Tech

The most important tech entrepreneurs from all 50 states

Biz Carson and Nathan McAlone

2015-07-11T17:03:00Z

bill gates steve jobs wozniak 2 — From left, Apple's Steve Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Getty Images

You don't need to be born in Silicon Valley to make it as a tech entrepreneur.

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As this list proves, founders come from every corner of the U.S., and each state has someone who has changed the tech landscape.

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Here's a list of the biggest founders from each state plus Washington D.C.

And if you think we've overlooked someone big in your state, leave a note in the comments or tweet at @sai.

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Alabama: Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia and Wikia, credits his upbringing in Huntsville, Alabama for his passion for education. Despite running the fifth most popular website in the world, his net worth is estimated to be slightly over $1 million.

Jimmy Wales — Jimmy Wales, co-founder Wikipedia Frank Schulenberg/Flickr

Alaska: Larry Sanger, the other co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Infobitt, moved to Anchorage when he was seven.

Larry Sanger Wikipedia — Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger

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Arizona: Phoenician Joan Ganz Cooney changed television forever when she helped found the Children's Television Network, the creators of Sesame Street. Her career didn't stop in showtime, though. She founded the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which specializes in increasing literacy through digital technology. The eponymous center has hosted things like the National STEM Video Game Challenge and launched a news site dedicated to reporting on educational gaming.

Joan Ganz Cooney

Arkansas: Brad Feld has bounced around a lot: born in Arkansas, raised in Dallas, then lived in Boston for over a decade before moving to Boulder, Colorado. He’s most known for founding Foundry Group, a prominent venture capital firm that focuses on early stage investment, but also co-founded startup accelerator Techstars.

Brad Feld

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California: Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple, was born in San Francisco. His adoptive parents eventually moved down to Mountain View, where he met Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak in high school. At his death in 2011, Jobs was worth an estimated $11 billion.

steve jobs

Colorado: David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP) company, was born in Pueblo. Upon his death, he donated more than $4 billion to his Packard Foundation.

David Packard

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Connecticut: John Zimmer grew up in Greenwich. In 2012, he co-founded Zimride, which spun off ride-hailing app Lyft, a rival to Uber. Zimride was later sold to Enterprise Rent-A-Car.

John Zimmer Lyft

Delaware: Though many members of the Delaware-based du Pont family have amassed vast quantities of wealth, few had the abiding interest in new technology that Felix du Pont did. Felix’s fascination was with airplanes, and after working at “the family business” (DuPont — which created nylon, teflon, kevlar, etc.) for a few years, he struck out on his own to found an aviation company. That company would go on to become US Airways.

dupont

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Georgia: Atlanta native Will Wright changed the idea of video games when he co-founded Maxis in 1989. Wright was the genius game designer behind SimCity, The Sims, and Spore. In 2015, Wright moved from games into apps with his new content platform company, Thred.

Will Wright

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Hawaii: Honolulu native Steve Case graduated from Punahou School three years before Barack Obama. The AOL founder's estimated net worth in 2015 is $1.3 billion.

steve case

Idaho: Dan Price grew up in rural Idaho 20 to 30 minutes away from the nearest town, and started building his company, Gravity Payments, when he was in high school. After making little money and hiring his first employee for only $24K and no benefits, Price wanted to make amends and made the radical decision in 2015 to pay every single employee a minimum wage of $70,000 a year.

Dan Price accepts the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the GeekWire Awards in 2013. — Dan Price accepts the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award at the GeekWire Awards in 2013. Geekwire

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Illinois: At 24, Tony Hsieh sold LinkExchange, the company he co-founded to Microsoft for $265 million. Hsieh later became CEO of Zappos.com and leading the "Downtown Project" in Las Vegas.

Tony Hsieh — Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh REUTERS/Danny Moloshok

Indiana: Sun Microsystems co-founder and chairman Scott McNealy was born in Columbus, Indiana. Even with a net worth of more than $1 billion, McNealy still caddied for his son, Maverick, during the 2014 US Open.

