We’re only a couple weeks aways from the 9th Annual Crunchies show at the San Francisco War Memorial when we will honor a select group of the best and brightest startups and leaders in the tech industry.
Today, we’re looking at some of the top leaders in the tech industry who are contending for the Crunchie for CEO of the Year, an award given to the leader who has had the most critical impact on the tech landscape during their watch. Below are the CEOs that have been selected as finalists for the CEO of the Year award, as well as a look back at some of the awesome leaders who have been given this award in previous years.
The 2015 Nominees
Tim Cook
Talk about tough acts to follow. Since being appointed as Apple’s CEO by Steve Jobs in 2011, Tim Cook has had to navigate periods of unprecedented success and occasional backlash at the helm of one of the most valuable companies around. His tenure has seen major product releases, including many notable releases this past year: the Apple Watch, the iPad Pro and the new Apple TV.
Jack Dorsey
You probably can’t list Jack Dorsey‘s accolades in 140 characters or fewer but maybe that’s why he’s toying with the idea of a 10,000-character tweet. The dual CEO of Square and Twitter has had a pretty busy 2015, seeing his mobile payments startup go public while also making some major feature changes to his ever-evolving social media platform.
Elon Musk
Few people seem to be as busy as Elon Musk. The Xip2/PayPal/Tesla Motors/SpaceX/OpenAI/SolarCity founder has been hard at work in 2015, particularly with SpaceX in landing rockets (with varying degrees of success) on floating platforms and with Tesla Motors where his company is busy pioneering the self-driving technologies that may redefine the future of transportation.
Susan Wojcicki
Following Google’s transition into Alphabet, Susan Wojcicki, who had been running the show at YouTube for a while, was give the title of CEO as it was spun off into a separate entity. She convinced Google executives to buy the video-sharing startup in 2006 and is now overseeing such new initiatives as the company’s subscription service YouTube Red and its YouTube Gaming product.
Mark Zuckerberg
When the Crunchies began in 2007, Facebook was just a couple of years old and had 58 million monthly active users. Fast forward to the present and their last reported MAUs was 1.55 billion. Mark Zuckerberg has been at the helm of the social media giant since he helped found it in his Harvard dorm room. He’s a two-time Crunchie winner, and this year he has seen such milestones as the explosive growth of Facebook Video, Instagram and Messenger, as well as newer initiatives surrounding Facebook’s virtual reality company Oculus.
Past Winners
Toni Schneider – 1st Annual Crunchies Winner
Schneider served as the CEO of Automattic, the web development platform behind WordPress. Schneider is now serving as a partner at True Ventures.
Mark Zuckerberg – 2nd Annual Crunchies Winner
See above for various accolades, MAUs, net worths, etc.
Mark Pincus – 3rd Annual Crunchies Winner
Pincus founded and is the acting CEO of Zynga, a games company that has made all of the smartphone apps you play in bed all night, including (but not limited to) FarmVille, Words with Friends, Mafia Wars and Draw Something.
Andrew Mason – 4th Annual Crunchies Winner
Mason was the founder and CEO of Groupon, a company that gives you great coupon deals and is responsible for successful first dates everywhere.
Jeff Weiner – 5th Annual Crunchies Winner
Weiner is the CEO at LinkedIn where he’s helped grow the very professional networking site to nearly 374 million monthly users.
Mark Zuckerberg – 6th Annual Crunchies Winner
See above, and then above again.
Dick Costolo – 7th Annual Crunchies Winner
Costolo was the CEO of Twitter for nearly five years, during which time the company went public. He’s a comedian at heart but he’s also pretty good at being rich so he’s going to be joining Index Partners this year as a partner.
Marc Benioff – 8th Annual Crunchies Winner
Benioff is the CEO of Salesforce where he has been since he started the company in 1999. He’s done a lot of really cool things, but none quite as cool as being our most recent Crunchie award winner.
Tickets to the show, which will be held on February 8 at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, are still available starting at $115, and you can pick up your ticket to the event that’s best described as the Oscars of Startups and Technology on our ticketing page.
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