Category:Famous People from Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area, running roughly from Palo Alto through Mountain View and Cupertino to San Jose, and it is a place people move to rather than a place they are from. This category records that distinction honestly: almost nobody in it was born there. It collects people whose working lives were made in the Valley, and the membership skews hard toward one profession in particular. The general partners of Sand Hill Road firms outnumber the founders they backed, and the category also holds the elected officials who represent the same few square miles in Congress and in San Jose City Hall.
The venture partnerships
The largest identifiable block is the partner rosters of a handful of firms. Benchmark is represented by Peter Fenton, Matt Cohler and Mitch Lasky. Kleiner Perkins by Mamoon Hamid and Ted Schlein, the latter after two decades investing in information security. Greylock by David Sze and Jerry Chen. Sequoia Capital by Jim Goetz and by Michael Moritz, who came to investing from journalism. Andreessen Horowitz by Jeff Jordan, who spent more than twelve years there, and Chris Dixon, who leads its cryptocurrency practice.
Outside the established partnerships sit firms built by their founders. Vinod Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems before starting his own firm. Peter Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies and then Founders Fund. Reid Hoffman began in the Valley in the mid-1990s and moved from operating to investing. Mary Meeker left Morgan Stanley research to start BOND. Katie Haun was a federal prosecutor before founding a firm focused on digital assets. Josh Kushner runs Thrive Capital from New York, Joel Cutler co-founded General Catalyst from Cambridge, and Josh Kopelman runs First Round from Philadelphia, which is the point: the category is defined by where the deals are done, not where the partner sleeps. Jim Breyer, who backed Facebook out of Accel, and Cyan Banister, who came to angel investing after a childhood of poverty and homelessness, complete the investing side.
Operators and platform chief executives
The operating membership is a list of the companies headquartered along the peninsula. Tim Cook leads Apple, Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia at a Denny's in the Valley after a Stanford master's degree, Safra Catz led Oracle after a start in Wall Street investment banking, and Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems. Sam Altman built his reputation first as a founder, then as president of Y Combinator, and now runs OpenAI, where Sarah Friar is chief financial officer and Fidji Simo runs applications. Sridhar Ramaswamy leads Snowflake, Ryan Roslansky leads LinkedIn, Eric Yuan founded Zoom, Jeremy Stoppelman co-founded Yelp, Brian Chesky co-founded Airbnb, Tony Xu co-founded DoorDash, Apoorva Mehta founded Instacart, and Parker Conrad founded Zenefits, resigned in a 2016 compliance scandal, and then founded Rippling.
The earlier generation is present too. Carol Bartz and Susan Decker both led or helped lead Yahoo. Dick Costolo ran Twitter. Brian Krzanich ran Intel and Enrique Lores ran HP. Susan Wojcicki rented her Menlo Park garage to Google's founders before running YouTube. Gideon Yu was chief financial officer of both YouTube and Facebook.
The Valley's own delegation
A place category that holds only investors and executives would be missing the government. This one is not. Ro Khanna represents a district covering much of Santa Clara and Alameda counties. Zoe Lofgren represents San Jose, Gilroy and Morgan Hill, and has built her legislative record around technology policy, net neutrality and digital privacy. Kevin Mullin holds the neighboring peninsula seat. Sam Liccardo served as mayor of San Jose, the largest city in the Valley, through fights over pensions, homelessness and housing, before winning a House seat of his own. Mary Daly runs the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.
See also
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