1. Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs
In this issue,
Mark Lonergan
profiles the
leaders whose
companies fuel
the US economy
LONERGAN PARTNERS INSIGHTS OCTOBER 20, 2014

2. The Silicon Valley seems like the engine for growth in the US econo-
my. According to the 2014 Silicon Valley Index, this area leads the
nation in IPOs, patents registered, venture capital and angel invest-
ment, as well as leading the nation in income and high growth/high
wage jobs. Many of the newest global technology wins such as Face-
book, Twitter, and LinkedIn all have headquarters here.
With our firm’s focus on leadership, we wanted to know—who runs
the Silicon Valley? We profiled the 138 CEOs who lead the largest 136
publically traded tech companies in the Silicon Valley, all from the list
created by the San Jose Mercury News called the Silicon Valley 150.
We excluded companies with interim CEOs and healthcare-focused
companies involved in pharmaceuticals, so our study focuses on the
traditional core of high tech: companies in internet, software, semi-
conductor, networking, mobility, and computers.
Our study looked into the backgrounds of each of the CEOs in this
exclusive group. They are among the most accomplished people of
their times, and amongst them they oversee 1.3 million employees
and $689 Billion in worldwide sales.
So let’s explore....
Who Runs Silicon Valley?
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 1 OF 15
Mark is the Founder and Man-
aging Partner of Lonergan
Partners, Silicon Valleyʻs largest
independent search firm
By Mark Lonergan
Mark is also CEO of SVDX, a
joint venture with the Stanford
Rock Center for Corporate Gov-
ernance focused on educating
Boards of Directors
A Profile of Silicon
Valley Tech CEOs
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

3. Mostly men
No surprises here.
Similar to the Fortune 500, where only 25 CEOs are women, there are
very few women running the high tech companies in our study.
In fact, only four CEOs in this study are women: Meg Whitman of HP
(SV 150 #2), Safra Catz of Oracle (SV 150 #6 —she leads alongside
Mark Hurd), Marissa Mayer of Yahoo (SV 150 #19), and Selino Lo of
Ruckus Wireless (SV 150 #110).
That makes this group 97% male, so from here on out in this profile I
am just going to use the pronoun he, as it fits most of the time.
(Note, on October 6th just prior to this document being finalized, a
fifth woman CEO, Lisa Su of AMD (SV 150 #17), was appointed. The
summary data in this study was not changed as a result, but contin-
ues to reflect the world as of September 20.)
3% are women
Elon Musk
Tesla Motors (SV 150 #39) CEO
Elon Musk is one of 134 male CEOs
in our study. Having co-founded
Tesla as well as SpaceX and
Paypal, he illustrates a dedication
to several historically (although
certainly not exclusively) male pas-
sions - automobiles and rockets.
Selina Lo
Ruckus Wireless (SV 150 #110) CEO Selina
Lo is one of four female CEOs in our study.
In addition to founding Ruckus Wireless,
a company with $263 million in worldwide
sales, she has built a number of successful
computer networking startups such as Al-
teon WebSystems, which was sold to Nortel
for $7.8 billion, and Centillion Networks,
which developed the first token ring Ether-
net switch.
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 2 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

4. Someone who is 53 was born in 1961.
So while youngsters like Mark Zuckerberg make news and everyone
wants to know how someone so young could be so rich and pow-
erful, the typical SV 150 tech CEO is in fact a member of the Baby
Boom, with decades of experience under his belt.
Baby Boomers with an average
age of 53
Tim Cook
Apple (SV 150 #1) CEO Tim Cook is
age 53, making him the average age of
the Silicon Valley Tech CEOs.
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 3 OF 15
Experienced leaders
The average length of tenure of the current SV Tech CEOs is 6.2 years.
Moshe Gavrilov
Moshe Gavrielov of Xilinx (SV 150 #33)
has been CEO for just over six years,
which is the average tenure of the
Silicon Valley Tech CEOs.
Moshe also happens to be a
Lonergan Partners CEO placement.
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

5. High earners, especially in bonus
and stock
The average 2013 base salary in this group is $548K.
When bonuses and stock are included, the average annual compen-
sation goes up to $6.35 Million.
This obviously compares very favorably to the average Silicon Valley
2012 per capita income of $70,243, which in turn compares favorably
to the US national average of $44,276.
Meg Whitman
Hewlett Packard (SV 150 #2) CEO Meg
Whitman is one of the four CEOs in this
group working for a base salary of $1 per
year.
The others are:
Larry Page, Google (SV 150 #3)
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook (SV 150 #11)
Robert Pera of Ubiquiti (SV 150 #85)
Reed Hastings
Netflix (SV 150 #21) CEO Reed Hast-
ings has the highest base salary in the
amount of $1,952,308.
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 4 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

