“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.” -Benjamin Franklin.
People believe that with love comes; blindness and an absolute flaw in reason but that holds true only for the day when saint valentines weaves his magic. Today since we are not bound to that spell any longer, let’s take a look at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest who have found love but never lost their wits. Here is the Fascinating ‘techie’ list of Power and Passion.
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#21 Ali and Mark Pincus
After a few months cavorting around Aspen and partying with movie stars, Mark settled down and got engaged to his girlfriend Alison Gelb, who works at magazine publisher Hachette Filipacchi and whom a friend describes as “a huge prize” for Pincus. Pincus currently serves as CEO of Zynga, and online gaming site, which had 298 million monthly active users as of February 6, 2013.
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#20 Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki
Sergey Brin met his wife Anne Wojcicki through her sister Susan who rented a garage for Google when it was just starting out. While we all know about Google, not everyone knows about Wojcicki’s startup 23andMe, which does genetic testing and has identified a gene that could reduce the risk of Parkinson’s disease. Here’s a weird detail about the couple: According to the New York Times they wore bathing suits for their wedding — he in black, she in white. They were married on a sandbar and some guests swam out for the ceremony.
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#19 Marissa Mayer and VC Zack Bogue
On 12th of December 2009, Marissa Mayer, then known as “Google’s Employee No. 20,” married Zachary Bouge, cofounder of venture capital firm Data Collective. She then went on the become the CEO of Yahoo! And gave birth to their first son Macallister in 30th September 2012.
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#18 Bill and Melinda Gates
The man needs no introduction, nor does Melinda who is the co-founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the largest transparently operated private foundation in the world. The foundation aims to enhance healthcare and reduce extreme poverty, globally, and in America, its goal is to expand educational opportunities and access to information technology. In 2007, then President of India Pratibha Devisingh Patil presented the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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#17 Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle
Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle both attended Brown University and founded SlideShare along with Rashmi’s brother, Amit. They wanted to create a kind of YouTube for PowerPoint presentations—a central place where anyone could upload and share them. On May 3, 2012, SlideShare announced that it was to be acquired by LinkedIn. It’s reported that the deal was $118.75 Million.
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#16 Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan
The Facebook founder and Priscilla began dating before the social networking site had gone public. Priscilla recently graduated from the medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, she plans to become a pediatrician. (In that, she seems to be following in the path of other notable Silicon Valley spouses who have their own established careers, like Laurene Powell Jobs.) On December 9, 2010, Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and investor Warren Buffett signed a promise they called the “Giving Pledge”, in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their wealth over the course of time, and invited others among the wealthy to donate 50% or more of their wealth to charity.
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#15 Sheryl Sandberg and David Goldberg
Facebook’s No. 2 in charge, Sheryl Sandberg is married to the CEO of SurveyMonkey, David Goldberg, the popular online survey site that just landed a whopping $800 million investment from several sources. SurveyMonkey is a web survey development cloud based (SaaS) company, founded in 1999 by Ryan Finley.
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#14 Fab.com’s CEO Jason Goldberg and T-Systems’ Christian Schoenherr
Christian Friedhelm Schoenherr and Jason Seth Goldberg were married at Craft, a restaurant in New York. Rev. April Beer, an interfaith minister, officiated. One week later, Fab raised $105 million, which sells curated designer goods online at a discount, Jason Goldberg, along with his long time boyfriend went to the New York’s City Hall and picked up a marriage license. Quick and Simple.
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#13 Dave and Brit Morin
Dave Morin is a senior platform Manager in Facebook and Brittany Bohnet, Product Manager at Google. Dave came up with the most amazing way to propose to a girl. Dave and Brittany were on a 2 week vacation around the world when Dave surprised Brittany with an amazing proposal message spelled out on the beach of an island in the Maldives (Bazinga!!) What’s more the message was spelled out with coconuts!
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#12 Kevin and Julia Hartz
These two love birds met at a friend’s wedding while Julia was working for MTV (on Jackass) and Kevin had found Xoom. They got together and started a sales and ticketing company called Eventbrite. Now their ticketing startup has raised about $80 million in venture capital and has sold more than 90 million tickets. Today, Kevin lives in San Francisco with his wife, Julia, and two young daughters.
