Many startups that were able to raise a seed round are running out of cash because of the Series A crunch.

Even though quitting is never an ideal situation, serial entrepreneur and investor Howard A. Tullman recently wrote on Inc that entrepreneurs need to know when enough is enough. 

"Sometimes you need to be smart enough to figure out how to quit when you're ahead--even if you're actually way behind," he writes.

Tullman says that there's no simple answer for determining when it's time to throw in the towel, but he follows what he calls The Rule of 3 Ds and 3 Fs.

"There are some things you've got to Do, Determine and Discuss," Tullman writes. "The Fs are Facts, Feelings, and Family."

• The most important thing you have to do is face the facts. 
• You then need to determine how you feel about the situation. For example, if you frequently don't feel appreciated, it's time to go.
• Discuss your situation with your family because running a business can be just as hard on them as it is on you. 

SEE ALSO: Four Senators Are About To Propose The Immigration Bill Of Silicon Valley's Dreams

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With apps and services like Nike FuelBand, Fitbit, and ZEO, we're increasingly generating more and more data in our day-to-day lives.

We also, of course, generate a bunch of data by using things like email, calendars, and social media. 

But until now, there hasn't really been a way to see the correlation between all of that data.

Enter Tictrac, a "lifestyle designing" platform tapping into the quantified self movement that aims to empower people through their own data.

Tictrac, which is publicly launching next month, aggregates data from services including Runkeeper, Withings, Facebook, Twitter, and Fitbit, to provide you with a personal dashboard of all your activity. As of right now, Tictrac syncs with 45 different services, and plans to keep adding more. 

"It's in our own DNA to at least mentally track in order to at least understand how we're doing,"Tictrac founder Martin Blinder tells Business Insider. "The ability to create this in an automated fashion is able to appeal to this basic human need in a way that we never before had."

Tictrac will also help you manage all of life's little projects, such as losing weight, raising a child, managing migraines, lowering your stress level, and running your first 10K, Blinder says. Even more, brands like Huggies, for example, could create a project geared toward helping parents care for their newborn.

For example, you can analyze how your stress levels change during periods of high email consumption. Or if you're a runner, you can see if factors like sleep and weather affect your performance.  

"The value in this comes from the insights it gives you and the ability to make better life decisions," Blinder says.

But Blinder admits that some people might not be so inclined to analyze all that data themselves. That's why Tictrac also aims to connect its users with coaches, personal trainers, teachers, and doctors. 

In the next few years, Blinder imagines that more brands will start to adopt the quantified self movement. 

"What we feel is the next evolution of (brands interacting with consumers via social media) is where brands become transformational in the lives of people," Blinder says. "As brands start to adapt themselves to QS movement, you’re going to see a massive adoption across different verticals of this kind of activity."

Check out some screenshots below.

SEE ALSO: Roadmap To The Future

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Most startups and businesses give plenty of attention to their company culture. They host innovation sessions, offer free lunches, install foosball tables and bike racks.

But when it comes to style, the company is often overlooked. In fact, even out of date, out of style, or completely disconnected from who and what uses its products.

Yet your business’ style can be an enormous part of market position and what draws customers in. It goes beyond branding, messaging, and colors used in your various digital and physical assets to everything from how your executives speak to how they dress.

A great example is Steve Jobs. He must have had dozens of black mock turtleneck tops and midwash jeans because it was his go-to look for a long part of his career. But while most people would have thought this was a detriment to Apple, that look spoke exactly what Apple is about to this day: Sleek, streamlined, simple, polished.

Mark Zuckerberg is another good model for the role that a founder’s style can play in a company’s DNA. While he may have been criticized for his choice of hoodie sweatshirts and Adidas sport sandals when on stage, that is exactly what Facebook’s initial core user base was wearing and could likely identify with. Would they have attached to Facebook if not? It’s hard to say but it likely played a part in the company’s allure to them.

Y Combinator’s Paul Graham wore Birkenstocks on stage when I saw him speak, which isn’t that far off from the innovative, aspirational youthfulness of the Y Combinator brand. It definitely plays a big part in my own personal style as a founder as well as for my business. Everything about Condiment from the notecards I send out to say thank you to the way I speak to the audience to what I wear is geared towards the company and its brand.