6. Americans
67% of the CEOs in this group were born in the USA.
This actually surprised me as quite a high fraction of the group. How-
ever, when we look at founder CEOs only, 19 of 33 for which we had
origin data were born outside the USA.
The foreign country which is the birthplace of the highest number of
CEO founders outside the USA is China with five, followed by India
with four, and Taiwan with three.
Jure Sola
Sanmina-SCI (SV 150 #16) CEO Jure Sola is the
lone founder born in Croatia. After moving to the
United States at the age of seventeen, he co-
founded what is now the 16th largest company
in the Silicon Valley in 1981.
Source: LPI SV150 2014
Tech CEO Profiling
Project, includes all CEOs
with country of origin
information available
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 5 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

7. Virtually all the SV Tech CEOs had a formal four year college degree.
This is compared to 46% of the Silicon Valley’s adult population and
29% of the nation’s adult population overall.
In addition, 23 of 138 attended an Ivy League school for either under-
graduate or graduate education, and 41 of 138 attended an elite Top
10 National University as defined by the current US News and World
Report college rankings.
The well-educated
John Chambers
CEO of Cisco Systems (SV 150 #5) John
Chambers has earned three degrees, includ-
ing an undergraduate degree and JD from
West Virginia University and an MBA from
Indiana University.
Source: LPI SV150 2014 Tech CEO
Profiling Project, includes all CEOs
with degree information avail-
able. Note: Top 10 Universities as
defined by US News & World Report:
Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Colum-
bia, Stanford, Univ of Chicago, MIT,
Duke, UPenn, and CalTech. 63 Elite
Degrees awarded to 45 CEOs as
several had multiple degrees from
the institutions in the Top 10; for
simplicty, fulfillment of a graduate
programs was assumed to represent
one graduate degree per CEO
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 6 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

8. 130 of 138 CEOs have obtained a degree from a school in the United
States.
When we narrow the study to look at California schools only, we
found that only 19% of the CEOs attended an undergraduate institu-
tion in California. When graduate school is included, the percent rises
to 36%.
Graduates of US degree programs
Stanford stands out as the university which boasts the largest number of
degree holders among the SV Tech CEOs (with 20 CEOs having either a
Stanford undergrad or graduate degree, or both).
Marissa Mayer
Yahoo (SV 150 #19) CEO
Marissa Mayer earned two
degrees from Stanford: a BS
in Symbolic Systems and a
MS in Computer Science. Source: LPI SV150 2014 Tech CEO Profiling Project
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 7 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

9. The typical Silicon Valley Tech CEO has an educational background in
a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) field.
A clear majority (66%) of CEOs had obtained either an undergraduate
or graduate degree in a STEM field of study.
Not surprisingly, founders were more likely to have STEM degrees
(85% of them) than non-founders (60% of them).
At the undergraduate level, 63% of 131 undergraduate degree hold-
ers received a STEM degree, while 28% studied business, and a small
minority of 9% degreed in the liberal arts.
STEM graduates
TJ Rodgers
Cypress Semiconductor (SV
150 #65) CEO T.J Rodgers
exemplifies a passion for
STEM fields, having earned a
BS in Physics and Chemistry
from Dartmouth and a MS
and PhD in Electrical Engi-
neering from Stanford.
Source: LPI SV150 2014 Tech CEO Profiling Project, includes all CEOs with field of undergraduate
study information available
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 8 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

10. Over 60% of the SV Tech CEOs have obtained a graduate degree (87
CEOs with 100 graduate degrees among them).
Most have either a Masters in Science (40 CEOs) or a Masters in Busi-
ness Administration (35 CEOs).
Graduate degree holders
Dr. John Ambroseo
There are also more than a few PhDs in
the group, including Dr. John Ambroseo
of Coherent (SV 150 #62) who earned a
PhD in Chemistry from the University of
Pennsylvania.
Source: LPI SV150 2014
Tech CEO Profiling
Project, includes all CEOs
with graduate degree
information available
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 9 OF 15
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

