 billion

The Moneymaker: Facebook

Background: Mark Zuckerberg, a New York native and founder of Facebook, had no idea what he was getting himself into when he constructed the social networking site in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004. The history of Facebook is well known these days – it began as a social networking site solely for Harvard students before rapidly spreading to all of the Ivy League schools, as well as other Boston-area universities. Over time, the site evolved to include high school students; and in 2006, anyone over the age of 13 could join. Facebook now boasts over 750 million active users worldwide. Zuckerberg has declined all offers to sell the site to major industry power players including Google, Viacom, Microsoft and Yahoo. Despite having dropped out of Harvard, Zuckerberg has since become the world’s youngest billionaire.

Notable Accomplishments: Currently, Zuckerberg sits on several Forbes lists, and his most recent rise in net worth makes him appear to be the third richest “Tech Titan” behind Bill Gates and Larry Ellison. In 2007 Zuckerberg won the Crunchie Award for “Best Startup CEO” and placed number one on Vanity Fair magazine’s 2010 list of the “Top 100 Most Influential People of the Information Age.”  In 2010, Time Magazine named him “Person of the Year” for “connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Current Position: CEO of Facebook.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin

Age: Larry, 38; Sergey, 37

Estimated Net worth: $17 billion each

The Moneymaker: Google

Background: Larry Page and Sergey Brin are the co-founders of the search engine giant Google. Page graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering before continuing on to receive his Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Stanford. Brin and his family immigrated to the United States from Russia when he was 6 years old. He went on to receive his Computer Science Degree from the University of Maryland followed by a master’s degree from Stanford University. The power duo met while earning their Ph.D.s at Stanford – but both left before earning the titles to pursue what is now online search engine powerhouse Google. Page resides in Palo Alto, California; Brin in San Francisco.

Notable Accomplishments: With Google controlling two – thirds of the Internet search market, Page and Brin continue to sit high atop the Forbes billionaires list. Both received honorary MBAs from IE Business School in 2003, the Marconi Foundation Prize in 2004 and were elected Fellows of the Marconi Foundation at Columbia University and Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, among many other industry nods. The pair has other interests apart from Google; Page’s interest in alternative energy has fueled the decision to purchase portions of land in hopes of erecting homes that run on new kinds of fuel cells and geothermal energy; while Brin has become a benefactor for Parkinson’s disease. Both men are investors in Tesla Motors.

Current Position: Page is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Google; Brin is a co-founder of Google.

Reid Hoffman

Age: 53

Estimated Net Worth: More than $1 billion

The Moneymaker: LinkedIn

[highlight_text] Hoffman is also an angel investor in many other major website successes including Facebook, Zynga and Flickr. [/highlight_text]

Background: From his living room in 2002, Reid Hoffman set out to create a social networking site for the business world. At the end of the first month in operation, LinkedIn had a total of 4,500 members and has only grown since – approximately one million new members join LinkedIn every week. Hoffman graduated from Stanford University in 1990 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Symbolic Systems and Cognitive Science. He then went on to earn a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. Four years later he founded SocialNet, an online dating service, a predecessor to the extensive list of current online dating services today. Hoffman held a variety of positions at PayPal, including Executive Vice President.

Notable Accomplishments: At Stanford University he received numerous awards as well as a Marshall Scholarship. Hoffman is also an angel investor in many other major website successes including Facebook, Zynga and Flickr. Overall, Hoffman has invested in over 80 start-ups. In 2009 he went corporate, joining venture capital firm Greylock Partners where he has led investments in Groupon, Shopkick and online rental website Airbnb.

Current Position: Executive Chairman and co-Founder at LinkedIn; Partner at Greylock; Member, Board of Directors at Zynga; Member, Board of Directors at Kiva.org; Member, Board of Directors Mozilla Corporation; Chair, West Coast Advisory Board at QuestBridge; Member, Provost Council at College Eight, UCSC. He also oversees the Greylock Discovery Fund, which has already dished out 20 seed investments between $25,000 and $500,000 since it launched last September.

