iRethinks: 10 Influential CEO on Web 2.0

When Mark Zuckerberg showed up in Palo Alto three years ago, he had no car, no house, and no job.  Today, he’s at the helm of a smokin’-hot social-networking site, Facebook, and turning down billion-dollar offers. Can this kid be for real?

“I’m just lucky to be alive.” Mark Zuckerberg, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of social-networking site Facebook, is talking about the time he came face-to-face with the barrel of a gun. It was the spring of 2005, and he was driving from Palo Alto to Berkeley.

Now, internet users are spent 1% of their time on facebook.

Consider two of the founders of YouTube, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Both cut their teeth at PayPal–in fact, Hurley was one of PayPal’s first employees and even designed its logo. (He is also the son-in-law of James Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics.) Top-tier venture-capital firms were calling them, offering money, counsel, and connections, within months of launch. That’s not quite as uplifting as hearing that twentysomething buddies created a cool site to swap videos with friends.

Larry Page never finished his Ph.D because of the great success of his Google search engine. It was started in 1998 and grew rapidly every year since its beginnings. Page and Brin started with their own funds, and that of their friends and family but the site quickly outgrew their own available resources. They eventually received private investments through Stanford to fund the rapid growth of up to 20% per month.

In 2005 Larry Page has an estimated wealth of $US7.2 billion according to the Forbes business magazine. Forbes ranks Larry Page as the 55th richest man in the world at just 32 years of age.

Electrical engineering degree from Princeton, Ph.D. from UC, Berkeley, began career in software at Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. Began at pre-IPO Sun Microsystems in 1983, rising to chief technology officer; led development of its Java technology. Briefly ran flailing software outfit Novell, but found perfect match in 2001 when Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin appointed him chief executive. Introduced new services (Gmail, Google Talk), taking on Microsoft with desktop search function.

Michael Arrington, a former corporate attorney who, via his TechCrunch blog, has become one of the most influential figures on the Web, is the quintessential blogger: intense, passionate, consumed with his subject, opinionated, sleep-deprived, forward-thinking, easy to irritate and apt to air his grudges in public. Arrington’s vast network of Silicon Valley sources-many gained through his legendary parties-allows him to be ahead of the tech-biz curve and often play Web 2.0 kingmaker.

Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple, which he co-founded in 1976. Apple leads the industry in innovation with its award-winning Macintosh computers, OS X operating system, and consumer and professional applications software. Apple is also leading the digital music revolution, having sold over 110 million iPods and over three billion songs from its iTunes online store. Apple entered the mobile phone market this year with its revolutionary iPhone.

Steve also co-founded Pixar Animation Studios, which has created eight of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille. Pixar has won 20 Academy Awards and its films have grossed more than $4 billion at the worldwide box office to date. Pixar merged with The Walt Disney Company in 2006 and Steve now serves on Disney’s board of directors.

Paul S. Otellini is president and chief executive officer of Intel Corporation. He became the company’s fifth CEO on May 18, 2005, succeeding Craig R. Barrett. Otellini previously had served as Intel’s president and chief operating officer, positions he held since 2002, the same year he was elected to Intel’s board of directors. Otellini joined Intel in 1974. Otellini received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of San Francisco in 1972, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley in 1974.

Lawrence (Larry) Joseph Ellison was regarded one of the most visionary leaders in the information technology industry. In 1977, with two colleagues, he founded a company that created the world’s first commercially viable relational database. This technology revolutionized the way businesses were able to access and use data. Owing to Larry Ellison’s drive and competitive spirit, Oracle databases eventually dominated the market, and Oracle grew to become the second largest independent software company in the world. With a personal fortune estimated at $18.7 billion in 2004, Ellison became one of the world’s richest people. Ellison’s remarkable foresight and willingness to take risks were demonstrated in his early recognition of the significance of the Internet. Ellison’s interests outside the software business, such as his love of yacht racing and his profound interest in Japanese culture, also attracted a great deal of attention from the news media. His lavish lifestyle contributed to an image of Ellison as a  and charismatic personality.

Mullenweg dropped out of university, where he was studying politics and philosophy, to work for tech firm CNET in San Francisco. Less than a year ago, he launched his own start-up, Automattic. Still only 22, and passionate about the power of open source software, he is now helping usher in a new generation of blogs. He has also put himself at the heart of the fight to curb splogs, a catchily named new menace that threatens to smother the blogosphere.

Like green algae on a pond, splogs – or spam blogs – suck the life from blogs. Mullenweg estimates that nine out of 10 comments posted on blogs are spam. We’ve always thought of spam as unwanted emails for expensive watches and large penises, but unscrupulous online marketeers are creating computer programs that generate nonsensical blog comments, tricking innocent users to click on fake blogs stacked with advertising.

By his teens, it was already his plan to move to Silicon Valley and start hi-tech businesses. Then, after graduating in computer science from Johns Hopkins university, he spent four years at Mitsubishi Electronics in Japan. ‘It was blue boiler suits and company exercises in the morning,’ he remembers fondly.

Sifry soon became aware that his readers were writing about him on their blogs, but it was hard to keep track of who was saying what. ‘All the main search engines were giving me results that were six weeks old,’ he says. So, over one precious spare weekend, he built a new search engine in his basement that would scan all the blogs in the world for references to his own and then rank them by how recently they had been written. He called his creation Technorati, put it online and went back to work on Monday. ‘I totally didn’t create it intentionally as a business,’ he says. Even as immense volumes of traffic began to crash his servers and people started offering him money to keep track of their blogs, Sifry, busy with Sputnik, refused to treat Technorati as his main concern. Then, one morning while sitting alone in his basement, he took a call from the communities vice president at AOL: ‘We love what you and your team have been doing.’ Sifry did not go with AOL. Instead, he left Sputnik and turned his attention to Technorati full-time. The site has led the way in tracking the expansion of the blogosphere, which currently consists of 55m blogs, more than twice as many as there were in January. ‘I am totally living the dream I had when I was a kid right now,’ Sifry says.