Most tech companies do not survive their first crisis. Fewer still outlast two or three. This is a list of San Francisco founders who built companies durable enough to endure the economic upheavals of their era—the dotcom bust, the global financial crisis, the pandemic—and who are still at the helm today.
Marc Benioff — Salesforce (1999)
Marc Benioff left Oracle in 1999 at 35 years old and started Salesforce in a one-bedroom apartment at 1449 Montgomery Street on Telegraph Hill, alongside co-founders Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. The apartment doubled as a server room. Posters of the Dalai Lama and Albert Einstein decorated the walls. No venture capital firm would fund them. Every firm in Silicon Valley passed. Benioff and his co-founders raised more than $17 million privately, through individuals, before a single institutional dollar came in.
The company launched its first product in 2000, just as the dotcom bubble burst. Salesforce survived by doing something its competitors were not: charging by subscription for software delivered over the internet rather than selling expensive enterprise licenses that required on-premise installation. The model was radical enough to attract ridicule from Oracle, SAP, and Siebel Systems, and resilient enough to outlast all of them as a category. Salesforce went public in 2004 and became the first major SaaS company to achieve meaningful scale.
Benioff has been chairman and CEO since the company’s founding, navigating the dotcom crash, the GFC, COVID-related layoffs, and activist investor pressure. Salesforce now generates more than $38 billion in annual revenue, employs more than 72,000 people globally, and anchors the San Francisco skyline from its tower on Mission Street. It is the third largest enterprise software company in the world.
Jeremy Stoppelman — Yelp (2004)
Jeremy Stoppelman graduated from the University of Illinois in 1999 and joined X.com, the Elon Musk-founded startup that became PayPal, as an engineer during the dotcom boom. He rose to VP of Engineering before PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002. He enrolled at Harvard Business School in 2003 and left after one year to co-found Yelp with fellow PayPal alumnus Russel Simmons, backed by a $1 million investment from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin.
Yelp launched in San Francisco in 2004 as an email recommendation service and evolved into the dominant platform for crowdsourced local business reviews. In January 2010, Stoppelman turned down an acquisition offer from Google. Steve Jobs called him personally around that time to reinforce the decision, urging him to stay independent. Yelp went public on the New York Stock Exchange in March 2012, with Stoppelman ringing the opening bell. In February 2013, he began taking a salary of $1, earning income instead from his equity stake in the company.
Yelp has faced sustained competitive pressure from Google for more than a decade, including a prolonged antitrust battle alleging that Google used its search dominance to suppress Yelp’s results. That case has continued to wind through courts and regulators across multiple continents. Stoppelman has been CEO since the company’s founding and has run Yelp through the GFC, which hit local businesses hard, and through COVID, which nearly eliminated the local advertising market overnight. He remains CEO and a San Francisco resident, having said publicly that he has not found a place that fits his life better.
Drew Houston — Dropbox (2007)
Drew Houston was 24 years old and a student at MIT when he got fed up with forgetting his USB drive and built a cloud storage tool for his own use in 2007. He co-founded Dropbox with MIT classmate Arash Ferdowsi, secured early funding from Y Combinator, and launched the company from San Francisco. The idea was simple enough to seem obvious and technically difficult enough that it took years for competitors to catch up. By the time Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and iCloud arrived, Dropbox had enough users and enterprise relationships to hold its ground.
Dropbox went public on the Nasdaq in March 2018 and has navigated a challenging decade as the market questioned whether standalone cloud storage could survive as a business against free offerings from the largest technology companies in the world. Houston’s answer has been to move the product upmarket into AI-powered knowledge management tools, repositioning Dropbox from a file storage service into a workspace platform for distributed teams. The company now has more than 700 million registered users across 180 countries, generates more than $2.5 billion in annual revenue, and has maintained operating margins above 40 percent on a non-GAAP basis. Houston has been CEO since founding, through the GFC, COVID, and the cloud storage wars.
Brian Chesky — Airbnb (2008)
Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia moved to San Francisco in 2007, could not afford their rent, and inflated air mattresses in their apartment to rent to conference attendees who could not find hotel rooms. They called it AirBed and Breakfast. They brought in Nathan Blecharczyk, a Harvard computer science graduate, and the three officially launched Airbnb in 2008 during the depths of the global financial crisis. They funded the company by selling Barack Obama-themed collectible breakfast cereal. Every investor they pitched turned them down.
Y Combinator took a chance on them. Sequoia Capital followed. The company grew from an air mattress rental experiment into the world’s largest accommodation platform, with more than 5 million hosts across 240 countries and regions who have collectively welcomed more than 2 billion guests.
COVID was the defining test. In eight weeks in early 2020, Airbnb’s revenue dropped by more than 80 percent and the company was burning $250 million per month. Chesky laid off 1,900 employees, 25 percent of the workforce, in a single cut on a single Tuesday, spending hours writing the memo himself and hosting an all-hands meeting shortly after it was sent. He then identified two trends rising inside the wreckage: local travel within 300 miles of home, and long-term stays driven by remote work. He killed 95 percent of the company’s active projects, refocused on those two trends, and filed for an IPO in July 2020 while the pandemic was still raging. Airbnb went public in December 2020 at $47 billion and closed its first trading day at over $100 billion. Chesky remains CEO and an Airbnb host in San Francisco.
Max Levchin — Affirm (2012)
Max Levchin co-founded PayPal in the late 1990s and served as its CTO through the dotcom boom and bust until eBay acquired the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He spent the following decade founding and running other ventures, including Slide, a personal media-sharing service acquired by Google in 2010, before launching HVF, a San Francisco-based innovation lab. Affirm was the most significant company to emerge from it, founded in 2012 alongside Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, and Alex Rampell. Levchin took over as CEO in 2014.
Affirm’s premise was that consumer credit was broken and that the industry needed a simpler, more transparent alternative to revolving credit cards with hidden fees and compounding interest. Its buy now, pay later model lets consumers split purchases into fixed installments with clear repayment terms and no late fees. The company went public on the Nasdaq in January 2021, with its share price doubling on the first day of trading. Then came 2022, when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates at the fastest pace in decades. The BNPL sector, built on cheap capital and rising consumer spending, was hit hard. Affirm’s stock fell more than 90 percent from its peak. Levchin held, cut costs, and focused on unit economics. By 2025 the company had nearly 26 million users and was processing $37 billion in annual payments. He was elected to the board of Coca-Cola in October 2025, remains CEO of Affirm, and still runs Strava segments in San Francisco on the daily.
