People from United States

John Atanasoff

Physicist who built the first electronic digital computing device

1903 – 1995

Joe Gebbia

Designer who co-founded Airbnb

Born 1981

Jimmy Wales

Co-founder of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia

Born 1966

Jim Gray

Database pioneer who made reliable transaction processing possible

1944 – 2012

Jim Clark

Founder of Silicon Graphics, Netscape and Healtheon

Born 1944

Jessica Livingston

Co-founder of Y Combinator and author of Founders at Work

Jeff Weiner

CEO of LinkedIn from 2009 to 2020

Born 1970

Jeff Hawkins

Inventor of the PalmPilot and neuroscientist of intelligence

Born 1957

Jef Raskin

Apple interface expert who started the Macintosh project

1943 – 2005

Bill Hewlett

Co-founder of Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage

1913 – 2001

Will Wright

Game designer who created SimCity and The Sims

Born 1960

Whitney Wolfe Herd

Founder and CEO of the dating app Bumble

Born 1989

Wesley A. Clark

Engineer who designed the LINC, an early personal computer

1927 – 2016

Weili Dai

Co-founder of Marvell Technology, one of the few women to co-found a major chip company

Walter Brattain

Bell Labs physicist who co-invented the transistor

1902 – 1987

Vladimir Zworykin

Russian-American engineer who developed electronic television at RCA

1888 – 1982

Vint Cerf

Co-designer of TCP/IP and one of the “fathers of the internet”

Born 1943

Vinod Khosla

Indian-American co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures

Born 1955

Vannevar Bush

Engineer who led US wartime science and imagined the “memex”, a precursor of the web

1890 – 1974

Ursula Burns

First Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, as CEO of Xerox

Born 1958

Tom Siebel

Founder of Siebel Systems and C3.ai

Born 1952

Tom Preston-Werner

GitHub co-founder who created Gravatar, Jekyll and TOML

Born 1979

Tim Sweeney

Founder of Epic Games and creator of the Unreal Engine

Thomas J. Watson Jr.

IBM president who led the company into the computer age

1914 – 1993