Jerry Yang arrived in San Jose from Taiwan at ten knowing one English word, met David Filo at Stanford and co-founded Yahoo!, later serving as its CEO.
Craig Newmark, a former IBM, Bank of America and Charles Schwab programmer, founded Craigslist and later Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
Marc Andreessen co-authored Mosaic, the first web browser to show inline images, co-founded Netscape and later the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Ev Williams grew up on a Nebraska farm, founded Blogger, co-founded Twitter and later created Medium and the venture firm Obvious Ventures.
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.
Brian Armstrong read the Bitcoin white paper in 2010, joined Y Combinator with $150,000 in 2012 and co-founded Coinbase with Fred Ehrsam. He also co-founded the anti-aging startup NewLimit.
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.
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, launched Palantir and Founders Fund, and became Facebook's first outside investor in 2004 with a $500,000 stake for 10.2 percent.
Sam Altman dropped out of Stanford to found Loopt, ran Y Combinator, and has led OpenAI as CEO since 2019, overseeing the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT. He was ousted and reinstated within five days in 2023.
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and the payments company Block (Square, Cash App), and later the decentralized social network Bluesky. He is a St. Louis native and NYU dropout.
