image credit: TechCrunch50-2008/FlickrPeter Thiel was born in 1967 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Thiel co-founded PayPal along with Elon Musk, and Max Levchin and was its CEO. He was an early investor in Facebook making an angel investment of $500,000 in Facebook for %10.2 of the company in 2004. He is currently a managing partner in the Founders Fund.
image credit: Henrik Moltke/Flickr Raphael Sofaer is one of the co-founders of Diaspora, an open-source personal web server. Grippi developed Diaspora with co-founders Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy. All students at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The aim of Diaspora is to be a decentralized social network. Unlike Facebook, users set up their own server or "seed" to host content and seeds can then interact to share social data. The group received donations of over $200,000 via Kickstarter, an online threshold pledge funding system for funding creative projects. One of the contributers was from Mark Zuckerberg founder and CEO of Facebook.
image credit: Joi/FlickrReid Hoffman attended Stanford University and Oxford University. He is the founder of LinkedIn a social networking site primarily for business and job search connections.
Richard M. Stallman was born on March 16, 1953 in New York City, New York. He is the president of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman is the creator of GNU Project a free Unix-like operating system. He also is responsible for the copyleft licensing concept and developed the very respected text editor Emacs.
image source: Jared and Corin/Wikimedia CommonsRob Malda (aka Commmander Taco) was born on May 10, 1976. Malda is the founder of Slashdot, one of the first news aggregation websites.
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