We’d like to congratulate the twenty-two inaugural winners of tonight’s TechFellow awards, each of whom has made outstanding contributions in one of four different categories: Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. Below is a listing of the winners, broken down by category.
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.
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.
Product Design and Marketing
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.
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*.
don’t really follow this at all
seems like a bit like the wank awards
Glad I’m not the only one a bit confused by all of this.
Yeah I don’t get it either…who among these people invented something on the order of the wheel or printing press?
i remember AOL dialup being a real pain in the butt. best wishes to anyone in the awards.
Can’t wait until it’s a public company.
Would be nice if the winners were covered as well (instead of the categories).
i wonder what will come of this
gratz to the winners
Had to dig but found http://www.techfellow.com with more information
Hehe.. anyways congratulations.
Without taking anything away from these well-deserved awards, i would note that the vast majority of these people made their contributions within the last 10 years. It would be nice if (in the future) you also recognized the earlier generations of visionaries, the ones who creating the enabling technologies and the earliest software products, in some cases as long as 40 years ago. Without their innovations and examples, it might have been impossible for tonight’s winners to have accomplished what they did.
That is an interesting point. Alan Turing, Manchester. Without which – who knows?
in that case, we should thank everyone who ever was or will be, for nothing is accomplised alone. i’m sure these people and many others worked smart and hard to get recognition. nice work.
Although I agree that it is worth remembering the pioneers (who were themselves in debt to earlier pioneers; to quote Sir Isaac Newton: “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.”), the computer science pioneers of whom you speak have already received large amounts of recognition through such prestigious awards as the ACM Turing Award, and so forth. The TechFellow awards are to honor what a younger generation has been able to achieve, specifically in the realm of high tech entrepreneurship, on top of whatever was achieved before their time.
congrats
You forgot one… Jeff Hock, All around kick ass dude.
You’re right …….. that guy totally rules.
i think that is an AWESOME idea techcrunch, and there are some serious stars on here – but i’d like to request and suggest a few things:
a “rising stars” category (aka ‘ones to watch’ – which may be culled from runners-up?)
a review of runnersup/near finalists so that we can see the awesome folks who simply didn’t make the final cut (qi lu? there are so many to list it’s ridiculous…)
a clear “methodology” or statement of evaluation process that explains evaluation and selection criteria
a broader selection of judges!! i pick:
- mike moritz
- robin reed
- some others in venture and vc search firms
Congratz folks.
Gratz to all winners.
Waiting for next year …