He helped computers find a voice, gave old windows another life, and brought AI to software testing. Kevin Surace’s career makes more sense when you remember that he also conducts.
Eric Ly is a Vietnamese-American entrepreneur and software engineer best known as a founding member and the first CTO of LinkedIn. Born in Saigon and raised in Silicon Valley, he was an early Java engineer at Sun and a product builder at General Magic before helping Reid Hoffman launch LinkedIn in 2002. Today he is co-founder and CEO of KarmaCheck, an AI-forward background check and credentialing company that raised a $45M Series B in 2024, focused on speeding up hiring in healthcare and staffing. Across a 30-year career he has chased one recurring idea: building trust between people online.