Vinod Khosla

Vinod Khosla (Gurmukhi: ਵਿਨੋਦ ਖੋਸਲਾ; born 28 January 1955) is an Indian/American businessman listed by Forbes magazine as a billionaire. Khosla made his early fortune as one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems, a company which created the Java programming language and Network File System (NFS) after his departure as founding CEO and chairman in the early 1980s.

Early life and education

Khosla's father was an officer in the Indian Army and was posted at New Delhi, India.

Khosla read about the founding of Intel in Electronic Engineering Times at the age of fourteen and this inspired him to pursue technology as a career. He attended Mount St Marys High School in Delhi. He went on to receive multiple degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering), Carnegie Mellon University (Masters in Biomedical Engineering), and Stanford Graduate School of Business (MBA).

Career

In 1980, after post-graduating from Stanford University, Khosla worked for electronic design automation company Daisy Systems.

Larry Page

Lawrence "Larry" Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur who co-founded Google Inc. with Sergey Brin, and is the CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc. After stepping aside as CEO in August 2001 in favour of Eric Schmidt, Page re-assumed the role in April 2011. He announced his intention to step aside a second time in July 2015 to become CEO of Alphabet, under which Google's assets would be reorganized. Under Page, Alphabet is seeking to deliver major advancements in a variety of industries. Page is the inventor of PageRank, Google's best-known search ranking algorithm.

Page is a board member of the X Prize Foundation (XPRIZE) and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2004. Page received the Marconi Prize in 2004.

Early life and education

Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan, United States (U.S.). His father, Carl Vincent Page, Sr., earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Michigan in 1965, when the field was being established, and has been described by BBC reporter Will Smale as a "pioneer in computer science and artificial intelligence." He was a computer science professor at Michigan State University and Page's mother, Gloria, was an instructor in computer programming at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. Page's mother is Jewish, but he was not raised in a religious household and "does not readily identify as a Jew."

Sergey Brin

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is a Russian-born American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who, together with Larry Page, co-founded Google, one of the world's most profitable Internet companies. According to Forbes List February 2016, he is jointly one of three people listed as 11th richest in the world (21 overall), with a net worth of US$39.2 billion.

Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of 6. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he later became friends. They crammed their dormitory room with inexpensive computers and applied Brin's data mining system to build a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in a rented garage.

Bill Gates

William Henry "Bill" Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate, philanthropist, investor, and computer programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books.

Starting in 1987, Gates was included in the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest people and was the wealthiest from 1995 to 2007, again in 2009, and has been since 2014. Between 2009 and 2014, his wealth doubled from US$40 billion to more than US$82 billion. Between 2013 and 2014, his wealth increased by US$15 billion. Gates is currently the richest person in the world.

Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Gates has been criticized for his business tactics, which have been considered anti-competitive, an opinion which has in some cases been upheld by numerous court rulings. Later in his career Gates pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.