Last year TechCrunch partnered with Founders Fund on an innovative awards program called the TechFellow Awards to recognize top high-tech entrepreneurs. The 2009 TechFellow Awards recognized 22 inaugural innovators across four categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation.
Founders Fund is expanding the awards program this year and added New Enterprise Associates (NEA) as co-host. Together, Founders Fund and NEA will grant each TechFellow $100,000 to invest in a start-up of their choice, more than doubling last year’s award size. Additionally, a new fund structure will allow each TechFellow to share in the interest of all 2010 TechFellow companies. Last year’s TechFellows helped fund and found fFlick, Bidfire, Quora, Flipboard, HipChat and others. Check out last year’s winners.
We invite the tech community to nominate candidates for this year’s 5 award categories:
1. Engineering Leadership
- Engineering Leadership candidates are people who have demonstrated technical excellence, built amazing technology infrastructure and products, or led teams that together built complex and elegant solutions that changed our lives. They are the uber geeks who calculate 10-digit squares in their heads, and write a thousand bug-free lines of code on the fly without skipping a beat.
- 2009 TechFellows: Michael Abbott, Adam D’Angelo, Sandy Jen, Elaine Wherry, Eric Ries, Rich Skrenta
2. General Management
- General Management candidates are people who have built the teams and organizations that create and deliver great technology and products to the world. They are company builders who provide foundations and processes for all the rest of the geeks and dreamers to make their dreams reality. They are the folks who wake up at 6am and open the doors, make the donuts, play reveille, and lead the charge to take the hill. They make it *happen*.
- 2009 TechFellows: Scott Dietzen, Mike Jones, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, David Sprosty,
Jason Rapp, Scott Weiss
3. Product Design
- Product Design and Marketing candidates are people who have designed insanely great products, who have made technology beautiful, who have created the marketing campaign that blows you away and make you want to go out and buy ten of them for your whole family. These are the storytellers, the artists, the people who make our dreams come alive.
- 2009 TechFellows: Michael Birch, Daniel Burka, Adam Goldberg, Zach Klein, Jeffrey Veen
4. Disruptive Innovation
- This category is meant to highlight the visionaries, the starry-eyed fools who believe when no one else will. They are undaunted when told NO by stern parents, when told it WON’T WORK by a thousand dismissive VCs, when failure after failure would dash the hopes of lesser mortals. These are the men and women whose incredible ideas burst forth like Athena from their foreheads, and they know what it means to make Fire, the Wheel, and the Printing Press.
- 2009 TechFellows: Scott Banister, Andrew Frame, Will Harvey, Blake Krikorian, Mike McCue
5. Life Science Innovation
- New category for 2010 to recognize new leadership in the life sciences
To recommend an innovator for TechFellow consideration by the nominating commitee please fill out the form below. Nominates must be submitted by 6 pm PST on Monday, November 29.
The 2010 TechFellow Awards Nominating Committee members are:
- Michael Arrington (Founder, TechCrunch)
- Peter Barris (Managing General Partner, NEA)
- John Battelle (Founder/Chairman/CEO, Federated Media)
- Ron Conway (Managing Partner, SV Angel)
- Esther Dyson (Chairman, EDventure)
- Shawn Fanning (Founder, Napster, SNOCAP, Rupture)
- Drew Houston (Founder/CEO, Dropbox)
- Max Levchin (Founder/CEO, Slide; Co-Founder, PayPal)
- Andrew Mason (Founder/CEO, Groupon)
- Dave McClure (Founding Partner, 500 Startups; Former Director, Founders Fund II Angel Program)
- John McKinley (Founder/CEO, OurParents)
- Jonathan Miller (CEO Digital Media, News Corp)
- Tim O’Reilly, (Founder, O’Reilly Media)
- Sean Parker (Co-Founder, Napster, Plaxo, Causes; Founding President, Facebook; Managing Partner, Founders Fund)
- Aaron Patzer (Founder/CEO, Mint.com)
- John Pleasants (CEO, Playdom)
- Geoff Ralston (CEO, LaLa; former Chief Product Officer, Yahoo!)
- Terry Semel (Chariman/CEO, Windsor Media; Former Chairman/CEO, Yahoo!)
- David Sacks (Founder/CEO, Yammer; COO, PayPal)
- Scott Sandell (General Partner, NEA)
- Peter Thiel (Managing Partner, Founders Fund; Chairman & Co-Founder, Palantir Technologies; Former Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder, PayPal)
- Michael Yanover (Business Development, Creative Artists Agency)
Final fellowship selections will be announced at the second annual awards ceremony to be held Thursday, December 2, in San Francisco.