Image via Complex Original
For every Larry Ellison or Jeff Bezos, you have that third-tier entrepreneur—the under-the-radar boss changing the tech game with their popular startup business and caking huge on the financial front. Several of the industry’s biggest players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Dick Costolo, found themselves a part of this special clique several years back and broke out to reach an elite class status that only a handful of other big wigs have managed to achieve. But a new era is upon us, welcoming a high number of ambitious tech figures who are creeping on the come up and making a name for themselves amongst smaller circles. These are the 12 Tech Ballers You Should Know right now.
Ori Allon
Company: Urban Compass
Position: Founder & Executive Chairman
Allon pulled off an insane feat by upping his wealth from $30 millon to $70 million in just one week with the latest VC raising for his startup, which allows users to discover and secure apartment rentals in NYC. Now the business is worth over $150 million.
Nick D'Aloisio
Company: Summly
Position: Founder
The British-Australian programmer became an overnight millionaire when he invented the popular summarization app. Summly managed to attract the interest of the wealthiest man in Asia, Li Ka-shing, who invested in the company with several celebrities including Ashton Kutcher. It was acquired by Yahoo for $30 million earlier this year. You are now looking at one smart (and rich) 18-year-old.
Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström
Company: Rdio
Position: Co-founders
Looking over the Scandinavian pair’s resume, these dudes obviously fall under the same category with the rest of the industry’s elite tech entrepreneurs. Yet till this day Friis and Niklas Zennström have remained under the radar, even after selling Skype to eBay for $2.6 billion back in 2005 and snatching a percent of the profits earned from the Microsoft buyout two years ago. But their new ad-free music subscription service, Rdio, continues to gain traction and raise its net worth. Consider it a matter of months before the two sell it off for some major bread.
Leah Busque
Company: TaskRabbit
Position: Founder
Women are a force to be reckoned with on the startup front and Busque is living proof of it. Her online mobile marketplace has raised $20 million in venture capital over the past year, expanding the platform to 19 U.S. markets and launching in London last month. TaskRabbit has certainly helped alleviate the job crisis on domestic soil and serves as a great side hustle. Trailblazer.
Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler
Company: Kickstarter
Position: Co-founders
The world's largest crowdfunding platform serves as a home to some of the greatest independent projects of the modern day, and has managed to procure over 12 million pledges in its five-year existence. Kickstarter's channeled enough money for numerous campaigns to get off the ground, and while valued at an unknown, yet high value, the CEO has gone public about never selling the company or pursing an IPO. Sophisticated ballin'
Travis Kalanick
Company: Uber
Position: Co-founder and CEO
Kalanick admits he founded the global taxi and limosuine app to become a "baller in San Francisco." Mission accomplished. Having recently secured $358 million in a C Series round (on top of the $300 million he'd previously raised), Uber's valuation looks to be approaching the $4 billion mark. See where baller's ambition gets you.
Emmett Shear and Justin Kan
Company: Twitch.TV
Positions: Co-founder/CEO and Co-founder/President
Video game streaming began as a niche idea that progressively transformed into a mainstream phenomenon thanks to the launch of Twitch.tv. All praises go to both Khan and Shear for launching the platform, which remains a fixture on the competitive gaming circuit, as well as the current next-gen consoles: PS4 and Xbox One (in 2014). The service just cashed in on a $20 million investment from Take-Two and several other parties, upping its value at a rumored $300 million.
Joe Fernandez
Company: Klout
Position: Founder and CEO
His Klout bio tagline reads "Just trying to get enough beans to make a burrito." Well, the brother got enough cake beans to franchise numerous Chiptole stores across the nation. Fernandez's social importance ranking engine secured a $30-million investment last year and is still worth several millions despite its struggle-buss state.
Bobby Murphy and Evan Spiegel
Company: Snapchat
Positions: Co-Founders
The duo's photo-flashing app that allows users to send a photo or video to others and have it deleted in a matter of seconds has become one of Silicon Valley's biggest success stories: sharing over 100 million snaps daily. In fact, Murphy and Spiegel believe the service is blowing up at such an exponetial rate, they rejected a $3 billion cash buyout from Facebook. Who in their right mind would do that? Real shot-callers.
Kevin Chou
Company: Kabam
Position: CEO
Starting out as an investment bank analyst, Chou's financial background played a huge role in the creation of his social games startup. His vision of creating niche gaming titles that appeal to social media users paid off huge with two of Kabam's biggest titles, Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis, earning over $100 million in revenue in the past three years. Kabam is now worth $700 million with talks of the company pursuing an IPO.
Ehud Shabtai and Uri Levine
Company: Waze
Positions: Co-founder/CTO and Co-founder/President
Waze helped shapeshift the mobile traffic-mapping landscape once it launched onto every major smartphone platform and recently became a Google subsidiary for the asking price of $1 billion. As you can tell, this made the compay's co-founders ridiculously rich. Shabtai supposedly carries an est. net worth of $78 million alone, with Levine holding down $38 million. It pays big to do business with Google.
Satoshi Nakamoto
Company: Bitcoin
Position: Founder
No one anticipated Bitcoin to blow up as fast as it did, reaching an exchange value of $700 with the company appraised at over $100 million. But while the company continues to take over the virtual currency conglomerate and grow in popularity, its founder remains anonymous. In fact, no one knows whether Nakamoto is male, female, or possibly an extraterrestrial. All we know is he/she/it is living Bill Gates large right now.