While consulting with LA based startup Glossi.com, CEO Matt Edelman and I had this very conversation. As he jetted to speak at CES, I had asked him, ‘What are you going to wear?’

We shared a laugh about it but Matt’s style, along with everyone at the company, is as woven into the company’s overall vibe as anything else and it plays a part. From there it’s in everything; the walk, the talk, you name it. Glossi’s done a great job of communicating its company style—cool, innovative, creative media company—because it recognized the role style plays. It’s not a surprise that Glossi is attracting that type of brands and creators.

There are a lot of other great examples in the market.

So, how do you find your company’s style and how do you build on it from there?

1. It starts with your customer. Your company style isn’t really about you, it’s about your customer first. Anything else might alienate them and put them off. Condiment’s readers are similar but a bit different than me and the company’s style is most centered to it. Where the role a founder and execs play is in a synergy with this.

2. It involves your message and brand. Your company’s style is an extension of your brand and message. So, if world changing and approachable is your message and position, work that into every element of the business. Leave no stone unturned.

3. Market and geography play a part. Union Square Ventures breathes West coast fresh and innovative, but East coast sharp and professional, a perfect match of its market (tech) and location (New York). Glossi’s very similar to a lot of companies based in the ‘Silicon Beach,’ while Google embodies a lot of the spirit of the Silicon Valley.

4. In the end, all companies are essentially a ‘lifestyle brand’ – That doesn’t just mean lifestyle companies alone but all companies. We all represent the ideas, minds, likes, interests, dislikes, needs, wants, locations, price points or income, etc. of the market, category and our customers. Founders and executives fit in from there.

5. Don’t try to fake it. A lot of companies try to be what they think is cool or trending at the moment versus what they are. It doesn’t work. Great company style is in part accepting the reality and truth of what your unique company and its vibe is

Most of all, don’t be afraid. You shouldn’t need to fit any mold but the one that is right for your company and its customers. Microsoft gets knocked for being as square as it gets, outdated, etc. but it has a lot of legacy, old school position and it works. Your company style, like all style, doesn’t need to be anything but authentic, appropriate and fitting. What that looks like is as unique as your business is.

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The worst part of being an IT professional is getting that call, text or email saying the computers have crashed.

Oddly, that really important task is still handled in low-tech ways. Someone manually calls in the troops, sending out emails or telling everyone about the problem over the phone.

PagerDuty aims to automate that. It offers a software-as-as-service to alert IT professionals when things break. It doesn't replace the IT management tools that watch for problems. It lets IT professionals choose how to contact them after those tools sound the alarm. It also automates the process of escalating the problem and finding the right person to fix things.

PagerDuty just nabbed a $10.7 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, Others invested, too, including famous angel and LiveOps chairman Maynard Webb, known as the guy that kept the IT systems at eBay from crashing.

Andreessen Horowitz's John O’Farrell, who will join the PagerDuty board, explained why he backed this startup:

"Today’s machines are very good at detecting and reporting incidents. It’s when those incidents get handed off to humans for remediation that things sometimes break down – because the humans are still using processes and technology that haven’t changed much in ten to fifteen years."

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 by three Amazon IT pros who all carried pagers at Amazon: Alex Solomon, Baskar Puvanathasan, Andrew Miklas. Since then, the company has accumulated an impressive customer list including  Microsoft, National Instruments, Electronic Arts, Adobe, Rackspace, Etsy, Square and Github.

Don't miss: 10 Mind-Blowing Projects Made With A Tiny $35 Computer

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Waqas Ali grew up in a small town in Pakistan called Punjab.

Ali studied physics while attending a university in Lahore, but eventually dropped out when he was inspired by a group of five craftsmen making handmade shoes in his home town, Ali writes on Medium.

So he started working on an online shoe store called HOMETOWN because he wanted to help those craftsmen build a sustainable business.

He ended up returning to Punjab to meet with a "shoe master" named M Hussain, who would become the official shoemaker. He got his friend Sidra Qasim to come on board as a co-founder, and in November 2012, he secured a $10,000 seed fund from P@SHA Social Innovation Fund.

The two eventually moved to Lahore so they could get in touch with designers, find high quality raw material, and start building the website.

