Smartest people In Tech

Smartest CEO: Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple













"The empires of the future," Winston Churchill once said, "are the empires of the mind." Those words have never held more weight. Our greatest technological advances come not through physical might, tools, or cash but through intellect and imagination. As Fortune gets set to acknowledge these advances at our annual Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen (July 22–24), we think it only fitting to introduce you to the field's brawniest brains. These are the people whose collective intelligence propels us into a future that looks nothing like the present. They've dreamed up phones that let us surf the Net, websites that help us feel more connected, and movie characters who step off the screen.
So what do we mean by smart? We salute intelligence, but also impact. Accel partner Jim Breyer is a bright guy, but he is worthy of inclusion on Fortune's list because he applies his mind to investments that have the potential to change lives -- or at least lifestyles. We're most concerned with the present. Thus, you won't find the Polish polymath Nicolaus Copernicus on our list, nor will you find Bill Gates. And this is not a ranking based on pure IQ. In the ecosystem that leads to commercializing technological advances, thoughtful business executives are just as important as engineering geniuses.

So,in short,what constitutes tech savvy today? An alchemy of intellect, ambition, and that uncanny ability to peer around corners.Here are who we think are the masters of universe today:


When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after a 12-year exile, the company was close to bankruptcy. Thirteen years later it has a market cap of $250 billion and is the world's most valuable tech company, transforming whole industries along the way. iTunes reinvented music. Pixar, now part of Disney, elevated animated films. The iPhone changed telecom. And the new iPad has other computer makers scrambling to respond. Rocking one industry could be luck, but upending four? That's smart.

He is a visionary, a micromanager, and a showman who creates such anticipation around new products that their releases are veritable holidays. And Jobs is a pop culture icon like no other business executive: An episode of The Simpsons a few years ago featured a Jobs-like character named Steve Mobs.

His dictator-like control can cause havoc for partners: Jobs, 55, has decided, for example, that Apple products won't support Adobe Flash, the code most video-heavy websites depend on, leading designers to switch to new tools. But Jobs' vision is also what gives these devices their elegance, causing consumers' hearts to flutter.


CEO runner-up: Jeff Bezos
CEO, Amazon

Jeff Bezos never stops innovating. Bezos launched Amazon as an online bookstore in 1994, then turned it into a massive virtual mall open to other vendors' wares. Now he's done the same with Amazon's cloud computing services, which let customers rent data storage and computing power from Amazon. Then there's the Kindle, which has helped redefine the very concept of the book. Though the company hasn't disclosed the number of Kindle users, its eBook selection has grown tenfold to 600,000. And while the iPad is getting all the eReader love these days, Bezos got there first, and virtually every iPad review compares Steve Jobs' tablet to Bezos' device.


CEO runner-up: Mitch Gold•
CEO, Dendreon

For the 192,000 men diagnosed with prostate cancer last year, Dr. Mitch Gold's Seattle-based BioTech company Dendreon may hold the key to their survival. The Food and Drug Administration last April finally approved Provenge, a prostate cancer vaccine that stimulates the body's own immune system to attack tumors. In one clinical trial, Provenge extended the lives of patients with prostate cancer on average by 4.1 months, with 32% of patients still alive three years after treatment. While Gold and Dendreon stand to benefit -- it's estimated Provenge could generate more than $1 billion in U.S. sales -- ultimately the real beneficiaries will be the patients themselves.

CEO runner-up: Jack Ma
CEO, Alibaba Group

Like many entrepreneurs, Ma's success story started with borrowed capital and a dream. In 1999, Ma, a former English teacher, invited 18 people over to his home, pitched the idea of a business-to-business e-commerce site, and snagged $60,000 in funding. Today Alibaba's multitiered empire, which includes e-commerce, consumer retail, and payment platforms and ownership of China Yahoo, now plays a major role in China's booming economy. (The B2B site alone reported $179 million in revenue last quarter, up 49% from the year before.) By launching a $30 million marketing campaign late last year promoting its English-language site and recently acquiring Vendio Services, an e-commerce service company in the U.S., Ma is clearly positioning Alibaba as a future global force.

CEO runner-up: Richard Rosenblatt
CEO, Demand Media

Rosenblatt's big media idea is simple but brilliant: Give the masses what they want. His Demand Media uses a team of freelancers to churn out 7,000 videos and articles a day, based on a sophisticated computer analysis of what online readers are searching for on any given day. The material appears on Demand's own family of sites, but also on mainstream media outlets such as USA Today. Readers are happy, and advertisers apparently are too: Executives say that Demand Media has been profitable since its start, reportedly generating more than $200 million in revenue a year. The company is said to be exploring the possibility of an IPO.

Smartest Executive: Todd Bradley
EVP, HP Personal Systems Group

One in every five PCs sold today is made by Hewlett-Packard, and that's largely thanks to Todd Bradley. He was CEO Mark Hurd's first major hire when Hurd took the reins from Carly Fiorina in 2005. Within a year, Bradley, 49, launched the celebrity-packed "The computer is personal again" ad campaign, recruited designers like Vivienne Tam, and outsold Dell to become the largest PC maker. Under his leadership, HP's $42 billion personal systems group, which also includes mobile devices, workstations, and Internet services, has increased profitability by 300%.

