Sheryl Sandberg was Facebook's COO from 2008 to 2022, credited with making its advertising business profitable, and is the founder of LeanIn.Org.
Jan Koum arrived in California from Ukraine at 16, worked as a grocery-store cleaner and co-founded WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014 for $19.3 billion.
Ben Silbermann left Google to build iPhone apps, and after his first app failed teamed up with Evan Sharp to create Pinterest, launched in March 2010.
Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian pitched Y Combinator's Paul Graham after a spring-break drive to Boston and ended up creating Reddit, the 'front page of the Internet'.
Kevin Systrom turned down a job offer from Mark Zuckerberg, co-founded Instagram and sold it to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012 when it had just 13 employees.
Whitney Wolfe Herd helped launch Tinder, then founded Bumble and took it public in 2021 at age 31, becoming the world's youngest female billionaire.
Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, later served as its executive chairman, and went on to invest in and co-found AI ventures including Inflection AI and Manas AI.
Evan Spiegel turned a Stanford class project on ephemeral messaging into Snapchat, reaching a million daily users in 2012 and becoming the world's youngest billionaire in 2015.
Sergey Brin left Moscow at six, met Larry Page at Stanford and launched Google from a Menlo Park garage. He returned in 2023 to work on AI research at Alphabet.
Larry Page co-created the PageRank algorithm and co-founded Google with Sergey Brin, later leading Alphabet as CEO until stepping back from day-to-day roles in 2019.
Brian Chesky, an industrial designer by training, co-founded Airbnb and leads it as CEO. He holds roughly a 10 percent stake in the company.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and now leads Meta Platforms as chairman, CEO and controlling shareholder. He became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 23.
