Copenhagen, Denmark, 1979

Founder of Ruby on Rails, an open-source web development framework that has become a benchmark for thousands of programmers around the world because of its simplicity. Global services such as Twitter, Groupon, Shopify and Yellow Pages use this code in their developments. In 2005, at the age of 26, Google named him ‘Hacker of the year’, and he appeared on the cover of the Linux Journal. He is also a partner at 37signals. His book Rework, in which he explains how to launch and manage businesses in a different way, was named bestseller of the year by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.