But it wasn't easy. They were living in a hostel and using a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant as their office. 

After about for months, Ali and his team were able to make super comfortable and lightweight shoes. 

But selling those shoes proved to be more difficult than they expected. They spent about 60% of their money on building inventory, there wasn't much left for marketing and operations. 

Since they were strapped for cash, they simply interacted with potential customers both online and offline. When they sold their first shoe, Ali wrote a handwritten letter to the customer, and he still does that to this day.

"Honest communication, delivering on promises, and most importantly showing human side of our business helped us increase both our traffic and sales," Ali writes.

In August 2012, Google and Punjab's government proclaimed HOMETOWN as an "Innovation Hero."

Now, Ali and his team are part of a Punjab-based incubator. Ali was also recently selected to be an Acumen Fund Pakistan Fellow.

SEE ALSO: Startups Are Running Out Of Cash, And Founders Need To Know When To Quit

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Some 2,277 private tech companies were acquired in 2012, according to a recent report by M&A database CB Insights. 

For the 331 startups, which disclosed valuations and financials of the deals, acquirers paid $46.8 billion.

More than 50% of the startup exits were less than $50 million, while over 80% were less than $200 million. Only eight $1 billion startups were acquired in 2012.

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Pretty much the worst nightmare of any startup CEO and cofounder just came true for Brett O'Brien, according to PandoDaily's Michael Carney.

O'Brien is the CEO, chairman, and co-founder of a startup called Viddy, which makes a video-sharing app.

At least, he was all those things until this week.

Last spring, Viddy was a startup sensation. 

Photo-sharing app Instagram had just been acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, and Viddy – often called the Instagram-for-Video – had about 30 million monthly users.

The company was so hot that O'Brien was reportedly approached by Twitter, which wanted to buy the company for ~$100 million.

O'Brien turned down the money.

Instead, he raised more funds from outside investors who agreed to a huge valuation: $370 million.

This was Viddy's peak.

Since then: disaster.

Facebook curbed distribution to Viddy and user numbers plummeted. 

From that high of 30 million per month, Viddy now sees about 5 million.

Finally, Viddy's board had enough and this week, O'Brien got canned.

PandoDaily reports that O'Brien will keep a seat on the board, but that's about it.

It's the worst nightmare of so many tech startup CEOs faced with tough M&A choices.

• You build a product that gets overnight success from users.
• A big incumbent sees your success and shoves money your way.
• It's a lot of money, but not Instagram-level money, so you walk away ... even though its plenty to make you rich for the rest of your life.
• Your product's overnight success goes away.
• You get canned.

It'll make your stomach turn just thinking about it.

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By 2045, human beings will become a new species, half human, half machine.

Or so futurist Ray Kurzweil believes. He argues that by looking at the how tech is being developed that one day we will sort of merge with machines and society will reach a state of "technological singularity."

That's because, in part, computer processors double in speed every year while they get increasingly smaller. One day, we'll inject tiny computers into our bodies like medicine or add them to our brains to make us smarter. 

In the meantime, tech is always getting faster, cheaper, and spreading to more markets and industries. And this creates a lot of opportunity for startups, until the day when we all turn into cyborgs.

"Because of this totally changing nature of society and the community business world, any company designed to succeed in the 20th century almost by definition has to fail in the 21st century," David S. Rose, Associate Founder of Singularity U and founder at Gust, tells Business Insider.

So what does that mean for startups today?

In order to prepare for the singularity, Rose says, entrepreneurs need to figure out what technology will change and over how long, determine what effect that technology will have on a particular market, figure out what holes there will be to fill, and then actually build a business that will intercept that market hole when it comes around.

Amazon, Rose says, is the perfect example of a company that built a business with the singularity in mind.  

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos foresaw a world where there was no longer a need for physical bookstores, so he decided to build one online. Once Bezos nailed down the distribution side of books, he had to start thinking about ways that competitors could kill his business. Given that the cost of storage, networks, and other digital technologies were dropping, Bezos realized the potential in digital books.  

Enter the Kindle.

Instead of waiting for a company like Apple to take him out, Bezos took himself out.