Scott McNealy Sun Microsystems

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Iowa: Born in Cedar Falls, Marc Andreessen is famous for developing the Mosaic browser and co-founding Netscape. Andreessen has since gone on to become a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley with investments in Facebook, Stripe, and Lyft.

marc andreessen

Kansas: Kansas City native Kyle Vogt is a serial entrepreneur on a winning streak. He first co-founded Socialcam, which was acquired by Autodesk for $60 million. Vogt then went on to co-found Justin.TV, which rebranded as Twitch in 2011. Twitch sold to Amazon for $1.1 billion, and Vogt is now CEO of Cruise, a company that wants to bring self-driving tech to your car.

kyle vogt

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Kentucky: Boland T. Jones says his dad used to call him and his six siblings the “little army” because they would help him manage his Louisville, Kentucky dry cleaning stores. And by the time Boland was in high school, he was a mini entrepreneur in his own right, repaving hundreds of driveways during the summertime with an enormous bucket of tar. Jones brought this work ethic to founding companies, the most prominent of which is PGi. PGi produces audio and video conferencing products the help workplaces stay connected in the digital age.

boland t jones

Louisiana: Salman Khan was born to two immigrant parents (one Indian and one Bangladeshi), and went to public school in New Orleans, Louisiana, before going to both MIT and Harvard. He first worked as a financial analyst, but did an abrupt 180 to found Khan Academy, an free online education tool. Khan Academy, a nonprofit, has attracted big backers like Google and Microsoft, and over 2 million subscribers to its YouTube channel.

Salman Khan

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Maine: Charles Flint may have died in 1934, before computers, but he founded the company — Tabulating-Recording Company — which later became IBM. His financial wheeling and dealing earned him the nickname “The Father of Trusts.”

Charles Flint

Maryland: GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons was as "poor as a church mouse" growing up in inner city Baltimore. He's now worth $2.1 billion from his web hosting service and the sale of Parsons Technology to Intuit for $64 million.

bob parsons

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Massachusetts: The New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was actually born in Boston in 1942. He launched Bloomberg LP in 1981, took a brief break as Mayor of NYC, and returned to the company after. He is now worth more than $35 billion.

Michael Bloomberg gives speech

Michigan: Google co-founder Larry Page was born in Lansing and graduated from the University of Michigan. It wasn't until his grad school days at Stanford that he met Sergey Brin and co-founded Google, making him worth $29.2 billion.

Larry Page

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Minnesota: Former SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg was born in Minneapolis. At 26, he sold the first startup he founded, Launch Media, to Yahoo for $12 million.

Dave Goldberg — SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg SurveyMonkey/Getty

Mississippi: Jackson native Bob Pittman founded MTV and has bounced his way through tech companies like AOL, Time Warner and even did a stint at Six Flags theme parks. Pittman has turned his eye back to radio now runs iHeartRadio as CEO of iHeartMedia.

Bob Pittman

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Missouri: St. Louis native Jack Dorsey has founded two companies and, in the interim, is currently running them both. Dorsey is one of the Twitter co-founders and is both co-founder and permanent CEO of Square.

jack dorsey

Montana: A Helena native, Dave Morin worked for Apple and Facebook before founding his own company, Path.

Dave Morin

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Nebraska: Evan Williams grew up on a farm in Clarks, but became a serial entrepreneur after becoming obsessed with the internet. He founded Blogger (which he sold to Google) , Twitter (which is now public and worth more than $20 billion), and most recently Medium.

ev williams, medium, sv100 2015

Nevada: Kevin Rose grew up in Las Vegas and attended UNLV before he dropped out to move to Silicon Valley. Rose co-founded Digg, the popular tech link site, and a series of other startups. He's now betting on apps with his mobile tech lab, North Technologies.

kevin rose

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New Hampshire: Tad Martin's startup career took off at Amazon-funded Gear.com, which was acquired by Overstock.com — making Martin one of Overstock’s first employees. He became Overstock’s COO, and helped the company grow from $70 million in revenue to over $800 million before striking out on his own. Martin founded Collective[i], which aims to reinvent the way business operate, especially in sales, using advanced data.

tad martin

New Jersey: A self-described "nerd", Craig Newmark founded Craigslist in 1995. He was born in Morristown, but now lives in San Francisco.

Craig Newmark

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New Mexico: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was born in Albuquerque. In 2000, Bezos also launched spaceflight company Blue Origin, and between the two companies and his investments, is now worth $35 billion.

Amazon Jeff Bezos

New York: Born in Manhattan, Larry Ellison made a name for himself as the founder of Oracle in 1977. As the company's CTO and Chairman, Ellison is the fifth richest person in the world with a net worth of more than $54 billion.

ellison

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North Carolina: James "Jim" Goodnight's software company, SAS, was co-founded across the street from North Carolina State University. Born in Salisbury, Goodnight earned his Ph.D in statistics from the university and is now worth $7.5 billion.

James Jim Goodnight SAS institute

North Dakota: Born in Harvey, the native North Dakotan became later famously associated with another state: Texas. Haggerty co-founded Texas Instruments in 1951 and helped guide the company into the semiconductor business.