Mark Pincus

Age: 45

Estimated Net worth: $1 billion

The Moneymaker: Zynga

Background: A true child at heart, Mark Pincus clearly knows how to play the game. Just four years ago, Pincus founded Zynga, the social media gaming system he named after his late much-loved bulldog. Millions of fans of all ages log on daily to enter into animated worlds via games like Pincus’ FarmVille, FrontierVille, CityVille and Mafia Wars, made increasingly popular as a result of their connection to Facebook. The Internet gaming visionary graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Pincus is married with two children and resides in San Francisco, California.

Notable Accomplishments: Forbes named Pincus number 412 on their list of billionaires in the United States. Pincus has been an angel investor to a various Silicon Valley startups and he frequently gives lectures to entrepreneurial hopefuls.

Current Position: Chief Executive of Zynga.

Adam D’Angelo

Age: 26

Estimated Net Worth: Around $680 million, though he is notoriously tight – lipped.

The Moneymaker: Quora

Background: A Facebook alum, D’Angelo met Mark Zuckerberg while attending the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Before launching Quora, an online question – and – answer database, D’Angelo worked as Facebook’s Director of Data Mining and Distributed Systems for ad targeting, spam detection and collaborative filtering. He then moved on to serve as Chief Technology Officer where he led platform development, data teams and oversaw new product design and architecture; he also guided the site’s infrastructure to ensure expansion and scalability. The California Institute of Technology grad moved on after two years to embark upon his own technological adventure – Quora, a website providing a collection of questions and answers created, edited and organized by users

Notable Accomplishments: D’Angelo placed second in North America in the ACM International Computer Programming Contest in 2004, first in the same contest in 2003, and was honored with a Silver Medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics in 2002. He was one of the top 24 finalists in the TopCoder Collegiate Challenge in 2005, which tests the ability to design and implement complex algorithms in a timed environment.

Current position: Co-founder of Quora.

Michael and Xochi Birch

Age: Michael, 41; Xochi, 39

Estimated Net Worth: The pair netted about $600 million from the sale of Bebo.

The Moneymaker: Bebo

Background: This husband and wife pair has always had a strong interest in entrepreneurialism. With Michael’s brother Paul, the couple founded BirthdayAlarm.com to remind people of upcoming birthdays. They also co-founded Ringo.com, an early social networking site, which after only three months became the second largest in the world at that time. Friendster with 400,000 members was first. Ringo was sold to tickle.com in 2003. But it was in 2005 when the couple launched Bebo, a social networking site, that the couple really hit it big. One year later, Bebo was the sixth most popular site in the UK, with more daily views than AOL, Amazon and bbc.co.uk. The couple met at Imperial College London.

In 2008, Michael and Xochi Birch sold Bebo to AOL for $850 million—a savvy and timely business move, as the company sold to Criterion Capital Partners for less than $10 million just two years later. Michael and Xochi Birch’s combined 70 percent stake yielded a profit of $595 million from the initial deal. With the money that they earned from the sale of Bebo, they founded TheMonkeyInferno.com, a sort of ‘incubator’ for fledgling online project ideas. They’ve also launched a political network called Jolitics, a website designed to encourage open constructive political debate and Zuno.com, a greeting card site that plugs into Facebook and runs as both an iPhone app and website. The couple are currently working on a new project, WaterForward.com, a website developed as a way to support the couple’s favorite non-profit, charity: water.

Chad Hurley

Age: 34

Estimated Net worth: Around $300 million

The Moneymaker: YouTube

[highlight_text] Hurley was the first user-interface designer at PayPal, where he designed the original PayPal logo.  [/highlight_text]

Background: YouTube co-creator Chad Hurley has quite the resume for someone of his age. The Indiana University of Pennsylvania graduate started his career at the then fledging company PayPal. The entrepreneur used his PayPal background as a platform to start the website that changed the way the world looks at the relationship between the Internet and videos. Hurley, along with Steven Chen, launched YouTube, the world’s primary video sharing platform, in February 2005 and quickly sold the Internet sensation less than two years later to Google for an unprecedented $1.65 billion. Hurley continued to serve as the Chief Executive Officer of YouTube until November 1 of last year. Today Hurley and Chen are working with their newest venture, AVOS, which recently acquired leading bookmarking service Delicious.com.

