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© History Oasis
A list of famous tech CEOs who make our modern world run.
George Eastman built Kodak from a third-floor operation into a photography giant. He created the $1 Brownie camera and crafted its iconic slogan, “You press the button, we do the rest.” He led the firm until 1932, giving away over $100 million before taking his own life.
Charles Coffin left the shoe business at 39 to rescue a failing electric company. He merged it with Edison’s firm in 1892 to form General Electric. He survived the Panic of 1893 by securing emergency funding from J.P. Morgan and led GE until 1922.
Thomas Watson Sr. took control of IBM in 1914 with 235 employees. He enforced strict rules: dark suits, white shirts, and no alcohol. His motto, “Think” hung in every office. By his death in 1956, IBM employed 60,000 people across 200 offices.
Co-Founder of HP
David Packard co-founded HP in his garage in 1939 with $538. Walt Disney Studios bought their first audio oscillators from the company soon after. He left in 1969 to serve as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, then returned in 1972 and expanded operations worldwide, including apartheid South Africa.
Co-Founder of Intel
Robert Noyce co-founded Intel in 1968 after leaving Shockley Semiconductor. He co-invented the integrated circuit and led Intel until 1975. He was nicknamed “the Mayor of Silicon Valley”. He was best known for building Intel’s collaborative culture.
Founder of AMD
Jerry Sanders founded AMD in 1969 and ran it until 2002. The flamboyant former Motorola marketer said, “Real men have fabs.” For decades, AMD survived as David to Intel’s Goliath through Sanders’ relentless drive.
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was fired in 1985, and returned as CEO in 1997 to save the company from near-bankruptcy. He launched the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. He died in 2011 after orchestrating one of history’s greatest corporate turnarounds.
Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft in 1975 at age 19. He bought 86-DOS for $50,000 and licensed it to IBM while keeping the rights to sell elsewhere. This created Microsoft’s fortune. He led until 2000, when the Justice Department called Microsoft an “abusive monopoly.”
CEO of Sun Microsystems
Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems and led it from 1984 to 2006. The brash critic of Microsoft called Windows “a giant hairball.” He championed the network-is-the-computer philosophy and created the Java programming language.
CEO of Adobe
John Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Charles Geschke. They created PostScript, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Their bet on PostScript sparked the desktop publishing revolution. They served as co-CEOs of Adobe until 1989, building a software empire on creativity.
John Chambers ran Cisco from 1995 to 2015. He built the internet’s plumbing by acquiring over 180 companies. When the dot-com bust erased 80% of Cisco’s value, he steered the company through and emerged stronger.
Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 with $2,000 and ran it until 2014. The college dropout built Oracle into the dominant enterprise database by attacking competitors and buying rivals. He even hired investigators to dig through Microsoft’s trash during the antitrust trial.
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 from his garage. He quit his hedge fund job after learning web usage was growing 2,300% yearly. His focus on customers over quarterly profits baffled Wall Street but built a global giant. He stepped down in 2021 after 27 years.
Meg Whitman ran eBay from 1998 to 2008. She took the small auction site and drove massive global expansion. She bought PayPal, took the company public, and became a billionaire. She later had a less successful stint at HP.
Travis Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2010 and led its global expansion, often breaking local regulations. His “growth at all costs” culture drove success, but scandals revealed a toxic workplace. A shareholder revolt forced him out in 2017.
CEO of Google/Alphabet
Sundar Pichai led Chrome and Android before becoming Google CEO in 2015 and Alphabet CEO in 2019. He has fought off regulators, managed employee revolts, and pushed the company forward in AI while running one of the world’s largest tech giants.
CEO of Nvidia
Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 to build 3D graphics for gaming. He made a multi-billion-dollar bet on the CUDA parallel computing platform, turning Nvidia’s GPUs into the foundation of the AI revolution. He still runs the company.
CEO of Facebook/Meta
Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook from his Harvard dorm in 2004. His motto was “Move fast and break things.” His tenure brought explosive growth and constant scandals: Cambridge Analytica, misinformation, and whistleblowers. He renamed the company Meta and bet everything on the metaverse.
Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and was fired in 2008. He returned in 2015 and doubled the character limit. Critics attacked his part-time CEO style while he also ran Square. He quit in 2021 and sold Twitter to Elon Musk in 2022.
Daniel Ek co-founded Spotify in 2006 to fight music piracy with legal streaming. He created the freemium model in music and battled record labels over royalty rates. He bet heavily on podcasting to diversify beyond music.
CEO of OpenAI
Sam Altman became OpenAI CEO in 2019. The former Y Combinator president became the face of artificial intelligence after releasing ChatGPT. The board fired him in November 2023, but a massive employee revolt forced them to bring him back days later.
Sanjay Mehrotra co-founded SanDisk before taking over Micron in 2017. He guided the company through the brutal boom-and-bust memory chip market and pivoted to focus on AI and data centers while navigating semiconductor geopolitics.
CEO of Yahoo
Marissa Mayer ran Yahoo from 2012 to 2017 as the company’s fifth CEO in five years. The former Google engineer bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion and hired Katie Couric, but couldn’t stop the decline. She sold Yahoo to Verizon for $4.48 billion.
CEO of ADP
Carlos Rodriguez led ADP from 2011 to 2023. He joined through an acquisition in 1999 and became ADP’s sixth CEO since 1949. He transformed the company from a payroll processor into a human capital management provider, nearly doubling cloud clients.
Ursula Burns ran Xerox from 2009 to 2016, becoming the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. She started as a 1980 summer intern. She bought Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion and split Xerox into two companies in 2016.
Rich Templeton ran Texas Instruments from 2004 to 2023. He joined TI in 1980 and refocused the company on analog and embedded processors. He bought National Semiconductor for $6.5 billion and killed the wireless business. Stock grew 581% under his watch.
Greg Brown has led Motorola Solutions since 2008, the longest-serving CEO after the Galvin family. He split Motorola in 2011, keeping the enterprise and spinning off mobile. He made over 50 acquisitions and delivered 1,500% shareholder returns over 18 years.
CEO of Qualcomm
Cristiano Amon became Qualcomm CEO in 2021 after joining as an engineer in 1995. The Brazilian led Qualcomm’s 4G and 5G development. When COVID caused chip shortages, he secured more processors than competitors, giving Qualcomm the edge.
Intuit
Sasan Goodarzi became Intuit CEO in 2019 after joining in 2004. The Iranian immigrant turned Intuit from a tax platform into an AI-driven financial technology company. He bought Credit Karma and Mailchimp. Revenue grew 112% to $16.3 billion.
Marc Benioff co-founded Salesforce in 1999 from a San Francisco apartment with the slogan “The End of Software.” The youngest Oracle vice president built Salesforce into the third-largest enterprise software company. He created the 1-1-1 philanthropy model and bought Time in 2018.
Hock Tan has led Broadcom since 2006. The Malaysian-born CEO merged Avago with Broadcom in 2015. He tried to buy Qualcomm for $117 billion in 2017, but the U.S. government blocked it. He bought VMware for $69 billion in 2023.
Lee Kun-hee ran Samsung from 1987 until his death in 2020. He transformed Samsung from a budget brand into the world’s largest maker of smartphones, televisions, and memory chips. He was convicted twice for corruption and tax evasion but pardoned both times.
CEO of Lenovo
Yang Yuanqing joined Lenovo in 1989 and became CEO in 2001. He bought IBM’s PC business for $1.25 billion in 2005, making Lenovo the world’s largest PC company. He also bought Motorola Mobility from Google for $2.91 billion in 2014.
CEO of SAP
Christian Klein became SAP CEO in 2020 after his co-CEO Jennifer Morgan stepped down. He started at SAP as a student in 1999 at the age of 15. He cut 10% of the workforce in a major restructuring and pushed the company hard into cloud computing.
CEO of Equinix
Peter Van Camp led Equinix from 2000 to 2007, saving the company during the dot-com crash through a three-way merger in 2002. He became executive chairman in 2007 and briefly returned as interim CEO in 2018 after the sitting CEO resigned.
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