Ilya Zhitomirskiy | Diaspora

image credit: Henrik Moltke/Flickr  Ilya Zhitomirskiy is one of the co-founders of Diaspora, an open-source personal web server. Zhitomirskiy developed Diaspora with co-founders Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Daniel Grippi. 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.

Jack Dorsey | Twitter

image credit: Joi/FlickrJack Dorsey was born on November 19, 1976 in St. Louis, Missouri. Dorsey is best known as the creator of Twitter, a social networking service. He has also started a company called Square that makes a device that enables individuals to take credit card payments via an iPhone.

James Hong | Hot or Not

image credit: Jackson West/FilckrJames Hong co-founded the website Hot or Not with Jim Young. Hot or Not is a site that allows users to rate the attractiveness of photos submitted voluntarily by others.

Jason Calacanis | Mahalo

image credit: David Sifry/FlickrJason Calacanis was born on November 28, 1970 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York. Calacanis founded the web directory Mahalo in May 2007. He is also the co-founder of ThisWeekIn.com and is the host of This Week In Startups. Calcanis founded Open Angel Forum in 2009 and is as an angle investor he has invested in Gowalla, Blippy, gdgt, Thumbtack, and Backupify.

Jason Fried | 37signals

image credit: Jemima G/Flickr Jason Fried founded 37signals, a web application company, with co-founders Carlos Segura, and Ernest Kim. Basecamp, a web-based project-management tool, was the first application for 37signals which was followed by Ta-Da list, Backpack, Writeboard, Campfire and Highrise.