David Young has been a pioneer in cloud-computing since before the term was invented. In fact, he and his team helped to invent the term.

David has a long career in Silicon Valley coming up with the ideas we all use today on the internet. When one start-up finished, he was sitting around wondering why it was so hard to get servers and routers set up for his next start-up, so he wrote the first version of Joyent that went on to become the first company selling cloud computing on the internet.

At Joyent he and his colleagues invented selling virtual machines over the internet, he crafted the first cloud operating system, HTML pages that act like normal desktop and mobile apps, the first storage-as-a-service product. They invented node.js, the most widely used internet development technology on the planet. Joyent technologies powered early startups such as Twitter (now X.com), Facebook developer platform, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and many, many others.

Joyent was sold to Samsung and now powers millions of mobile and desktop devices around the globe.