"He deliberately shot himself in the foot because he knew that if he didn't do it, someone else would," Rose says.

And someone eventually did. Apple announced in 2009 that it would be coming out with an iPad, and shortly after that, the tech industry proclaimed that the Kindle would die, but it didn't. 

Even though Amazon doesn't release its exact number of Kindle sales, the company has continued to expand its Kindle lineup and announced in November that worldwide Kindle device sales over the holiday shopping weekend doubled. 

Obviously, Amazon continues to face competition from the likes of Apple and Google. But Amazon is the perfect example of what a Singularity-focused business looks like, Rose says. 

In short, here's how startups should prepare for the Singularity moving forward:

• Figure out where the ball will be a few years down the road.
• Determine how to hit that ball when it arrives.
• Figure out what could potentially take you out, and then take yourself out. 

SEE ALSO: Here's What Futurist Ray Kurzweil Thinks Life Will Be Like In The Next 20 Years

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Danielle and Jodie Snyder, co-founders of fashion jewelry line Dannijo, have seen incredible growth thanks to their social media presence. 

The sisters inadvertently became coolhunters for jewelry by documenting events like Coachella, Paris Fashion Week, and South by Southwest, and uploading relevant photos to sites like Twitter and Facebook, The New York Times' Caroline Tell reports.

“It helps when a brand puts itself out there in a human and personal way with character,” Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey told The Times. “Often brands are dehumanized a bit and you forget who’s behind it.”

The Snyder sisters have also harnessed the power of the hashtag. For example, adding the hashtag #armparty to images of mismatched arm bracelets helped their online bracelet business gain more traction, the sisters told The Times. 

Another hashtag, #putabibonit, has increased their online bib sales by 20 percent, the Snyder sisters say.

“There are aspects of our business that have put Dannijo more in the public eye, and being into social media is one of them,” Jodie said. “But we attribute a lot of our success to being young and open-minded and being part of a changing landscape of marketing and brand building.”

SEE ALSO: How Startups Should Prepare For The Day When Technology Merges With Our Brains

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Despite the massive changes we've seen in our personal lives from technology, the workplace has been remarkably static. Many of us still work in big offices, in cubicles, and at the same desk and computer every day. 

Not for much longer.

The workplace of the future is going to be less centralized, more mobile, and more flexible than anything most people outside the startup and freelance economy have experienced before.

And the trend's going to be accelerated by rapid uptake of mobile technology, economic volatility, and the global war for top talent.

We've illustrated where things are going using charts, data, and examples of the changes that have already begun.  

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Billion-dollar startup Evernote recently appointed Ken Gullicksen as its new COO.

He will be in charge of things like investor relations, corporate development, and sales and global support. Gullicksen will also be responsible for the different facets of Evernote Business. 

But who is Gullicksen? Well, he actually has a pretty lengthy history at Evernote.

Gullicksen joined Evernote's board of directors in 2009 after Morgenthaler Ventures, where Gullicksen was a general partner for more than 10 years, led a $10 million round in the startup. In 2011, Evernote hired Gullicksen away from the VC firm to lead its corporate development and acquisition strategy. 

While at Evernote, Gullicksen has led all five of the company's acquisitions and played a big role in Evernote's rollout of its China-based service, Yinxiang Biji, Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in a press release. 

Gullicksen has over 15 years worth of experience in Silicon Valley. He had his first taste of technology as an engineer at Sun Microsystems, but later shifted his focus to the corporate side. In his career, Gullicksen has held several executive roles at companies including Nortel Networks, and Hitachi-Raychem Display Systems.

Gullicksen holds a BS in electrical engineering from San Jose State University, and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

SEE ALSO: It's Pretty Stunning How Many Billion-Dollar Startups There Are Now

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Enterprise tech has gone from a yawn to an excited scream over the past year.

Businesses that sell to other businesses, with their steady revenues and more-predictable growth, are now the darling of tech investors.

That means they're good places for employees, too.

So if you're gunning for a new job with stock options that could make you a millionaire, consider this:

• VCs are throwing money at enterprise startups.

• They would like to throw more money at them, if they could find more good ideas.

• In 2012, the enterprise IPO market was red-hot. Companies such as Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, and Workday had extremely successful opening days in spite of the Facebook IPO fiasco—or maybe because of it, as investors veered away from consumer Web plays.

