LSV 150 People Insights - 2025

The lead­ers of the Lon­er­gan SV150 influ­ence not only the strate­gic direc­tions of their com­pa­nies, but also impact the glob­al econ­o­my. It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say their prod­ucts and tech­nolo­gies impact the cul­ture, health, and pros­per­i­ty of the human race itself.

Founders Thrive

Our annu­al review of the peo­ple who lead the com­pa­nies of the Sil­i­con Val­ley sees more evi­dence for the over­ar­ch­ing theme of Founder dom­i­nance in tech­nol­o­gy: founders are the CEOs, the Chairs, and the dom­i­nant stock­hold­ers at an increas­ing num­ber of pub­lic tech companies.

Gen­der Diversity 

On the gen­der diver­si­ty front, the pro­por­tion of women on boards has not declined since the leg­is­la­tion requir­ing Cal­i­for­nia pub­lic boards to achieve cer­tain gen­der diver­si­ty mile­stones was over­turned — but nor has it increased.

Nei­ther have women made inroads into the num­ber of CEOs, which at least at some lev­el may reflect that they have not par­tic­i­pat­ed much in the steady numer­i­cal increase in the pop­u­la­tion of Founder-CEOs (see below). 

The one area of lead­er­ship where gen­der diver­si­ty is flour­ish­ing is in the role of Board Chair. Com­ing off an admit­ted­ly small base, many more women are in the Chair role than ever before (see below).

Founder-CEOs flour­ish in the Sil­i­con Val­ley 150

The Sil­i­con Val­ley con­tin­ues to be com­mit­ted to Founder CEOs. When we start­ed our analy­sis of the SV150 in 2014, there were 38 com­pa­nies being led by Founder CEOs. Today, that num­ber has climbed to 56, down from an all-time high of 59 in Q1 2023. 

Of these 57 Founder CEOs (one com­pa­ny has two founders in the CEO role), 46 also claimed the title of Chair­per­son of the Board (81% of total Founder CEOs).

Of these 57 Founder CEOs, 31 also enjoy the enhanced con­trol over the enter­prise afford­ed by dual class stock struc­tures, in which insid­ers own vot­ing stock with vot­ing rights mul­ti­ples over the com­pa­ny’s reg­u­lar stock (the mul­ti­ple is usu­al­ly ten to one). The impact of own­ing an advan­tage class of stock can be sig­nif­i­cant, as shown below.

Pure aver­age vot­ing pow­er held:
By all Founder CEOs = 6.1%
By Founder CEOs own­ing stock with advan­tage vot­ing mul­ti­ples = 43%
By all Non founder CEOs = under 1% (1% is the report­ing thresh­old in com­pa­ny proxies)

This means in ques­tions of board mem­ber­ship, acqui­si­tion, CEO selec­tion, and strate­gic direc­tion, the Founder CEO most like­ly has the vot­ing pow­er to decide issues, per­haps even with­out broad sup­port from oth­er shareholders/​board members.

CEO tenure way up, dri­ven by increas­ing num­bers of Founder-CEOs

CEO tenure is dra­mat­i­cal­ly up, as mea­sured by both the aver­age and medi­an years of ser­vice (see table below). The medi­an years of ser­vice for the 152 CEOs in the rank­ings is 10 years, an increase of 45% since we mea­sured this in the Fall of 2016. when the medi­an years of CEO ser­vice was 5.5 years.

Dri­ving increas­es in tenure is the growth in the num­ber of Founder-CEOs, who have near­ly 3x the aver­age tenure of non founder CEOs. Founder-CEOs grew in num­ber from 28% of total CEOs in 2016 to 38% today.

Let’s look at the changes in CEO tenure by category:

Churn in CEO roster

While aver­age tenure is up, CEO turnover in Q1 2025 was nev­er­the­less quite brisk.

Grow­ing per­for­mance pres­sure in the Lon­er­gan SV150 may be lead­ing to CEO depar­tures; in the first 4 months of 2025, nine ranked com­pa­nies have hired a new CEO or put an inter­im in place. 