Patrick Haggerty

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Ohio: David Duffield founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and it grew to become the second-largest application software company before it was acquired by Oracle in a hostile takeover. Duffield didn't stop there though. Duffield then co-founded Workday in 2005 and is a co-CEO of the popular company. He's also a big philanthropist and established Maddie's Fund to help save the lives of dogs and cats as seen below.

Dave Duffield

Oklahoma: Andrew Stroup was born in South Korea, but adopted by an Oklahoma family and raised near Tulsa. Stroup is something of a geek renaissance man, working for the Department of Defense as well as being one of the top World of Warcraft players in the world. He participated in the first season of the Discovery Channel’s the Big Brain Theory, and has founded a slew of companies, like the giant robot competition MegaBots.

andrew stroup

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Oregon: Mike Jones may be best known as the CEO who turned around MySpace so it could be acquired. That's just a small slice of this Oregon native's background. He's founded several companies and now his own tech studio/incubator in Los Angeles called Science.

Mike Jones — Mike Jones, the CEO and a cofounder of Science. Science

Pennsylvania: The world now knows Mark Cuban as the flamboyantly outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and one the sharks circling on the show Shark Tank, but once upon a time he was a working class kid from Pittsburgh. Cuban made his first money selling garbage bags and powdered milk, but made his true fortune when he sold his second company, Broadcast.com, for $5.7 billion.

Mark Cuban — Mark Cuban knows how to stop the college implosion. AP Photo/Mike Fuentes,

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South Carolina: Yik Yak founders Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll met at Furman University in Greenville. The anonymous messaging platform, which is based in Atlanta, is valued at $400 million.

brooks buffington tyler droll yik yak — Brooks Buffington and Tyler Droll co-founded Yik Yak Alyson Shontell/Business Insider

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South Dakota: Gene Amdahl was born in Flandreau, South Dakota, a city with a population of only around 2,300 people, leaving to serve two years in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After getting a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, he joined IBM, where he became one of the driving forces behind the business mainframe computer. Since then he’s founded four companies in his own right.

Gene Amdahl

Tennessee: Charles Ergen, the chairman and cofounder of Dish Network, is known as one of the slickest dealmakers in the TV industry. That business savvy has netted the Oakridge, Tennessee native $17.1 billion.

charles ergen

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Texas: Michael Dell founded his eponymous computer company in 1984 at the age of 19, and with just $1,000. In 1992, Dell became the youngest CEO to rank in the Fortune 500. This son of Austin, Texas, is now worth $18 billion and is still the Chairman and CEO.

Michael Dell

Utah: Nolan Bushnell founded two very different but very successful companies — Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s (along with a bevy of others). What these two iconic businesses do have in common is a sense of gaming and fun. Steve Jobs’ first boss is now focused on trying to “fix” education by using video game metrics to “addict” students to academics.

nolan bushnell

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Washington: Bill Gates is not only from Seattle, Washington, but has come to define it in many ways. The founder of Microsoft and epic philanthropist has given away close to $30 billion, and is worth almost $80 billion.

Bill Gates

West Virginia: Dave McClure of West Virginia is best known for running the prominent startup incubator 500 Startups, and for his shrewd angel investments. He’s invested in successful companies like Credit Karma, MakerBot, Mint.com, and SlideShare.

Dave McClure

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Wisconsin: Seymour Cray was called the “father of supercomputers,” and founded Cray Research Inc. with the goal of building the faster computers the world had ever seen. After leaving his company, the founded another called Cray Computer Corporation in 1989, which unfortunately went bankrupt as the demand for supercomputers plummeted after the Cold War. But ever the entrepreneur, Cray started yet another computer company shortly after, however he died a mere two months after founding it.

cray

Wyoming: John Perry Barlow grew up in Sublette County, Wyoming, where he attended a one-room schoolhouse. He’s always had a spirit of freedom which led him to varied exploits like being a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, to co-founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the foremost non-profit digital rights group. He’s also a fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

John Perry Barlow

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Washington DC: Elizabeth Holmes founded Theranos when she was just 19 based on her patented way of running 30 common lab tests in a much less expensive way than traditional lab testing. Holmes hasn’t stopping going since, and says she works basically from the time she wakes up to when she goes to sleep. Every single day. And it’s worked. Beyond pioneering new methods of helping patients, Holmes is reportedly worth $4.6 billion.

Elizabeth Holmes TEDMED2014 — Elizabeth Holmes holes up a “nanotainer,” which holds the tiny amount of blood that Theranos can use to run over 70 tests. TEDMED/YouTube

Jeff Bezos Bill Gates Startups

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