2009 TechFellow Awards: The Winners


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.

Scott Banister

Andrew Frame

Will Harvey

Blake Krikorian

Mike McCue

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.

Michael Abbott

Adam D’Angelo

Sandy Jen

Elaine Wherry

Eric Ries

Rich Skrenta

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.

Michael Birch

Daniel Burka

Adam Goldberg

Zach Klein

Jeffrey Veen

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*.

Scott Dietzen

Mike Jones

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

David Sprosty

Jason Rapp

Scott Weiss