Notable Accomplishments: Hurley was the first user-interface designer at PayPal, where he designed the original PayPal logo. He also serves as an advisor for Google Ventures.

Current Position: Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of AVOS Systems, Inc.

Jack Dorsey

Age: 34

Estimated Net worth: More than $200 million

The Moneymaker: Twitter

Background: Missouri native Jack Dorsey was fascinated by technology from a young age. While most 14-year old boys are preoccupied playing sports, Dorsey was already hard at work designing dispatch routing software. In 1999 he dropped out of New York University and quit his programming job at a taxi and courier dispatch service to move to California, the land of technological opportunity. By 2000, the intelligent go-getter started his own company that dispatched couriers, taxis and emergency services via the Internet. But this was only the beginning. The idea for Twitter began to form while Dorsey was looking for a way to keep in contact with his friends without having to sit idly by a computer. Dorsey went to Odeo, where he met one of Twitter’s other co-creators, Biz Stone. Dorsey pitched the concept and within a few weeks, a working prototype of the website that today has users all a-Twitter, was born.

Notable Accomplishments: Since the establishment of Twitter, Dorsey has started Square, a system created in 2009 to reinvent the way people perform everyday payment transactions. In addition, taxi companies continue to use the software he designed for them in the ‘90s.

Current Position: Executive Chairman of Twitter; CEO and co-founder of Square.

Reed Hastings

Age: 50

Estimated Net Worth: $150 million

The Moneymaker: Netflix

Background: Reed Hastings is the powerhouse behind Netflix, which single-handedly changed the way the world watches TV and movies. Hastings grew up in Belmont, Massachusetts and loved to climb and canoe; this adventurous spirit led him to join the Peace Corps, teaching math in Swaziland after graduating from Bowdoin College. Upon his return to the United States, Hastings earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Stanford University and went on to found Netflix in 1997. Before his foray into the world of streaming movies and television shows online, Hastings was CEO of Pure Atria Software, which was sold for $750 million in 1997.

Notable Accomplishments: Hastings has served as the CEO of Netflix since September 1998 and the Chairman of the Board since its inception. He has held the number one spot on Fortune’s “Businessperson of the Year” list and expanded Netflix into an international company and has changed the media game by streaming movies and television shows over the Internet. Today Netflix has more than 23 million members in the United States and Canada and is the world’s leading Internet subscription service for movies and television shows.

Current position: Chairman of the Board of Netflix, President and Chief Executive Officer of Netflix, on the Board of Directors of Facebook, Director of Microsoft Corporation.

Greg Tseng

Age: 31

Estimated Net Worth: $45 million

The Moneymaker: Tagged

Background: The former nanotechnology researcher founded Tagged, a social networking site geared towards meeting new people through games and shared interests in 2004. Greg Tseng holds an A.B. in Chemistry and Physics and Mathematics from Harvard University, where he served as a Director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club (HEC) from 1998-2000 and co-authored The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). Greg is presently on leave from Stanford University, where he is pursuing the Ph.D. in Physics on a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Notable Accomplishments: As CEO since inception, he has been a driving force in creating Tagged with co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. Tseng also co-founded Avivon Inc., which introduced a textbook comparison-shopping to the Harvard campus during the fall semester of 1999, and served as COO of Limespot.com LLC, a leading network of over 100 local college portals.

Current position: Co-Founder, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Tagged.

Charlie Cheever

Age: 29

Estimated Net Worth: As estimated $10 million, although stays mum when it comes to numbers.

The Moneymaker: Quora

Background: Another Facebook alum, Cheever met fellow co-founder of Quora

Adam D’Angelo while working as an engineer and manager at Facebook, where he oversaw the creation of Facebook Connect and the Facebook Platform.

After graduating from Harvard University with a Bachelors of Art degree in Computer Science, Cheever worked as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, then went on to Facebook, then to found Quora.

Notable Accomplishments: Unlike websites like Yahoo Answers and Answers.com, what sets Quora apart from its competitors is the caliber of its contributors. For example, Netflix Chief Executive Reed Hastings answered the question of how much Netflix spends a year on postage—between $500 million and $600 million. His aim is to mine knowledge that isn’t already online and put it in the highly social context.

Current position: Co-founder of Quora.