In light of the upcoming celebration of the founders of the US, we thought we would celebrate some forgotten founders. Here are startup founders who are too often overlooked.
Jawed Karim is the third co-founder of YouTube, alongside Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Karim uploaded the first video to YouTube, and is known to be publicly opposed to its connection to Google+.
Chris DeWolfe is the former co-founder and CEO of Myspace. He is often overlooked since every user of the site was automatically connected with Tom Anderson, the company’s other co-founder.
Larry Sanger co-founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in 2001. He left the company in 2002 and has since been critical of Wikipedia.
David Filo worked on Yahoo with Jerry Yang. In the early days, Yahoo ran his Filo Server Program to serve websites.
Ron Wayne is known as the third co-founder of Apple Inc, founding the company on April 1, 1976 with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. He left the company very early on, selling his shares of stock for $800.
Dustin Moskovitz was one of the five founders of the social media giant Facebook. He was the company’s first CTO and oversaw many of the technical operations of the site.
Dylan Smith (left) co-founded Box with Aaron Levie (right) and is the current CFO of the company. While Smith played a key role in the success of the company, he hasn’t received nearly as much the spotlight as much as Levie.
Shawn Fanning helped develop the P2P file sharing service, Napster. During Napster’s heyday Fanning made it on the cover of Time Magazine, but after the success of the movie The Social Network, Sean Parker became associated with Napster.
Jim McKelvey co-founded Square with Jack Dorsey after he discovered a need for a mobile payment service when trying to sell a piece of glass art he had created. McKelvey designed the actual Square reader and he currently sits on the board of Square.
In keeping with the US Independence Day theme we mentioned at the beginning of this piece, John Jay is one of the overshadowed “Founding Fathers” of the United States of America. Jay authored some of the Federalist papers and helped negotiate the Treaty of Paris in 1783, ending the Revolutionary War. He was a member of the Federalist Party and initially tried to abolish slavery in New York in 1777.
Conner is a former Senior Editor for TechRepublic. He is now a Senior Research Analyst at 451 Research.
