Caterina Fake (b. June 13, 1969)
On the blog that she began in 1998 during social media’s early days, Caterina Fake describes herself as an “entrepreneur, mother, reader, optimist.” Those four words can’t begin to describe how she’s changed how we use the Web.

In the early 1990s, when many of us were still trying to figure out how to use e-mail, this Vassar College graduate was building online communities and social software as art director of Salon.com. In 1997, she took a job managing the community forums of Netscape. Five years later, her entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and she co-founded Ludicorp with her then-husband Steward Butterfield. Fake’s company then created Flickr, one of the most popular photo-sharing sites in the world.

Tech giant Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005 and hired Fake to run its technology development division. In 2009, less than a year after resigning from Yahoo!, Fake co-founded the website Hunch, which builds taste profiles of Internet users.

Just two years later, eBay acquired Hunch for a reported $80 million. Aside from business success, Fake has won numerous awards, including a 2006 spot on the coveted Time 100, Time magazine’s ranking of the world’s100 most influential people.

Believing that part of truly being successful is helping others, Fake is a partner at Founder Collective, a venture capital fund. And considering that she told entrepreneur.com that “the real world is a bottomless source of inspiration for what you can build [online],” it seems that we can look forward to more of Fake’s genius productions.