April 2009Inc recently asked me who I thought were the 5 mostinteresting startup founders of the last 30 years. How doyou decide who's the most interesting? The best test seemedto be influence: who are the 5who've influenced me most? Who do I use as examples when I'mtalking to companies we fund? Who do I find myself quoting?1. Steve JobsI'd guess Steve is the most influential founder not just for me butfor most people you could ask. A lot of startup culture is Appleculture. He was the original young founder. And while the conceptof "insanely great" already existed in the arts, it was a novelidea to introduce into a company in the 1980s.More remarkable still, he's stayed interesting for 30 years. Peopleawait new Apple products the way they'd await new books by a popularnovelist. Steve may not literally design them, but they wouldn'thappen if he weren't CEO.Steve is clever and driven, but so are a lot of people in the Valley.What makes him unique is his sense of design. Before him, mostcompanies treated design as a frivolous extra. Apple's competitorsnow know better.2. TJ RodgersTJ Rodgers isn't as famous as Steve Jobs, but he may be the bestwriter among Silicon Valley CEOs. I've probably learned more fromhim about the startup way of thinking than from anyone else. Notso much from specific things he's written as by reconstructing themind that produced them: brutally candid; aggressively garbage-collectingoutdated ideas; and yet driven by pragmatism rather than ideology.The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that Iremember exactly where I was at the time. It was HighTechnology Innovation: Free Markets or Government Subsidies? andI was downstairs in the Harvard Square T Station. It felt as ifsomeone had flipped on a light switch inside my head.3. Larry & SergeyI'm sorry to treat Larry and Sergey as one person. I've alwaysthought that was unfair to them. But it does seem as if Google was acollaboration.Before Google, companies in Silicon Valley already knew it wasimportant to have the best hackers. So they claimed, at least.But Google pushed this idea further than anyone had before. Theirhypothesis seems to have been that, in the initial stages at least,all you need is good hackers: if you hire all the smartest peopleand put them to work on a problem where their success can be measured,you win. All the other stuff—which includes all the stuff thatbusiness schools think business consists of—you can figure outalong the way. The results won't be perfect, but they'll be optimal.If this was their hypothesis, it's now been verified experimentally.4. Paul BuchheitFew know this, but one person, Paul Buchheit, is responsible forthree of the best things Google has done. He was the originalauthor of GMail, which is the most impressive thing Google has aftersearch. He also wrote the first prototype of AdSense, and was theauthor of Google's mantra "Don't be evil."PB made a point in a talk once that I now mention to every startupwe fund: that it's better, initially, to make a small number ofusers really love you than a large number kind of like you. If Icould tell startups only ten sentences, this would be one of them.Now he's cofounder of a startup called Friendfeed. It's only ayear old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them.Someone responsible for three of the biggest ideas at Google isgoing to come up with more.5. Sam AltmanI was told I shouldn't mention founders of YC-funded companies inthis list. But Sam Altman can't be stopped by such flimsy rules.If he wants to be on this list, he's going to be.Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer tomost when I'm advising startups. On questions of design, I ask"What would Steve do?" but on questions of strategy or ambition Iask "What would Sama do?"What I learned from meeting Sama is that the doctrine of the electapplies to startups. It applies way less than most people think:startup investing does not consist of trying to pick winners theway you might in a horse race. But there are a few people withsuch force of will that they're going to get whatever they want.
