Business Insider named 10 figures in the consumer tech industry to its list of 100 people transforming business.
Profiles compiled by Nick Bastone, Lisa Eadicicco, Ben Gilbert, Paige Leskin, Becky Peterson, Rob Price, Dave Smith, Antonio Villas-Boas, and Troy Wolverton.Jeff Dean, a senior fellow for artificial intelligence at Google, is making the AI of science fiction a realityGoogle is synonymous with search. But the company's CEO has made it clear that the future is artificial intelligence.
"It's one thing to look at your design on your computer screen and say it's great, but it's another when it's somebody standing in the rain on the street corner at night trying to use your app," Dill told Business Insider. As a gay black woman, Hamilton started Backstage Capital, a venture-capital firm, in 2015 from scratch to invest in companies led by underrepresented founders — women, people of color, and LGBTQ people.
In March, Hamilton handed over the CEO reins of the firm's operational arm in order to focus on raising capital, working with founders and serving as an"ambassador" to promote the Backstage mission. With regular speaking engagements, several podcasts and a book deal, Hamilton is spreading the message that a more representative tech industry is a more innovative tech industry.
With pressure growing on them to address the issues related to it, Google, Apple, and Facebook in the past year all introduced new features to minimize the distractions caused by their devices and services. Harris calls such moves"baby steps." It's an ambitious long-term goal for Apple, but so was getting all of Apple's facilities worldwide to run on 100% renewable energy, which the company announced it had accomplished last year.
"We think that the act of software creation doesn't have be innately intertwined with writing code as we know it today," Howie Liu, Airtable's CEO and one of the cofounders, says. He added that Airtable hopes to"democratize a lot of the value of creating software."