Kevin Efrusy (Accel Partners)

Unassuming former entrepreneur spent three months convincing Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker to take a meeting. Thanks to Efrusy, Accel now owns 10% of the company. Later a wedding brought Efrusy to Chicago, where he met with the team at Groupon, decided to invest and now serves on the board. Then there's the early bet he made on software outfit SpringSource before it sold to VMWare for $420 million.

His current investments include open-source software companies Terracotta and Aptana, database storage company Northscale, and BranchOut (a LinkedIn-like application for Facebook). Aspiring fiction writer says his only hobbies are "parenting my three young boys, coaching their sports and keeping them out of prison."