Entrepreneurs and engineers who helped define semiconductors, networked computing, the internet, digital marketplaces, mobile technology and artificial intelligence.
Brin came to the United States as a child and later co-founded Google with Larry Page at Stanford. Their search technology transformed access to online information and helped build a company that became a major force in advertising, mobile computing, cloud services and artificial intelligence.
“You always hear that money doesn’t buy happiness. I’ve always figured a lot of money will buy you a little bit of happiness.”
Grove survived Nazi occupation and escaped Communist Hungary before building a career in American technology. As Intel’s chief executive, he helped make microprocessors the company’s defining business and Intel a central supplier to the personal-computer revolution.
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
Bechtolsheim co-founded Sun Microsystems and helped advance workstation and network-computing architecture. He later became Google’s first outside investor and co-founded Arista Networks, extending his influence across several generations of Silicon Valley infrastructure.
“The first step is you have to say that you can.”
Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems and later became one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture investors. Through Khosla Ventures, he backed companies across computing, clean energy, biotechnology and health, helping move new technologies from research into commercial markets.
“The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”
Yang came to California as a child and co-founded Yahoo while at Stanford. Yahoo became one of the web’s first mass-market destinations, combining directories, search, email, news and other services that introduced millions of Americans to everyday internet use.
“In Silicon Valley, we tend to believe that anything you can imagine, you can build.”
Koum immigrated to California as a teenager and later co-founded WhatsApp. Its simple, inexpensive mobile-messaging model spread globally and helped make internet-based messaging a basic communications tool before Facebook acquired the company in 2014.
“No ads! No games! No gimmicks!”
Omidyar created the online marketplace that became eBay in 1995. By connecting individual buyers and sellers at massive scale, eBay helped establish consumer-to-consumer e-commerce and gave small businesses access to customers far beyond their local markets.
“I had a vision of using the internet to create a marketplace where normal people could buy and sell things.”
Musk built major American companies across several difficult industries, including SpaceX, Tesla and Starlink. Their work accelerated reusable launch systems, electric-vehicle adoption and satellite broadband, making him one of the most consequential technology entrepreneurs of the early 21st century.
“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”
Huang co-founded NVIDIA in 1993 around graphics processors. The company’s GPUs later proved exceptionally useful for parallel computation, becoming foundational hardware for machine learning, scientific computing and the modern artificial-intelligence boom.
“Software is eating the world, but AI is going to eat software.”
Jobs co-founded Apple and helped lead successive products that changed personal computing, digital music, smartphones and tablets. His emphasis on tightly integrated hardware, software and design helped make consumer technology simpler, more visual and more central to everyday life.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.”