• Some of the Valley's brightest minds are working on enterprise software.

So if you're thinking of making the jump, where should you go?

FireEye: Great tech and a golden-touch CEO

Company: FireEye

Location: Milpitas, Calif.

No. of Employees: 400

FireEye is a hot security startup for a whole bunch of reasons. It solves the hard security problem of protecting enterprises against previously unknown, so-called "zero-day" attacks. It just landed a $50 million round of financing on a $1.25 billion valuation, and hired an experienced CEO, Dave DeWalt.

DeWalt joined in November after turning down some 40 other job offers. He's had a string of leadership successes, including the turnaround of McAfee through its $7.68 billion sale to Intel. Wouldn't you want to work for a guy with that track record?

Box: Big IPO pending

Company: Box

Location: Los Altos, Calif.

No. of Employees: Over 500

Box is a venture capital darling, run by its young and brilliant founder Aaron Levie. Box is widely expected to go public in 2014 and to be a big hit with investors when it does. Meanwhile, the money folks can't stop throwing millions at it. In 2012, it landed a massive $150 million Series E round.

The reason it's so hot? Box has turned its secure file-sharing service into a development platform that enterprises love.

Okta: Everyone wants Okta's action

Company: Okta

Location: San Francisco

No. of Employees: About 75

Okta was the first cloud startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz. That's significant because Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz pioneered the concept at their previous company, Opsware. Okta has been going gangbusters ever since.

Okta helps companies manage employee identifies in the cloud. This is such a hot area that big guys Salesforce and Oracle now want in. (Okta's founder and CEO, Todd McKinnon, cut his teeth running the engineering department for Salesforce.com.)

The competition has helped Okta up its game. In 2012, it signed on 140 new enterprise customers.

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Stanford's student startup accelerator StartX just hosted its eighth demo day.

It's worth paying attention to StartX because of the success of Google, Instagram, and Snapchat – all companies that were all founded by Stanford graduates.

Out of the 11 companies that presented, Kidaptive is one that stands out.

Kidaptive aims to help parents support their child's learning development through educational games on the iPad called "appisodes." The appisodes teach reading, colors and shapes, spatial reasoning, number sense, and social development. Its technology adapts to each child to customize learning and provide tips to parents to help further their child's education. 

Kidaptive co-founders Dylan Arena and P.J. Gunsagar, who presented for the second time at a StartX demo day, has already attracted seed funding from the likes of Patrick Gallagher, co-founder of CrunchFund, Menlo Ventures, and Veddis Ventures. 

Arena and Gunsagar first presented at StartX's spring 2012 demo day, but returned to the winter 2013 demo day seeking further investment.

Kidaptive launched its second appisode, Leo's Pad 2, last month. 

SEE ALSO: It's Pretty Stunning How Many Billion-Dollar Startups There Are Now

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Enterprise startup Puppet Labs is growing so fast, we named it one of 25 enterprise startups to bet your career on.

And the story of its founder, Luke Kanies, is downright amazing.

For starters, Kanies spent his early childhood "on a hippie commune that had 1,600 people on it," in rural Tennessee, he laughs. "Now I'm running this multimillion-dollar company and I didn't have a toilet until I was 8 years old."

That compound, known as The Farm, is still there today, home to some 250 people.

Those roots gave him the scrappy attitude that let him build a successful software company against all odds.

After college, he had been working as a systems administrator—a sysadmin, as they're known—but didn't want to fix computers forever. He took a job as a product developer for BladeLogic, a software company now owned by BMC, but hated it and quit after six months.

He was broke.

"I didn't have a network, I didn't know anyone, I didn't know any software executives or anyone in the industry that could connect me," he remembers.

So he did the only logical thing and started a company.

He wrote the open-source Puppet software himself, which is used by sysadmins to automates tasks in the data center.

From 2005 to 2008, he pounded the pavement. In 2008, he logged 90,000 air miles in six months while his wife was pregnant with twins at home.

"I was actually on a plane when my kids were born," he says.

By 2009, Puppet Labs was at last profitable, making "a couple hundred thousand" dollars in revenue, Kanies said.

