Before Lyft was Lyft, it was Zimride. Back in those days, Logan Green ceremoniously only ate beans until they raised money. Billions of rides and tens of billions of dollars later, they’ve forever changed the game in transportation.
lyft
Logan Green & John Zimmer
Building Breakthroughs
Todd McKinnon and Freddy Kerrest struggled to find product-market fit in the early days. But they persevered. As Todd has said, “Sometimes you have to believe even when you don’t believe.” Ten years after their founding, they’ve built a business with over 100 Million registered users, an extraordinary feat in B2B software.
Okta
Todd McKinnon & Frederic Kerrest
Building Breakthroughs
Over countless dinners in NYC and a few favorite foot massage salons, we bonded over the future of expanding the representation of women in media. They grew into a global media company focused on providing tools, inspiration, and entertainment to millions of millennial and Gen Z women. In 2019 the company was acquired by Vice Media Group.
Refinery29
Christine Barberich, Justin Stefano, Philippe von Borries, & Piera Gelardi
Building Breakthroughs
Manny Medina shows how “immigrants get the job done.” Raised on a shrimp farm with Communist parents in Ecuador, Manny came to the USA knowing computer languages better than English. Now, he heads the leading sales engagement company.
Outreach
Manuel Medina
Building Breakthroughs
There will be a day when we wonder how people ever died in cars. Qasar Younis and Peter Ludwig, “Made in Detroit” before they came to Silicon Valley, who worked at companies like General Motors and Bosch before Google Maps and Android Auto, are fast-forwarding us all to that better future.
Applied Intuition
Peter Ludwig & Qasar Younis
Building Breakthroughs
Nat Friedman is on the world-wide sailing trip and learns that can X out of Novel. Cancels his sailing trip and goes home immediately. Great opportunities won’t wait. Power to the developers, acquired by Microsoft, and now runs Github inside of Microsoft. Initiative to strike while the iron is hot and there’s a path to bring power to developers.
Xamarin
Miguel de Icaza & Nat Friedman
Building Breakthroughs
In 2007, a young Justin Kan walked into a coffee shop with a camera on his baseball cap and a backpack full of networking gear. He said “Justin.tv is a reality-show that livecasts my life on the Internet.” Thankfully, Justin.tv pivoted from this clearly awful idea into Twitch, which now livestreamed over 1.1 Billion minutes in 2020.
Twitch
Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, Kyle Vogt
Building Breakthroughs
In the early days, we debated whether to call it Twttr or Voicemail 2.0. Luckily, we got to buy a vowel. Trillions of tweets later, Twitter has changed the rules in media, politics, culture, and technology.
Twitter
The First Tweet
Building Breakthroughs
Clover Health dares to be different in many ways. They started with medicare done differently. Changing the rules in medicare and changing the rule on how startups play offense. Then they decided to be our first company to go public via SPAC.
We started a movement that put seed investing on the map and made it a permanent part of venture funding. Back then we had skeptics of our own, so we know what it’s like to have doubters. But we also know what it’s like to turn them into believers.