Every decade in Bay Area founders produce companies that do not just succeed but come to define the era itself. Here are four.
The 90s: Pierre Omidyar — eBay
Pierre Omidyar was born in Paris in 1967 to Iranian parents who had emigrated to France for higher education, and moved to Baltimore at age six when his father began a residency at Johns Hopkins. He studied computer science at Tufts University, graduating in 1988, and made his way to the San Francisco Bay Area, working as a software developer at Claris, an Apple subsidiary, before co-founding Ink Development, a pen-computing startup that was eventually rebranded as eShop and sold to Microsoft in 1996.
That same year, Omidyar was still employed at General Magic when he built a prototype for an online person-to-person auction service on his personal website. He called it AuctionWeb and launched it on Labor Day, Monday, September 4, 1995, from his home in San Jose. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Omidyar contacted the winning bidder to ask whether he understood the device was broken. The buyer replied that he collected broken laser pointers. That exchange would become one of the founding anecdotes of internet commerce: a reminder that in a large enough market, a buyer exists for almost anything.
By February 1996, AuctionWeb had grown beyond what Omidyar’s $30-per-month personal internet account could handle. To cover the upgrade to a business account, he began charging sellers a small commission. In its first month of charging, the business turned a profit. AuctionWeb was renamed eBay in September 1997, named for Echo Bay, the name of Omidyar’s consulting firm. Benchmark invested $6.7 million in 1997. Meg Whitman was appointed president and CEO in March 1998, with 30 employees, 500,000 users, and $4.7 million in revenue. eBay went public on the Nasdaq in September 1998 at $18 per share, closing its first day at $53. Omidyar became a billionaire at 31.
He resigned as eBay’s chairman in 2015 and from its board entirely in September 2020. He and his wife Pamela signed the Giving Pledge and have committed to donating all but one percent of their wealth. The Omidyar Network has invested more than $822 million in social change initiatives.
The 2000s: Jensen Huang — Nvidia
Jensen Huang was born in Tainan, Taiwan, in 1963, and sent at age nine to live with relatives in the United States while his parents remained in Thailand. His uncle, believing it to be a prestigious boarding school, enrolled him at the Oneida Baptist Institute in rural Kentucky, a religious reform school for troubled youths, where Huang was bullied and assigned to clean toilets daily. His parents eventually discovered the situation, retrieved him, and the reunited family settled in Oregon, where Huang attended Aloha High School and began working the graveyard shift at Denny’s as a dishwasher and busboy at age 15.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University in 1984, where he met his wife Lori, who was his lab partner in an engineering course. He moved to Silicon Valley, worked at AMD and then LSI Logic, and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1992, attending night classes while working full time. In 1993, he co-founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem over breakfast at a Denny’s in San Jose, with $40,000 in starting capital. He has described the company’s founding odds as approximately zero percent chance of success.
Nvidia went public in 1999. In 2006 it launched CUDA, a parallel computing platform that turned its graphics chips into general-purpose processors and laid the foundation for deep learning. In 2012, Nvidia GPUs powered AlexNet, the neural network that won the ImageNet competition by a margin that stunned the research community and triggered the modern AI era. From that moment, Nvidia’s trajectory was fixed. Its chips became the essential hardware for training every major AI model in production. As of May 2026, Huang’s net worth exceeds $185.9 billion, making him the seventh wealthiest person in the world. He has been CEO since founding, more than 32 years. In 2026 he was appointed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The 2010s: Travis Kalanick — Uber
Travis Kalanick was born in Los Angeles in 1976, dropped out of UCLA in 1998 to co-found Scour, a peer-to-peer file-sharing service that was sued for copyright infringement by the entertainment industry and declared bankruptcy in 2000. He rebounded by co-founding Red Swoosh in 2001, another file-sharing company that was sold to Akamai Technologies in 2007 for approximately $19 million.
The idea for Uber came in Paris in 2008, when Kalanick and Garrett Camp, co-founder of StumbleUpon, were attending the LeWeb conference and could not get a cab. Camp developed the concept of a smartphone app to hail private drivers and persuaded Kalanick to join as chief incubator. The service launched in San Francisco in May 2010 with a handful of black cars. In October 2010, UberCab closed a $1.25 million seed round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Lowercase Capital and Founder Collective. Kalanick became CEO in 2010 and built Uber into one of the most aggressive growth stories in Silicon Valley history, expanding to more than 70 countries and reaching a $68 billion valuation by 2016. The company also became one of the most controversial, with documented allegations of sexual harassment, a toxic workplace culture, and regulatory battles across dozens of jurisdictions.
Kalanick resigned as CEO in June 2017 under pressure from Uber’s board and investors, selling approximately 90 percent of his Uber shares for $2.5 billion before the company’s 2019 IPO. He left the board at the end of 2019. In 2018 he invested $150 million in City Storage Systems, whose subsidiary CloudKitchens built a network of ghost kitchen facilities for delivery-only restaurant operators, backed by $400 million from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. In March 2026, Kalanick announced Atoms, a new company that absorbed CloudKitchens with a focus on robotics. He owns a home in San Francisco’s Castro District.
The 2020s: Patrick Collison — Stripe
Patrick Collison was born in 1988 in Dromineer, a small village in County Tipperary, Ireland. At eight he took his first computing course at the University of Limerick. At 16 he won the Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, Ireland’s most prestigious student science competition, for building Croma, a LISP-type programming language. He enrolled at MIT and dropped out in 2009 after co-founding Auctomatic, a software company he built with his brother John that sold for more than three million euros.
The Collison brothers conceived of Stripe on the way back from a startup event at UC Berkeley, where John proposed building an easy way to move money online. They launched in 2010 with the promise that any developer could integrate payments with seven lines of code. The company’s seed investors included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sequoia Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz. Stripe moved from Palo Alto to San Francisco in 2012 and to South San Francisco in 2021.
In 2024, businesses using Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in payments, a 38 percent increase from the prior year. In 2025 that figure grew to $1.9 trillion. In February 2026, a tender offer for employees and shareholders valued Stripe at $159 billion, making it the largest privately held fintech company in the world. The company supports half of the Fortune 100, 80 percent of the Forbes Cloud 100, and operates in more than 195 countries across 135 currencies. In April 2025, Collison joined Meta’s board of directors. He lives in San Francisco.