And that's when the venture capitalists started calling.

Today, his investors and his network are impressive. Backers include True Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, and Cisco. Last month, he hit the jackpot when VMware ponied up $30 million and struck a partnership.

Today Puppet is wildly popular, with 3.5 million downloads in the last 12 months alone. More than 200 coders voluntarily contribute to the open-source project, he says.

It's a happy ending, but Kanies never forgets the struggle.

"I look back and think, 'What was I thinking?'"

SEE ALSO: Cisco Published A Massive Report Predicting The State Of Mobile In 2017

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Pishevar and Standford to found Sherpa >

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Every few weeks, we hear about another fast exit in the insanely hot new software-defined networking market.

Today, 10-month old LineRate Systems was acquired by F5 Networks.

The companies didn't announce how much F5 paid, but we do know that Boulder, Colo.-based LineRate had a $4.75 million seed round led by Boulder Ventures.

And we know that it only launched its product in April—just 10 months ago.

We're guessing that the LineRate folks raked in a hefty payout because the valuations on these SDN startups have been super high.

The feeding frenzy started when VMware bought Nicira, a leader in the SDN market for $1.26 billion in July.  Nicira had raised about $50 million and had come out of stealth five months earlier.

Another SDN startup, Contrail Systems, was bought in December for $176 million, just two days after it launched. It had raised $48 million.

The reason that SDN startups are getting gobbled up is because SDN is a new technology that turns enterprise networking on its ear. Instead of buying expensive routers and switches with a lot of fancy features from the likes of Cisco, companies can buy simpler, cheaper hardware—and less of it. This makes networks more flexible and less expensive than they are today.

The market is projected to grow from $360 million in 2013 to $3.7 billion by 2016.

LineRate was one of the SDN startups Business Insidertold you to watch just last month.

We weren't kidding about keeping a close eye on them. The way these companies are getting snapped up, if you blink, you'll miss them.

SEE ALSO:  25 Enterprise Startups To Bet Your Career On

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A

• Chris Anderson
• Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman

B

• Noam Bardin
• Hugo Barra
• Marc Benioff
• James Beshara
• Tyler Bosmeny, Dan Carroll, Rafael Garcia
• Roelof Botha

C

• Dalton Caldwell
• Martin Casado
• Temo Chalasani and Marc Provost
• Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk and Joe Gebbia
• Patrick Collison
• Ron Conway
• Tim Cook
• Dick Costolo
• Chris Cox
• Bradford Cross, Aria Haghighi
• Eddy Cue

D

• Adam D'Angelo
• Paul Davison
• Henrique De Castro
• Dave DeWalt
• John Donahoe
• Jack Dorsey
• David Drummond
• Dave Duffield, Aneel Bhusri

F

• Joe Fernandez and Binh Tran

G

• David Goldberg
• Paul Graham
• Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz

H

• Kevin and Julia Hartz
• Reed Hastings
• Reid Hoffman
• Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen
• Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi

I

• Jony Ive

K

• Travis Kalanick
• Salar Kamangar
• Justin Kan
• Joe Kennedy
• Simon Khalaf

L

• Sahil Lavingia
• David Lawee
• Aaron Levie
• Ross Levinsohn
• Phil Libin
• Lee Linden and Ben Lewis
• Joe Lonsdale, Alexander Karp

M

• Doug Mack and Alison Pincus and Susan Feldman
• Paul Maritz and Pat Gelsinger
• Marissa Mayer
• Dave McClure
• Todd McKinnon
• Eric Migicovsky
• Neal Mohan
• Dave Morin
• Dustin Moskovitz
• Elon Musk

N

• Satoshi Nakamoto
• Andrew Ng, Daphne Koller
• Ren Ng
• Deep Nishar

O

• Mike Olson
• Isabelle Olsson, Steve Lee, and Sergey Brin

P

• Larry Page
• James Park
• Meredith Perry
• Sundar Pichai
• Tom Preston-Werner

R

• Gokul Rajaram
• Victoria Ransom
• Joff Redfern 
• Matt Rogers and Tony Fadell
• Andy Rubin

