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.

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.

Marc Russell Benioff (born September 25, 1964) is Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com, a cloud computing company.

Benioff started salesforce.com in March 1999 in a rented San Francisco apartment and defined its mission as The End of Software. He is “credited with turning the software industry on its head” by using the Internet to “revamp the way software programs are designed and distributed.” He has long evangelized software as a service as the model that would replace traditional enterprise software. He is the creator of the term “platform as a service” and has extended salesforce.com’s reach by allowing customers to build their own applications on the company’s architecture, or in the salesforce.com “cloud”. He is the author of three books, including the national best seller Behind the Cloud.

Prior to founding salesforce.com, Benioff was at Oracle Corporation for 13 years in a variety of executive positions in sales, marketing, and product development. At 23, he was named Oracle's Rookie of the Year and three years later he was promoted to vice president, the company's youngest person to hold that title. Before joining Oracle, Benioff worked as an assembly language programmer at the Macintosh Division of Apple Computer, where he was inspired by the company and its co-founder, Steve Jobs. While still in high school, he founded Liberty Software, which specialized in microcomputer games, creating and selling games for the Atari system among others.