Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman and the current executive chairman of Google. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive of Google.

Additionally, Schmidt was a former member on the board of directors for Apple Inc. and sat on the boards of trustees for both Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Along with Mike Lesk, Schmidt co-authored the lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system.

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. After graduating from Yorktown High School, Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business as a part time professor.

Jared Cohen (born November 24, 1981 in Weston, Connecticut) is the Director of Google Ideas, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an author, and an artist. Previously he served as a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff and a close advisor to both Condoleezza Rice and later Hillary Clinton. Initially brought in by Condoleezza Rice as one of the youngest members in history, he was one of the few people kept on under Hillary Clinton. In this capacity, he focused on counter-terrorism, counter-radicalization, Middle East/South Asia, Youth, and Technology. According to New York Times Magazine, Cohen was one of the principal architects of what became known as "21st century statecraft." Prior to his work at the State Department, Cohen received his BA from Stanford University and his M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. In September 2010, Cohen was named by the Huffington Post as one of the 100 game changers of the year and by Devex as one of the top 40 people under 40. In 2011, Vanity Fair named Cohen to its list of the “Next Establishment” and the Washington Post and Harvard Kennedy School of Government honored him with one of their six “Top American Leader” awards. He is author of the books One Hundred Days of Silence, Children of Jihad, and is co-authoring a book with Google's Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt about how technology is changing international relations, slated to come out in early 2013.

Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American businesswoman. She has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. Prior to Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Prior to Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.

Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg and the oldest of three siblings. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was two years old. She attended public school, where she was "always at the top of her class." Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.

In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College and in 1991, graduated with a B.A. in Economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, Sandberg met then professor Larry Summers who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.

Walter Isaacson (born May 20, 1952) is a writer and biographer. He is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of TIME. He has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs.

Walter Isaacson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. After graduating from New Orleans' Isidore Newman School and a summer at Deep Springs College as a participant in the Telluride Association Summer Program (TASP), Isaacson attended Harvard College and earned a B. A. in 1974 in history and literature. While at Harvard, Isaacson was president of the Signet Society, a member of the Harvard Lampoon and a resident of Lowell House. He then attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke College and read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE).

Walter Isaacson began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's fourteenth editor in 1996. He became Chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

Kara Swisher (born May 9, 1962) is an American technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal and an author and commentator on the Internet. She created and wrote Boom Town, a column which appeared on the front page of the Marketplace section and online, and now appears on All Things Digital, which she founded and currently serves as the co-executive editor of with Walt Mossberg.

Swisher wrote many stories about the World Wide Web and Internet policy issues and wrote feature articles on technology for the paper. During that period, she was cited as the most influential reporter covering the Internet by the Industry Standard magazine. She is the author of aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web, published by Times Business Print Books in July 1998. The sequel, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future, was published in the fall of 2003 by Crown Business Print Books.