S

• David Sacks
• Max Schireson
• Jessica Scorpio, Sam Zaid, and Elliot Kroo
• Michael Seibel and Ammon Bartram
• Sam Shank
• Ben Silbermann
• Frank Slootman
• Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy
• Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen
• Jeremy Stoppelman
• Godfrey Sullivan
• Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger

T

• Bret Taylor
• Peter Thiel, Jim Breyer, Yuri Milner, Mark Pincus
• Robert Thomas

U

• Gentry Underwood

W

• Hunter Walk, Satya Patel
• Jeff Weiner
• Evan Williams, Jason Goldman, Biz Stone
• Dennis Woodside

Y

• Gideon Yu and Jim Harbaugh

Z

• Gregg Zehr
• John Zimmer, Logan Green
• Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, David Ebersman
• Randi Zuckerberg

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2012 was a huge year for Silicon Valley. 

Facebook went public, Marissa Mayer joined Yahoo, laws changed to foster new industries, enterprise startups got hot, and billion-dollar companies were formed and acquired.

Now, after months of research, debate, and more research, we're happy to present the latest installment of the Silicon Valley 100, Business Insider's authoritative compilation of the people who did the coolest things in Silicon Valley this year. That means people who:

• backed promising companies and saw big exits;
• were star executives;
• created new, interesting things;
• changed entire industries;
• and made industry-defining acquisitions or took their companies public.

In sum, these people aren't riding on old reputations. All of them did something amazing in 2012, and they won big. A big shout-out to everyone named in the list: You earned it. And if you feel that we missed someone? Tell us—we're not all-knowing, and we love telling stories about amazing people.

In A-Z Order

The Complete List 1-100

Acknowledgments

Thanks to our many readers who took the time to send us nominations. The Silicon Valley 100 was assembled by Megan Rose Dickey, Alyson Shontell, Nicholas Carlson, Jay Yarow, and Jim Edwards, and copyedited by Jill Klausen.

100. Randi Zuckerberg

Founder, Zuckerberg Media

Randi Zuckerberg took Silicon Valley by storm with her reality TV show "Start-Ups: Silicon Valley."

It ended up not doing very well in terms of ratings, so it won't be renewed for a new a season. But that's not stopping Zuckerberg from starting her own media company. 

99. Ren Ng

Founder and Executive Chairman, Lytro

In 2011, Ng's team invented a new kind of camera. With it, you take the picture and then decide where to set the focus.

In 2012, Ng launched the camera and later gave up his position as CEO to become executive chairman.

98. Dave McClure

Venture Capitalist and Founding Partner, 500 startups

Since launching his 500 Startups accelerator program in 2010, Dave McClure has invested in a slew of companies all over the world.

To help fuel investments abroad, 500 Startups filed documents with the SEC for two new funds that will likely focus on startups in India and Mexico. It's also expanding to China, and recently added a Beijing venture partner, Rui Ma.

In addition, 500 Startups launched a new coworking space in New York for early-stage startups, including companies from the 500 Startups portfolio.

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Love and technology: A great combination if ever there was one.

In honor of Valentine's Day, we've created this mega-list of the tech industry's most-powerful couples. 

Some are high-profile power couples who work at different companies. Some are couples who work at big companies, and some are new startups founded by married couples.

Dave and Brit Morin are tech royalty

Dave and Brit Morin are married, and each is working on a startup.

Dave is running Path, a mobile social network that has been growing rapidly.

Brit left Google to start her own company, Brit, which launched in November, 2011. It's a design and cooking site full of inspirational how-to posts.

Fab.com CEO Jason Goldberg recently married T-Systems' Christian Schoenherr

One week after Fab raised raised $105 million, which sells curated designer goods online at a discount, Jason Goldberg and his boyfriend, Christian Schoenherr, went to New York's City Hall and picked up a marriage license.

Schoenherr is an account manager in New York for T-Systems North America, a division of Deutsche Telekom that provides information technology services.

The wedding was in August.

Kevin and Julia Hartz's romance started at a wedding

Kevin and Julia Hartz run Eventbrite. They met at a friend's wedding while Julia was working for MTV (on "Jackass") and Kevin was founding Xoom.

They knew right away they wanted to start a company together. Now their ticketing startup has raised about $80 million in venture capital and has sold more than 90 million tickets.

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