VentureBeat

Apropos of nothing, we’re kicking around names of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who’ve hit it “big” at least twice in their careers. Of course, “hit it big” is a subjective term. But who are your nominees? Add your candidates in the comments. So far, we have Jim Clark (Silicon Graphics/Netscape), Steve Jobs (Apple/Pixar), Judy Estrin (Bridge/NCD/Precept Software), Andy Bechtolsheim (Sun/Granite Systems) and Reed Hastings (Pure Atria/Netflix).

UPDATE: Lots of entries in the comments here, but in the interest of focus, we’d like to narrow this down to founders only (we probably should have said this earlier). Neither Omid Kordestani nor Ram Shriram were founders at Google or Netscape, and Guy Kawasaki wasn’t founder at Apple, and so on. Our question first arose from a conversation about how individuals themselves are very hard to bet on, as significant predictors of success. True, you need good founders to win. But they are hardly ever guarantors of $300-400 million plus mega IPO (or sale) hits. What’s surprising is how few examples there are of people who get two big hits. Thanks for the responses, and we’ll be watching for more.

Next Story: Mercury News RSS feeds
Previous Story: Alley Cat strikes again