Tonight, Silicon Valley’s heroes gave competition a rest and joined together at the third annual TechFellow Awards to celebrate the spirit of innovation. An all-star committee of industry moguls carefully considered your nominations of visionaries in the fields of engineering, product design and marketing, general management, and disruptive innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.
Supported by Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the awards ceremony was hosted by Jim Parsons, the Emmy-award winning star of nerdy television comedy show The Big Bang Theory at San Francisco’s Museum Of Modern Art. Mayor Ed Lee spoke, Facebook engineer Mark Slee DJ’d, and past winners toasted the future of our industry.
Thanks to everyone for submitting your nominations. Here are the 5 winners for each category of this year’s TechFellow Awards:
Engineering Leadership
Presented by: Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo
- Ruchi Sanghvi, former Product Manager (NewsFeed) at Facebook
- Amitt Mahajan, co-creator of MyMiniLife (Farmville)
- Scott Marlette, former Product Manager (Photos) at Facebook
- Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bit.ly
- Brian Totty, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Groupon
Product Design & Marketing
Presented by: Dave Morin, co-founder and CEO at Path
- Craig Mod, former designer at Flipboard
- Dustin Mierau, co-founder and Chief Designer of Path
- Wilson Miner, designer at rdio
- Dan Cederholm, co-founder of Dribbble
- Joe Hewitt, former Product Manager (iPhone) at Facebook
General Management
Presented by: Ross Fubini, VP of SuccessFactors (acquired by SAP)
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Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025
Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444.
- Joe Greenstein, founder and CEO of Flixster
- Heather Harde, former CEO of TechCrunch
- Andrew Siegel, SVP, Strategy and Corporate Development of Conde Nast
- Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay
- Victoria Ransom, founder & CEO of Wildfire Interactive
Disruptive Innovation
Presented by: David Friedberg, CEO at The Climate Corporation
- Diego Berdakin, co-founder and President of BeachMint
- Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper
- Leilah Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource
- Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare
- Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter
- Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and CTO, Github
