
A job at sixteen. A dream role at Google. A startup that needed a new purpose. Welcome co-founder Roberto Ortiz has made a career of knowing when to stay with the craft and when to change the plan.

Before Nexar’s road cameras and his new AI ventures, Eran Shir helped people put the web to work at Dapper. His career keeps returning to a practical question: what could we build with information we already have?
She launched eBay Canada from a Toronto guest room, ran businesses at Yahoo and Move, then went traveling with her family. Starting Grokker was supposed to be the part she had finished doing.

A fire, a new daughter and a mother who preferred email helped shape Joy’s first chapter. Today, its co-founder is building a parenting club around the questions that keep coming.

He helped build an advertising exchange, then took charge of GoFundMe. Years with a mountain rescue team offer a clue to the question that connects the two: what makes people willing to depend on one another?

Before he co-founded Lucid Lane, Adnan Asar helped turn family photographs into products people could hold. His career connects an early fascination with AI to the patient work of making software useful.

From satellite radios to Slant, Lustre and Vetted, Stuart Kearney has kept returning to one question: how do you help someone decide what to buy? Yahoo is the latest chapter in that pursuit.
At Yahoo, Facebook and Uber, Prithvi Rai worked on the machinery of trust. With Borneo, he turned a familiar problem - keeping track of sensitive data as a business grows - into a company of his own.

After years building advertising technology at Yahoo, Mukundu Kumaran co-founded C1X to make its complicated transactions easier to manage. His career keeps returning to a practical question: can the people using the software get the work done?

Before GoLinks, Jorge Zamora drew plans for physical infrastructure and taught himself to build a social network. His next idea came from noticing how much useful software stayed trapped inside big companies.
From Yahoo and Groupon to GoFundMe, Kite and H55, Rob Solomon has spent his career working out what happens when an idea has to become an organization.
She learned communications on Capitol Hill and at Yahoo, then built JSA+Partners around candid advice. After the Los Angeles fires, Jennifer Stephens Acree put those relationships to work for businesses trying to begin again.

He helped people find their way around the web. Three decades after Yahoo began, Jerry Yang is still making introductions - between founders and capital, Asia and America, and old ink and new audiences.
A Cowboys fan found his people on the early internet. Three startups and a return to Nextdoor later, Nirav Tolia is still working out how strangers become useful to one another.

From a teenage DJ booth to Yahoo, Facebook and GoodRx, Doug Hirsch has kept asking why ordinary tasks take so much effort. His next chapter brings him back to small teams, rough prototypes and the pleasure of making something useful.

He came from Cairo to Stanford expecting to become a professor. Three startups later, Amr Awadallah’s career traces a different education: how to turn information into something people can actually use.

After years building internet products and vacation rentals, Prashant Kirtane turned to the work that follows a work trip. His journey from Yahoo to WegoPro begins with a familiar nuisance: getting the expenses done.

At CBS, Fouad ElNaggar saw people building the future with software from the past. After Sapho and its sale to Citrix, he took a larger question to Array: what does an hour of work actually tell us?
After years teaching computers what people want to read, NewsBreak founder Jeff Zheng turned his attention to the neighborhood. A coffee shop in Mountain View helps explain where he wants to go next.

Before she managed the tempo around ServiceNow's brand leaders, Shawntae Tehrani-Austen spent years learning the unforgiving clock of digital advertising. Her career is a study in the operational work that makes creative ambition possible.

