INTRODUCING: The 10 people transforming the way the technology industry does business

Business Insider

Business Insider named 10 enterprise technology executives to our list of the 100 people transforming business.
These executives are changing the way that companies work with their customers, the way that programmers work together, and the way that money moves all over the world.
See the full list of the 100 people transforming business here.

Technology is changing the world.

That rapid change has created tremendous demand for tools that can help the world keep pace with the rapid rate of change: People want tools that help them work together, that help them build better and more reliable software, and that help ease the complicated process of doing business on the internet.

We’ve identified ten of the top executives who are providing the technology that forms the foundation for so much innovation. Read on to find the 10 executives transforming enterprise technology.

Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block knows what your customers are thinking

Ryan Young for Business Insider

Last summer, Salesforce promoted chief operating officer Keith Block to co-CEO, putting him on an even keel with Marc Benioff, the company’s legendary founder.

Now Block’s focused on capitalizing on what he calls a "perfect storm of amazing technology disrupting business models and markets," as artificial intelligence gives companies the ability to achieve what he calls the holy grail of sales software, the chance to know everything about their customers and what they value, no matter how they interact with them.

"Everything for us begins and ends with the customer behind every device, whether it’s a phone or an IT device or a robot," Block says.

"There’s a customer back there, and you have to have a portfolio that allows you to think about, how do you capture that information? How do you distill that data? How do you make actions through artificial intelligence around better engaging with that customer," he adds.

Block says that he wants Salesforce to be known as a partner to its customers, as they try to figure out how to capitalize on the rising tide of AI and other emerging technologies.

"We enjoy an incredible relationship with our customers. I think in many ways we’re the envy of the industry in terms of the senior level relationships that we have."

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Stripe president John Collison are opening the world for online business

Stripe

Stripe famously began with seven lines of code, developed by brothers Patrick and John Collison — a simple tool to let developers accept credit-card payments in their apps.

That simple idea has exploded into one of Silicon Valley’s highest-flying startups, with Patrick as CEO and John as president. In the years since inception, Stripe has expanded its business to include services like fraud detection, debit-card issuing, and point-of-sale software.

"We have the mission of increasing the GDP of the internet, and fortunately we are not running out of things to do there," John Collison told Business Insider.

The goal, Collison says, is to reduce the many points of frustration that can make it difficult to do business online. That has included programs like Stripe Atlas, which helps young companies automate the process of filing the paperwork to incorporate and open their first bank accounts.

Customers including Amazon, Lyft, and Target use Stripe to power some of their online-payment systems, while Collison highlights that customers including Warby Parker are using the company’s tech to extend into physical retail.

All this has translated into serious buy-in from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, and CapitalG (formerly Google Capital).

Glitch CEO Anil Dash is making it easy (and fun) to write software

Elizabeth Viggiano

In a world where every company is moving to become a technology company, it’s now extra important to keep developers happy and productive.

Enter Glitch, the namesake tool from the company formerly known as Fog Creek Software. The big idea behind Glitch, CEO Anil Dash says, is to give developers both old and new a tool that makes it easy, and maybe even fun, to build web software, solo or in teams.

Developers are the most expensive people on the staff, Dash says: "Their productivity is really valuable, and their comfort is really valuable."

Glitch comes with a pedigree: Fog Creek Software previously incubated and spun out businesses like popular developer Q&A site Stack Overflow and productivity app Trello (later sold to Atlassian for $425 million).

Dash says that developers at companies including Google and Microsoft are turning to Glitch because it’s an easy way to developers to come up with an idea, build it, and show it to colleagues. Because it has a Google Docs-style shared-code editor, those teams can work together to make changes.

Just as important, Dash adds, it’s a way for programmers to show colleagues in nontechnical roles like marketing or sales an idea and incorporate their feedback. And then it’s simple enough to get them coding too.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider