In a day and age where it’s hip to be square, tech nerds are having the last laugh. We Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as routinely and automatically as waking up in the morning and going to the bathroom, but do you ever wonder who the actual masterminds behind these groundbreaking sites are? Here’s a tribute to some of technologies most fascinating and famous nerds.
Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook founder
Mark Zuckerberg (right)
The kid’s got nerve but it serves him well. At 25, Zuckerberg turned down a $1.6 billion offer from Yahoo to buy Facebook. A la Bill Gates, Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to found Facebook, a concept which initially began as illicit photographs of Harvard girls which students could rate according to hotness scales. FB is now one of the biggest businesses in Internet (and cyberstalking) history.
Famous Quote: More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world.
Jimmy Wales
Wikipedia founder
Jimmy Wales is the founder of Wikipedia.org, the free online encyclopedia which ranks in Alexa’s top 10 most popular sites on the web. Allowing users to “edit this page” sparked something completely revolutionary in the world of information-sharing. Wikipedia now has more than a million articles in English, which exceeds Encyclopedia Britannica’s by 10 times. Wales serves on the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation and is a founder of Wikia, a provider of wiki creation software and wiki-based search services.
Famous Quote: Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.
Kevin Rose
Digg founder
Named one of Time Magazine’s top 25 most influential people on the web, Rose is a computer-science dropout from the University of Nevada who has changed the way millions of people get the news each day. Voting for stories on Digg.com, the site attracts anywhere between 10 to 20 million visitors a month.
Famous Quote: Don’t spend too much time planning, release early and often, some things will work, others won’t, refine and move forward and above all forget the money, just make sure you love what you’re doing.
Steve Jobs
CEO of Apple
Back in 1976, Steve Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak created one of the first commercially successful personal computers. Jobs is reputed for putting Apple and its products at the forefront of the information technology industry. He is also considered one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs. He was listed as Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Businessman of 2007.
Famous Quote: Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen
YouTube founders
Former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, created the most widely-used video-sharing site, known as YouTube.com in February 2005. Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube after experiencing difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s place in San Francisco. In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google.
Famous Quote: What our users want to watch is themselves. They don’t want to watch professionally produced content. There are so many people with cameras that have the opportunity to create their own content and so many more people with editing tools to tell their stories.
Evan Williams
Blogger and Twitter founder
Enabling everyone and their dog to rant about anything from politics to bowel movements, Williams has founded several of the Internet’s most successful companies, including Pyra Labs (the company behind Blogger and Blogspot). After selling Pyra Labs to Google, he teamed up with Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone to found Twitter, setting off the ever-evolving microblogging frenzy. Twitter is the third most-used social network with 6 million unique monthly visitors and 55 million monthly visits.
Famous Quote: I learn to launch projects even when they have nothing to do with the company.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
Google co-founders
Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. Their goal was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Google has been identified multiple times as Fortune Magazine’s #1 Best Place to Work, and is considered the most powerful brand in the world. Alexa ranks Google as the most visited website on the Internet.
Famous Quote: The Star Trek computer doesn’t seem that interesting. They ask it random questions, it thinks for a while. I think we can do better than that.
Craig Newmark
Craigslist founder
Founder of the San Francisco-based website Craigslist.org, craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements – with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums. Craigslist serves 45 cities and has 5 million visitors a month.
Famous Quote: I look at what the phone company does and do the opposite.
Bill Gates
Chairman and CEO of Microsoft
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the PC revolution. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, whom he later appointed as CEO of Microsoft. Microsoft has been a leader in software development for businesses, with various email and task management software and products such as Microsoft Sharepoint portal server, Microsoft exchange hosting and Microsoft CRM hosting. Time magazine named Gates one of the 100 people who most influenced the 20th century, as well as one of the 100 most influential people of 2004, 2005, and 2006. Since leaving Microsoft, Gates continues philanthropic endeavors. As of 2007 Bill and his wife Melinda Gates were the second most generous philanthropists in America, having given over $28 billion to charity.
Famous Quote: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Michael Dell
Founder and CEO of Dell
Dell had his first encounter with a computer at the age of 15 when he broke down a brand new Apple II computer and rebuilt it, just to see if he could. He founded the Dell company in 1984 with nothing more than $1,000 with the ambition of selling computer systems directly to the customer. In 1992, Dell became the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on the Fortune 500. Dell Inc, sells more systems globally than any other computer company, placing it No. 25 on the Fortune 500.
Famous Quote: Twenty years and $40 billion. They seem like good round numbers.
Where’s that famous Matthew Cassar? Definitely amongst the most good looking of the bunch
Great list of successful geeks…very inspiring, thanks
you got to be kidding me where is Wordpress founder?? Matt Mullenweg?? Wordpress is second most credible project after google..
If you are mentioning Kevin Rose then where is Pete Cashmore he is as much (even more) famous as Kevin.
You totally forgot moot. moot. Christopher Poole was in Time magazine for cripes sake.
Nice list, but a few corrections/additions needed
Since when Eric Schmidt became the co-founder of Google? He is CEO hired by Larry Page and Sirgey Brin.
Also as mentioned by Moin, Matt Mullenweg is also missing.
It’s a good list, but I have a problem with calling these people nerds. They are definitely geeks, and some may be nerds, but I don’t think that the term nerd works for all of them. For example, is Steve Jobs, the founder of Pixar a nerd? I don’t think so
Dude, Jobs did NOT found pixar…
Pixar started in 1979 as the Graphics Group, a part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm before it was bought by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar
uhmm, tom?!
I stand corrected about the Pixar thing, but I still wouldn’t call Jobs or Wales or Dell nerds. They are definitely geeks.
@Buzzy Yes thank you for the clarification. Jobs did not found Pixar.
@smashing themes: you’re right, shouldn’t have put Eric Schmidt as google co-founder. I went on to say in the first sentence that “Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University” but there was probably some confusion so thanks!
also… i was curious about the whole geek/nerd debate and here are the definitions of the two:
nerd – an intelligent but single-minded expert in a particular technical field or profession
geek: an enthusiast or expert especially in a technological field or activity
…similar, but not quite the same. interesting point –but i still like the way nerd sounds
should have put there ‘famous and eventually rich nerds’.
nerd rules.
Bugger! I’m far too good looking to make it big time. I guess I’ll have to stick to what we do best.
Get another bottle of Bollinger out of the cooler.
Oh, very inspiring. I hope I make it bigtime as well. Hahaha
they are really very inspirational .
I will be one of them after few years
WHERES MOOT?
Here I am!
These reviews are such inspiring. At least we get a hint of who are behind the big brands in the cyberspace! Such stories will surely encourage other internet people. do you agree?
Great summary Mary. This is my first time to your blog, but it will not be the last! I was actually researching “Top Internet CEO/Founders” and came across your site. (I’ll never stop being amazed at how people think it’s okay to not only offer unsolicited advice, but to be rude in the process. There are ways to make your point without sounding like a spoiled brat. Thankfully, some do get it right.) Anyway, this info will be very useful to me. Thanks for the great work!!
That was so remarkable.. me too is searching for the most famous geek/nerd and I stumbled my self here. This so informative and I really like it. BTW, how about writing a list of creators of the greatest programming languages that made all of this technologies possible for us to enjoy. huh what do you think?
It may be really surprising to know the roots of the corporations’ success.