Michael Moritz (Sequoia Capital)

Welsh-born venture capitalist inspires equal parts fear and respect. The early investor in Google, Yahoo, and PayPal is still swinging for the fences. He led Sequoia's investment in video camera maker Pure Digital (sold to Cisco for $590 million); turned rubber into gold when he flipped Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion; backed battery maker A123 Systems before it went public in 2009; helped orchestrate Google's $700 million (pending) purchase of ITA Software; took prepaid debit-card company Green Dot public that same month (current market cap: $1.9 billion); portfolio company Kayak just filed to go public and Moritz joined LinkedIn's board shortly before its much anticipated IPO.

Moritz also serves on the boards of 24/7 Customer, Aricent, Gamefly, Klarna and WeatherBug. In what spare time he had left, the former journalist re-released an update of his 1983 book "Return to the Little Kingdom: How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World."