Chairman, Idealab

Founded in 1996, Idealab is one of the longest-running startup incubators in the nation and has launched over 150 companies. Of these, more than 50 have been acquired or gone public. This year, two Idealab companies – renewable energy business Heliogen Inc. and energy storage company Energy Vault Holdings Inc. – went public through reverse merger deals. Gross founded his first company in 1985 and started Idealab after a prolific career as an early web technology entrepreneur. He founded educational software publisher Knowledge Adventure (now JumpStart Games Inc.) in 1991 and in 1998 launched early search engine GoTo, which was eventually acquired by Yahoo Inc.

YEARS ON THE LA500: 7