With 28 years' experience in management, Bradley has proved his ability to help struggling businesses turn around. As CEO of PalmOne (which later became Palm), he shifted the company from PDAs to smartphones, and he cleared up the supply-chain issues that nearly crippled the company. Bradley now believes that HP's future lies in mobile devices; to jump-start that strategy, he's turning to (you guessed it) Palm, which HP acquired for $1.2 billion this spring.

The guy definitely has brainpower, but don't take our word for it. Ask other savvy executives, including Motorola co-CEO Sanjay Jha, who regularly seek his counsel.


Executive runner-up: Dick Costolo
• How we chose the smartest people in tech
COO, Twitter

Since Twitter emerged as a social media phenomenon in 2006, one of the company's persistent issues has been the lack of a business model. That's where Costolo, 46, comes in. The former Google executive and Feedburner CEO was tapped by Twitter last September to head up the social media giant's monetization efforts, which now include the rollout of Promoted Tweets, ads that will appear in search results, user feeds, and third-party Twitter applications like TweetDeck. The company says that more than 10 major advertisers are onboard, including Disney, Starbucks, Virgin America, and Bravo. Will the new ad model fly? Costolo and company promise an update in after the fourth quarter.


Executive runner-up: Michael Grimes
Managing Director and Co-Head of Global Technology Investment Banking, Morgan Stanley

Grimes has worked on some of the biggest tech deals in recent memory. His more than two decades of experience in the business gives him serious credibility, but the investment banker has stayed relevant by shifting his focus along with changes in tech. Even in a bum economy, the Morgan Stanley team led the industry with $60 billion in global technology M&A deals in 2008 and 2009. In the past 12 months, he's advised AdMob in its acquisition by Google, Omniture by Adobe, and Zappos by Amazon (Amazon's largest deal ever), just to name a few. During his career, Grimes, 43, has worked on more than 100 M&A and IPOs, including, in the last year, A123 Systems and Ancestry.com. The one for the history books: Google's $1.9 billion IPO.


Executive runner-up: Andy Rubin
VP of Engineering, GOOGLE (oversees Android)

What Rubin's rather underwhelming job title doesn't tell you is that he's the father of Android, Google's wildly successful mobile operating system. Unlike Apple's walled-garden approach to its iPhone OS, Android remains free and open-source, so any mobile-phone maker can use it in its phones and build its own user interface on top of it, something Motorola has done with its MotoBlur user interface and HTC with Sense. Android's stability and ease of development has also allowed widespread adoption since launching in late 2008. Rubin recently revealed that an eye-popping 160,000 Android-powered phones sell each day. Says the 47-year-old Rubin: "Building a product that people now ask for when they walk into a store is a total thrill."


Executive runner-up: Sheryl Sand
COO, Facebook

Sandberg helped turn Google into a money machine, and now she's working to do the same at Facebook. She's been instrumental in building stronger relationships with advertisers, and this year her team grew the ad business by signing on campaigns from big players like Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and P&G. Along with upping the business side, the company is pushing its presence online: More than 150 million users engage on a monthly basis with Facebook on external websites, and 1 million sites use its Facebook platform. Sandberg, 40, is also helping increase Facebook's physical footprint. In the last year divisions she oversees opened offices in Austin; Hamburg, Germany; and Hyderabad, India.

Smartest Engineer: Christophe Bisciglia
Co-Founder, Cloudera

What kinds of problems could we solve if everyone had access to the computing heft that powers Google? Christophe Bisciglia joined the search giant as a software engineer when he was just out of college and quickly realized that if he shifted his digital workload from an individual computer to a cluster of networked computers, he could crunch data faster. Problem was, most scientists didn't have access to the kind of web-based, or "cloud," computing power of Google.

After teaching a class called Google 101, which taught software engineers at the University of Washington to program on a cloud-size scale, Bisciglia, 29, became obsessed with the possibilities emerging from an open-source project called Hadoop. Hadoop lets engineers take advantage of the massive computing efficiencies that come from networking hundreds of computers. He left Google in 2008 to help start Cloudera, which makes it easier for customers to turn their data into insights using Hadoop. Bisciglia resigned from Cloudera in June but tells Fortune he remains committed to harnessing the massive power of the cloud in new ways. Brains and brawn are definitely a potent combination.



Engineer runners-up: Cheever and D'Angel
Co-Founders, Quora

Founder Mark Zuckerberg isn't the only smart guy at Facebook. The social media giant has spawned a plethora of talented engineers, and several of them have since broken out on their own. In January, Facebook alums Charles Cheever, 28, and Adam D'Angelo, 25, launched Quora, a site where users pose questions that range from "When, how, and why did Journey's `Don't Stop Believing' get its second wind of popularity? to "How do you conceptualize an electron?" In March the company received funding (reportedly $11 million) led by Benchmark Capital. The site is built on the philosophy that people like to share not just information about themselves (viz. Facebook) but also knowledge.


Engineer runner-up: Luke Rajlich
CTO, FarmVille

With 20 million daily players, Zynga's FarmVille has taken social gaming into the mainstream. It matched the biggest game out there in size within 40 days of launching and is now three times the size of the No. 2 game. Behind the scenes Rajlich, 26, leads the engineering team, and one of its main jobs is handling technical issues stemming from FarmVille's unprecedented growth. "We have to deal with problems that no one else in social gaming has to deal with because the game's so big," he says. He joined Zynga as part of the acquisition of a small software company he co-founded called MyMiniLife. Its technology was later used in the creation of FarmVille. But there's nothing mini about his work anymore.


Engineer runner-up: Amit Singhal
Google Fellow, Engineering

If you've ever used Google search, you've benefited from Singhal's work. The software engineer heads up the company's core ranking team, which is constantly working to improve the accuracy, speed, and thoroughness of Google search. When Singhal started at Google in 2000, the search engine of today was pure science fiction. The time between the posting of a web page to the time a person could find that page via Google could take anywhere from 15 to 45 days. Now, thanks to Singhal and his team, users have nearly instant access to websites and blog posts, and up-to-the-minute Twitter updates. "If you reduce the time that it takes for people to find relevant information by just one second, you save several lifetimes a day at Google's volume," he says.


Engineer runner-up: J.B. Straubel
CTO, Tesla

Straubel is on the forefront of electric vehicle development. Tesla founder Elon Musk in 2003 hired Straubel, 34, to help develop technology for Tesla's Roadster, the first limited-production high-performance electric sports car that accelerates from 0 to 60 in less than four seconds. Since then, the Roadster has sold out, Tesla has gone public, and the company is moving full steam ahead on developing the 2012 Model S, a four-door family sedan with a base price of $49,900 after a tax credit. "One of the most interesting dilemmas we'll face is the transition from a fossil-fuel-based system to a renewable-energy-based system," he says. "It's exciting to be at this tipping point, to explore solutions and map out a new transportation infrastructure."

Smartest founder: Mark Zuckerberg
CEO, Facebook

Some people surely scoffed in 2006 when a 21-year-old college dropout turned down a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo. But from the outset Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was sure that the website he started coding from his Harvard University dorm room would be more than a time waster. He was designing a utility -- much like the telephone or the radio before it.

At the company's F8 developers' conference this spring, Zuckerberg, now 26, launched Facebook's most ambitious set of features yet. New social tools let any website (say, Fortune.com) leverage Facebook's network of relationships to make recommendations to visitors who are Facebook users.

Privacy advocates have criticized Zuckerberg for the move, but he's been keenly insightful about what information users want to share on the web. Some analysts say that over time users will start coming directly to Facebook to seek out relevant information, a development that's of concern to one search-engine giant. Outsmarting Google? That's certainly nothing to scoff at.


Founder runner-up: Marc Benioff
Chairman and CEO, Salesforce.com

When Benioff, 45, started Salesforce in 1999, he believed his company's model of delivering software via the Internet would kill conventional software. That hasn't happened yet. "It's going to take more than one or two decades to get that done," admits Benioff, but his business has evolved into one of the leading cloud-computing services for enterprises, with more than 77,000 clients, including SunTrust Banks, Egencia, and the Weather Channel. Salesforce's success lies in its low-cost infrastructure: Companies don't have to deal with software licenses and extra hardware. That convenience, along with innovations such as social media functions like Chatter, will contribute to $1.5 billion in 2010 revenue, according to the company.

Founder runners-up: Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Co-founders, Google

Since founding Google in 1998, Page, 37, and Brin, 36, have extended Google's dominance in online advertising by branching into new areas such as Google Maps, gmail, and Google Books. But at the end of the day, Brin and Page appear to be devoted to Google's core search business. Their Android mobile-phone operating system has helped popularize multimedia phones, for example, but the company doesn't actually charge a licensing fee for its use. Instead, Google's goal with Android (and gmail and other services) is to help drive consumers to its search engine, and in turn attract advertisers who want to reach those consumers.

Founder runner-up: Wang Chuanfu
Founder, BYD

Wang's Shanghai-based BYD is the world's largest manufacturer of mobile-phone batteries; it's also a car company that's forging ahead with electric cars like its plug-in crossover, the e6. In 2008, Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway bought a $230 million stake in BYD in the firm belief that Wang's business could one day become the world's biggest automaker and a leader in solar power. It's off to a good start: BYD and Daimler recently announced a joint venture, worth $88 million, in which the companies will collaborate on a new generation of electric vehicles. For his efforts, Wang, 44, has been richly rewarded: He's widely believed to be China's richest man.

Founder runner-up: Jack Dorsey
Creator, co-founder, and chairman, Twitter

What started out as a way for Dorsey to let friends know about his goings-on has gone from a side project to a wonder rivaling Facebook. Twitter lays claim to more than 75 million users who broadcast their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Now Dorsey, 33, is on to his next project, Square, a mobile-phone payment service that relies on the same tenets as Twitter -- immediacy, transparency, and approachability -- and enables users to conduct credit card transactions with a phone and a free add-on device in 10 seconds or less.