11. 101 of the companies were led by non-founders.
The longer the time the company was public, the more likely the CEO
was not the founder.
For companies in their first five years as a public company, the likeli-
hood the CEO was also a founder was 50%.
After the first five years, the likelihood dropped off to 23%, with com-
panies which had been public longer than 20 years still having a 17%
likelihood of being led by a founder.
Not the founder
John Donahoe
eBay (SV 150 #7) CEO John Donahoe illustrates
the path of the non-founder CEO. A highly
trained business leader, he earned an MBA
from Stanford and ran top strategy consulting
firm Bain & Company prior to joining eBay. He
spent three years in top eBay management
roles before being promoted to CEO.
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 10 OF 15
This is a big surprise to me. 60% of the CEOs had no prior experience
as a CEO in their resume.
However, when we excluded founders, only 50% of the CEOs who
were non-founders were first time CEOs.
First time CEOs
Jeff Weiner
LinkedIn (SV 150 #44) CEO Jeff Weiner is cur-
rently honored by Glassdoor as the best CEO in
the country. Prior to his role at LinkedIn, he was
EVP at Yahoo in charge of the Network Divison,
and later Executive in Residence at leading
venture firms Accel Partners and Greylock
Partners.
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

12. The typical SV Tech CEO was internally promoted and not hired from
the outside to fill the role.
If we include founders as fundamentally an internal choice, then 64%
of CEOs could be classified as an internal appointment.
Among non-founders, the tilt towards internal promotion was not ex-
treme, but 56% of non-founder CEOs were internally promoted to fill
the role rather than hired from the outside.
Internally promoted CEOs...
Note: CEOs sourced from the Board of Directors were counted as internally promoted
Source: LPI SV150 2014 Tech CEO Profiling Project
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 11 OF 15
If hired from the outside, the CEOs in our study typically had prior CEO
experience.
When we looked at CEOs who were hired from the outside rather
than internally promoted, we found 61% had prior experience as a
CEO.
…or externally-hired CEOs with
prior CEO experience
Tom Waechter
JDS Uniphase (SV 150 #43) CEO
Tom Waechter was previously CEO
of Stratex Networks, REMEC Corpo-
ration, and Spectrian Corporation.
Brian Krzanich
Brian Krzanich of Intel (SV 150 #4)
is a sublime example of promotion
from within, being made CEO after
30 years at Intel. He started to work
for the company as an engineer at
the age of 22.
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

13. LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 12 OF 15
Not the Chairman of the Board
Source: LPI SV 150
2014 Tech CEO
Profiling Project
Only 48 CEOs were also their COB and 58% of those were founders,
such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (SV 150 #11) and Reed Hast-
ings of Netflix (SV 150 #21).
As CEO of the SVDX, this is a governance issue near and dear to my
heart. I am pleased to see that only 20% of non-founding CEOs are
also COB at their company.
Lloyd Carney
Brocade Communications (SV 150 #36) CEO
Lloyd Carney, who also happens to be a
Lonergan Partners CEO placement from 2013,
exemplifies the governance best practice
of separating the roles of CEO and Chair-
man of the Board. His Chairman at Brocade,
Dave House, is a highly experienced business
leader who has served Brocade as a director
since 2004, and as Chairman since 2005.
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

14. LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 13 OF 15
This concludes our brief profile of the Silicon Valley Tech CEOs. They
are a colorful group and their fascinating life stories are the fuel for
books, magazine articles, and even movies.
Here’s what they have in common:
The leaders of the Silicon Valley are technical, well-educated, and the
product of vast experience.
They clearly have unusual intellectual gifts and a passion to achieve
and build. In the most dynamic market in the world, they invent and
then reinvent their companies in order to stay in the lead.
The CEOs of these companies are resilient, visionary, and demanding
—especially of themselves.
They are who runs the Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley is a
mindset, not a location.
—Reid Hoffman, co-founder
LinkedIn
I’m a Silicon Valley guy.
I just think people from
Silicon Valley can do
anything.
—Elon Musk, co-founder & CEO
of Tesla Motors
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