The new­ly hired CEOs are: Intel (LSV# 9) Lip-Bu Tan; West­ern Dig­i­tal (LSV#23) Irv­ing Tan; San­disk (LSV#44) David Goeck­el­er; Lumen­tum (LSV#74 ) Michael Hurl­ston; Cours­era (LSV#108) Greg Hart. There are also four com­pa­nies with inter­ims: Ultra Clean (LSV#67), Synap­tics (LSV#88), Lucid Group (LSV#90), and Mar­qe­ta (LSV#122).

Also, since the start of 2025, for­mer­ly ranked 23andme saw its Founder-CEO Ann Woj­ci­c­ki step down, and the com­pa­ny is now in Chap­ter 11.

Women on LSV150 boards hold steady

As of the month of April 2025, women direc­tors fill 37% of the board seats on the Lon­er­gan SV150. Com­pared to our study of Sil­i­con Val­ley boards pub­lished in our 2015 Who Runs Sil­i­con Val­ley Board edi­tion, this is a huge increase in rep­re­sen­ta­tion of 23 per­cent­age points. A relent­less focus on gen­der diver­si­ty in the Sil­i­con Val­ley has yield­ed a change in recruit­ment at the board level. 

It should be not­ed that the share of board seats held by women (37%) has remained fair­ly con­stant for the past four mea­sure­ment years.

2015 Num­bers Com­pared to Today

• Board seats filled by women: 157 in mid-2015 ris­ing to 453 today 
• Per­cent women held seats: 14% in mid-2015 ris­ing to 37% today 
• Boards chaired by women: 4 in mid-2015 to 18 today
• Num­ber of Lon­er­gan SV150 boards with no women direc­tors: 45 in mid-2015 drop­ping to 0 today 

Note: these diver­si­ty sta­tis­tics above do not include the 152 boards seats filled by the CEOs of the LSV150 (143 men and 9 women — there are two com­pa­nies with two male co-CEOs).

Women Chairs Grow­ing in Number

The Board Chair role is high­ly influ­en­tial. With 18 women cur­rent­ly serv­ing as chairs, we have mea­sured a sig­nif­i­cant leap in the num­ber of com­pa­nies with a woman in the board chair role.

That num­ber 18 may not seem very large, but let’s put that into a dif­fer­ent perspective:

While 18 woman chairs might seem like a rel­a­tive­ly low 12% of the total, giv­en the impact male CEOs also serv­ing as chairs have on the pool of com­pa­nies with an inde­pen­dent chair, anoth­er way to look at this is women have 22% of the tru­ly avail­able inde­pen­dent chair roles. 

Note: 71 boards have the CEO in the chair role — only one of those is a woman, Lisa Su of AMD (LSV #17).

Women CEOs — no recent gains

Since we start­ed track­ing the num­ber of women CEOs of the Sil­i­con Val­ley in 2014, when there were five women CEOs in the SV150, we have not seen any momen­tum behind this met­ric. There are cur­rent­ly only nine women CEOs of the com­pa­nies on our ranking.

Unlike our track­ing of women board direc­tors (see analy­sis above), the num­ber of women CEOs in this rank­ing is not a met­ric with a trend line — the num­ber of women CEOs inch­es up and down a lit­tle each year, but has seen no mean­ing­ful trend­line improvement.

The cur­rent nine women CEOs of the Lon­er­gan SV150 are:

• Lisa Su, AMD (LSV #17)
• Adair Rita Fox-Mar­tin, Equinix (LSV #30)
• Jayshree Ullal, Arista (LSV #36)
• Fid­ji Simo, Instacart (LSV #53)
• Mary Pow­ell, Sun­run (LSV #68)
• Hay­den Brown, Upwork (LSV #100)
• Rati Sahi Levesque, The Real­Re­al (LSV#117)
• Jen­nifer Teja­da, Pager­Du­ty (LSV #124) 
  
• Julia Hartz, founder of Event­bite (LSV #136)

Note: with the depar­ture of Ann Woj­ci­c­ki, the Founder-CEO of 23andme, which is now in Chap­ter 11, we have only one female Founder-CEO in the LSV150 — Julia Hartz of Eventbrite.

Read the 2025 LSV150 com­pa­ny insights for more about LSV 150 finan­cial met­rics, IPOs, and acquisitions…