Ruba Borno, Cisco's VP of Growth Initiatives and Chief of Staff
The 34-year-old Ruba Borno joined Cisco from the Boston Consulting Group in June as part of recently-appointed CEO Chuck Robbins' new administration.
Cisco is the world's biggest maker of computer network equipment and she's charged with finding new markets for Cisco to enter.
Jeff Hammerbacher, Cloudera's Chief scientist and cofounder
Cloudera is the 800-pound gorilla in the hot big data technology known as Hadoop.
Jeff Hammerbacher, the 32-year-old ex-Facebooker not only helped found it, he is now using it, working with Mount Sinai in NYC, to help cure cancer.
Solomon Hykes, Docker's CTO and founder
The 26-year-old Solomon Hykes invented a technology called "containers" that is taking the enterprise cloud computing world by storm.
Docker has raised more than $162 million and spawned a crop of competitors, and has every big name in tech from Amazon to Microsoft calling it up for partnerships.
Kirk Phelps, Carbon3D's VP of product management
The 33-year-old former Apple-er Kirk Phelps is working on a 3D printer that grows objects out of a pool of liquid.
And his company has nabbed $100 million in backing from Google Ventures, as well as former Ford CEO Alan Mulally to its board.
Lisa Seacat DeLuca, IBM's mobile software engineer and inventor extraordinaire
The 32-year-old Lisa Seacat DeLuca is the most prolific woman inventor in IBM’s history.
So far, she's wracked up 180 patents, with another 200-ish pending, and she's teaching others at the company how to invent and get patents, too.
Paola Santana, Matternet's COO and cofounder
The 29-year-old Paola Santana, a former Dominican lawyer and Fullbright scholar, co-founded Matternet in 2011.
She's helping create the world’s first commercial network of drone delivery vehicles and has already lined up a few pilot programs delivering medical equipment in places like Haiti, Bhutan and Papua New Guinea and delivering packages in Switzerland.
Simon Vallee, Slack's senior product manager
The 34-year-old Simon Vallee came to Slack when the skyrocketing startup bought his two-person company, Spaces, in 2014, Slack's first acquisition. (And Vallee sold his previous startup, Open Cal to Groupon, too.) He's now helping Slack add features that lets teams share documents.
Chris Wanstrath, GitHub's CEO and cofounder
The 30-year-old Chris Wanstrath helped create GitHub, which has become the largest code "repository" in the world, and a big, big deal in the developer world.
That means it hosts applications that programmers want to freely share with, and work on, with others.
Cassidy Williams, Clarifai's developer evangelist and software engineer
The 23-year-old Cassidy Williams has become one of the most watched women in the tech scene for encouraging other young women to learn to code.
She's been to the White House and was featured in a documentary and is a popular speaker at conferences.
Michelle Zatlyn, CloudFlare cofounder and head of user experience
The 31-year-old Michelle Zatlyn cofounded unicorn startup CloudFlare in 2009 to help make web sites faster and safer.
It's grown so big so fast that it now handles 5% of all Web traffic. It's used by over 2 million websites that generate 500 billion page views per month, and it's adding 5,000 new websites per day, Zatlyn says.