Before recruiting became an AI arms race, Arnab Bhattacharjee was building the machinery of web search. At Consider, he is applying the same patient obsession with relevance to a more human question: who should meet whom next?
Frank Weishaupt is the CEO of Owl Labs, the Boston company behind the Meeting Owl, a 360-degree video conferencing device built for hybrid meetings. He joined in 2018 after two decades in sales and operations leadership at CarGurus, Criteo, Jumptap and Yahoo, and has since made Owl Labs a widely cited voice on the future of work through its annual State of Hybrid Work Report.
Ohad Rozen is the co-founder and CEO of Tymely, a New York and Israel based startup building an AI agent that resolves complex e-commerce customer service tickets end-to-end. A former NLP research scientist at Amazon and Yahoo with a PhD from Bar-Ilan University, Rozen previously ran the guided-onboarding startup Toonimo. Tymely has raised roughly $15.25M across seed and Series B rounds, backed by Hetz Ventures, DESCOvery (D.E. Shaw's venture studio), and 97212 Ventures.
Alvaro Morales is the co-founder and CEO of Orb, the flexible billing engine behind companies like Vercel, Perplexity and Replit. Raised in Lima, Peru and trained as a computer scientist at MIT, he built products at Yahoo, Palantir and spent five years as an engineering leader at Asana, where he watched pricing changes that should have taken minutes drag on for months. In 2021 he and CTO Kshitij Grover founded Orb to let companies ship pricing as fast as they ship product. In June 2026, payments giant Adyen agreed to acquire Orb for $335 million.
Greg Cohn is the co-founder and CEO of Ad Hoc Labs, the Los Angeles product studio behind Burner, the app that pioneered disposable, on-demand phone numbers back in 2012. A former Yahoo product leader who spent his early career in book publishing and content strategy, Cohn built Burner after his first app failed, turning that stumble into a durable, privacy-focused business that has outlived most of its venture-funded peers. He is an advocate for building consumer apps that deliver lasting value over chasing hypergrowth.
Allie Janoch is the CEO and co-founder of Mapistry, a Berkeley-born software company that turns the soul-crushing paperwork of environmental compliance into maps, mobile inspections and automated alerts for industrial and manufacturing companies. A computer-vision engineer by training - MIT Lincoln Labs, IQ Engines, Yahoo's Flickr - she walked out of a comfortable Silicon Valley job in 2013 to build software for stormwater permits, of all things, alongside her husband and environmental-engineer co-founder Ryan Janoch. The bet: regulations don't have to be the enemy of either the economy or clean water.

Samuel Ethiopia is the CEO and co-founder of DocSpera, a Silicon Valley surgical coordination platform used by thousands of surgeons and 300-plus health systems to synchronize the messy stretch between a surgical decision and a patient's recovery. A chemical engineer turned strategy consultant turned operator, he carried a Kellogg MMM dual degree and stints at Dow, Eli Lilly, PwC's Strategy&, and Yahoo into the operating room's back office, where he now bets that real-time, AI-driven data can make surgery run on time. He also co-founded The Par Fund to back underrepresented entrepreneurs.
Adam Hyder is the Chief Development Officer and EVP of Engineering at Juniper Square, the private-markets technology company building the operating system for fund administration, investor relations, and partnership enablement. A technology leader with more than two decades of experience, he has run engineering and product at Malwarebytes, BlueJeans Network, Jobvite, and Yahoo HotJobs, and started his career working on Java in its earliest days at Sun Microsystems. He is known for scaling distributed global teams, shipping large-scale SaaS, consumer, and enterprise products, and turning sprawling roadmaps into shipped software.
Ankarino Lara is a product-minded entrepreneur who co-founded Thismoment, a San Francisco enterprise content-marketing platform that helped global brands collect, curate and publish user-generated content across social channels. A Harvard-trained archaeologist who once conserved Maya artifacts at the Peabody Museum, Lara moved from museums to the early consumer web, building products at CNET and Yahoo! before launching Thismoment in 2008 around the idea that the basic unit of human experience is the 'Moment.'
Tod Sacerdoti is a two-time founder and prolific seed investor. He built BrightRoll into a video ad-tech powerhouse that Yahoo bought for $640 million in 2014, then reassembled the band to start Pipedream, a developer integration platform that Workday acquired in early 2026. As a general partner at Flex Capital he has backed 400-plus companies at the seed stage, including Chime, Vercel, Replit and Mercury.