15. Appendix
Profile of the Companies in this Study
Our data is all based on publically available data, from government
filings, company websites and press releases, and news articles. We
did not run any “background checks” on these folks, so we only know
what they have been willing to tell the world. The dataset is also a
snapshot in time, with our study date being September 20, 2014.
The company data to populate our SV Tech CEO list was taken from
the San Jose Mercury News ranking of the Silicon Valley 150, pub-
lished on April 11, 2014. Financial statistics in this profile reflect the last
4 published quarters of results prior to December 31, 2013. The Silicon
Valley 150 list can be found at:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/sv150/ci_25548370
Average 2013 Revenue
$5 Billion (ranked in first place was Apple with $174 Billion in sales at
the time of the Mercury News rankings, and last ranked was Nimble
Storage with $126 Million in sales)
Average Market Cap (on March 31, 2014)
$17 Billion (ranked in first place was Apple with $479 Billion in market
cap, and last ranked was Dialogic with $13 Million in market cap)
Average Number of Employees
9,300 (ranked in first place was Hewlett-Packard with 317,500 and last
ranked was Ubiquiti with 183)
Average Time as a Publically Traded Company
14 years (first ranked as oldest was Hewlett-Packard (SV 150 #2),
which went public in 1957). The youngest were those 10 companies
on the list which went public in 2013:
Twitter (SV 150 #67)
Silver Spring Networks (SV 150 #98)
Chegg (SV 150 #113)
Rocket Fuel (SV 150 #116)
Barracuda Networks (SV 150 #121)
FireEye (SV 150 #131)
RingCentral (SV 150 #133)
YuMe (V 150 #135)
Gigamon (SV 150 #141)
Nimble (SV 150 #150))
LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 14 OF 15
CEO Standouts
Youngest
Mark Zuckerberg, age 30
CEO Facebook (SV 150 #11)
Oldest
Shaw Hong, age 77
CEO Omnivision Technologies
(SV 150 #46)
Longest Serving
Ray Zinn
CEO Micrel (SV 150 #118)
Has served as CEO for 35 years
Newest in the Job
Safra Catz & Mark Hurd
Co-CEOs of Oracle (SV 150 #6)
Appointed September 18, 2014
Founders with 20+ years as
public company CEO
Jure Sola of Sanmina-SCI
(SV 150 #16)
Aart de Geus of Synopsis
(SV 150 #40)
TJ Rodgers of Cypress Semicon-
ductor (SV 150 #65)
Ray Zinn of CEO Micrel (SV 150
#118)
Thinh Q Tran of Sigma Designs
(SV 150 #124)
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs

16. LONERGAN PARTNERSʻ INSIGHTS WHO RUNS SILICON VALLEY © 2014 LONERGAN PARTNERS, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PAGE 15 OF 15
Notes
All Silicon Valley 150 companies are headquartered in the five Bay
Area counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa,
and Alameda.
SV 150 companies excluded were:
Symantec (SV 150 #12 has an interim CEO). Note: interim Michael
Brown was made permanent on September 25, 2014, after the cutoff
date of this study. His profile has not been included in our dataset.
ServiceSource (SV 150 #108 has an interim CEO)
and the following 12 pharmaceutical and biotech companies:
Gilead Sciences (SV 150 #8)
Bio-Rad Laboratories (SV 150 #38)
Align Technology (SV 150 #68)
Impax Laboratories (SV 150 #77)
Affymetrix (SV 150 #97)
Medivation (SV 150 # 107)
Genomic Health (SV 150 #111) Note: this company has a female CEO,
Kimberly Popovits
Pharamcyclics (SV 150 #112)
Abaxis (SV 150 #128)
Nektar Therapeutics (SV 150 #137)
Depomed (SV 150 #145)
Sciclone Pharmaceuticals (SV 150 #148)
Number of Fortune 500 women CEOs comes from Catalyst http://
www.catalyst.org/knowledge/women-ceos-fortune-1000 dated
September 19, 2014.
Top 10 National Universities according to the US News & World Re-
ports Rankings of September 30, 2014 were: Princeton, Harvard, Yale,
Columbia, Stanford, University of Chicago, MIT, Duke, UPenn, and
California Institute of Technology.
2014 Silicon Valley Index, a publication of the Joint Venture and the
Silicon Valley Community Foundation, can be viewed at:
http://www.jointventure.org/images/stories/pdf/index2014.pdf
Interview with Jeff Weiner from Business Insider online at:
http://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-ceo-jeff-weiner-on-leader-
ship-2014-9
Every effort was made to be accurate
in the content of this study. We apolo-
gize for any mistakes or omissions.
However, Lonergan Partners makes
no claim that this material is error-free,
and assumes no responsibility for any
errors or mistakes published in this
article.
Lonergan Partners and the Lonergan
Partners logo are trademarks of
Lonergan Partners.
All other marks are the property of
their respectivce owners.
Who
Silicon
Valley
Runs