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#11 Susan Gregg Koger and Eric Koger
Eric and Susan Gregg Koger launched Modcloth, an online retail website that specializes in vintage, vintage-inspired and indie clothing, accessories and decor. Susan loves vintage clothing and kept buying them even though they didn’t fit her well. Eventually Eric and Susan went to college and all her clothes were left behind, that was when they began selling clothes online.
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#10 Tech journalist Kara Swisher and Google’s Megan Smith
AllThingsD chief Kara Swisher is married to Google’s Megan Smith. Imagine what a dinner table conversation would be like in this family. Not to mention when Google is facing issues of privacy breach with Google Play but whatever be the case they have found love in each other and still remain very powerful people in the tech world.
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#9 Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston
Paul Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston run Y Combinator, the startup school/seed-funding venture that has invested in hundreds of companies. Interestingly enough Paul and Jessica were dating before they began Y Combinator, Paul said in an interview with mixergy.com that he could have never done it without Jessica and their third co-founder. Together they made the idea a reality.
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#8 Michael and Kass Lazerow
Michael and Kass Lazerow are the founders of Buddy Media, a privately held company that offers some of the world’s largest brands social media solutions, which sold to Salesforce.com last year for more than $800 million. Before founding Buddy Media, they launched Golf.com together, which they eventually sold to Time Inc.
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#7 Lisa Connell and Frank Sinton
After starting video aggregator MeFeedia in 2007, Connell and Sinton took extreme measures to balance work and family. The company is based in Burbank, Calif. but they moved their three kids across the country to Ormond Beach, where they bought a beachfront home. Sinton is CEO, so he commutes to Burbank and Connell heads sales efforts from a home office.
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#6 Erika Trautman and Cameron McCaddon
Erika Trautman and Cameron McCaddon fled the high cost of the Bay Area to launch their startup, FlixMaster, in the relatively affordable locale of Boulder, Colo. where they joined the 2011 class of TechStars, an incubator. The site is a cloud-based video editing and publishing platform that enables content creators to build dynamic, interactive videos with drag-and-drop ease. This startup has caught the eyes of biggies like Sony.
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#5 Casey Sackett and Jennifer Wong
After the birth of their first child, Casey Sackett and Jennifer Wong launched Alt12Apps Inc. with their first app called Babybump. Since then they have created two more applications called Kidfolio and pink Pad all three for parents to express themselves on social media to other parents who are going through the same situations.
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#4 Caroline Hu Flexer and Michael Flexer
Caroline and Michael Flexer are co founders of Duck Duck Moose. They had the idea for the venture when they noticed how much their 2 year old daughter like to play games on her iPhone. The Flexers joined forces with one of their friends, Nicci Gabriel, and the three of them launched Duck Duck Moose to make mobile apps for kids. Today the team has 14 popular apps, 2.4 million paid downloads, and $7 million in venture investment.
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#3 Jenn Deering Davis and Hayes Davis
In Austin, breakfast tacos founders, Hayes Davis and Jenn Deering Davis, wanted to know how many people were reached by tweets about a topic on Twitter. As they spoke to more people, it turned out that others wanted to track Twitter reach, too. So that April, they launched a simple site where anyone could get a snapshot report of recent Twitter activity and their first product, TweetReach was born.
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#2 Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum
Diane Greene is a board member of Google, “Diane is a special person who combines a sharp business acumen with a brilliant technical mind,” ex-executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. She left the Android giant and joined her husband Mendel Rosenblum to start VMWare in 1998 and until 2008 she remained the CEO, after which she turned into an angel investor. Her husband quit soon after that and became a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.
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#1 Carley Roney and David Liu
It took eight years for Carley Roney and David Liu to fall in love after meeting as undergrads at NYU. But after they reunited at a graduate school party, the pace picked up. Two years after they got married, the pair went into business together and founded the Knot in 1997, when the site went up on the internet. Today, the Knot publishes wedding planning, nesting, and baby related content on multiple media platforms.
TLVP 