TOM ANDERSON MySpace Co-founder and President
Having more than 11 million
friends is all in a day’s work for Tom Anderson, the current president and one of
the founders of MySpace, one of the world’s largest online social networks.
Every MySpace account includes Anderson as a default first friend who is
invited to view each personal network. When Anderson’s own rock group failed,
he needed a place to post his songs. He started MySpace in 2003 with his
friend, Chris De Wolfe, as a free tool to help musicians promote their songs
and allow music lovers to create their own Web pages devoted to sharing their favorite
music with like-minded admirers. Two years later they sold the business to
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580 million. Anderson graduated from the
University of California – Los Angeles in 2001 with a master’s degree in film
and from the University of California – Berkeley in 1998 with a bachelor’s
degree in English and rhetoric.
BILL GATES Microsoft Founder
When Bill Gates stepped down from
his day-to-day activities at Microsoft in 2008, his action marked the end of an
era that shaped the computer world. He remains the company’s chairman and
advisor, but he now devotes much of his time directing the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, a philanthropic organization working to help people worldwide lead
healthy, productive lives. His foundation currently is awarding $3 billion in grants
to improve education and graduation rates via technology, with an emphasis on
online learning. Gates learned to program computers when he was 13 years old.
Early in his career, he developed the BASIC programming language for the MITS
Altair, one of the first microcomputers. He founded Microsoft in 1975 with Paul
Allen, and five years later they licensed the first operating system, called
PC-DOS, to IBM for $80,000. This decision to license, rather than sell, the
software is considered one of the wisest business decisions Gates ever made.
Today, Microsoft’s Windows and Office products dominate the software market.
