Who Are the Most Popular Silicon Valley CEOs?

by Ben Parr

Say you just moved to Silicon Valley, and you’re looking for a new job in the tech industry. What Silicon Valley CEO should you work for?
Cubeduel, a side project of Urbanspoon co-founder Adam Doppelt and RescueTime co-founder Tony Wright, says it has the answer. Cubeduel connects to a user’s LinkedIn account and then asks him or her to choose between two colleagues, business partners or coworkers based on who they would rather work with.
Cubeduel’s users have clocked in more than 1.2 million votes so far, with 26% of those users voting more than 100 times, so it has a pretty decent sample size. LinkedIn, Microsoft and Google employees alone have voted more than 100,000 times.
So who’s the most popular CEO in Silicon Valley? That honor goes to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. He has won 100% of his duels on Cubeduel (16/16). Perhaps his previous stint as an improv comedian simply makes him more personable. Also topping the list of highly regarded CEOs are Brian Halligan of Hubspot (100%), Tony Hsieh of Zappos (83%), Gary Kovacs of Mozilla (81%), Marc Benioff of Salesforce (78%) and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn (75%, 54/72). Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious and CEO of Tasty Labs, won 88% (22/25) of duels.
Unfortunately, several other prominent CEOs get the dubious honor of being the least-liked on Cubeduel. Two of the least-regarded are Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp (7%, 1/13) and Matt Williams of Digg (18%). We can understand why people wouldn’t be happy with Matt Williams — how popular can you be when you lay off half of your staff? But it’s interesting that Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman is so unpopular. Bringing up the rear though is Jordan Glazier of Eventful (4%).
Cubeduel’s stats aren’t scientific, of course. There could be any number of reasons why someone chooses one colleague over another, and it’s all based on LinkedIn connections. Still, if you’re the CEO of a major Silicon Valley company, you’d like people to say they like working with or for you.

Meet Susan Wojcicki, "The Most Important Googler You've Never Heard Of"

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry

The San Jose Mercury News today has a laudatory profile of Susan Wojcicki, SVP Product Management at Google, whom they call with good reason "the most important Googler you've never heard of."

She oversees Google's two main advertising products, AdWords and AdSense, which bring in the vast majority of Google's revenues (and even more of its profits).

Here's what we already knew:

• She rented her garage to Larry and Sergey when they first started Google.
  
• Her sister Anne married Sergey Brin.

Here's what we learned:

• She's as respected inside Google as she is little-known outside -- and it suits her just fine to have a low profile. She's known for letting her teams get credit for the work they do.
  
• She came up with the google doodles! Awesome!
  
• She wasn't just one of the first googler women, she was the first googler mother; as such, she was (and is) a leader on making google a more inclusive workplace. She now has four children -- also very cool.
  
• She was behind Google's two biggest acquisitions: DoubleClick, and YouTube, after failing to keep up with them as head of Google Video

All in all, a very impressive record. She is indeed the most important Googler we'd only vaguely heard of.