24 Top innovators

Call them innovators, entrepreneurs, or good old-fashioned trouble-makers. These 24 disrupters have gone up against the odds as they've rattled old industries and tried to create new ones.

Vinod Khosla
Vinod Khosla
Khosla Ventures
Vinod Khosla, a lion of IT venture capital investing in his years at industry heavyweight Kleiner Perkins, has turned his attention to energy - specifically, to coming up with alternative fuels to replace environmentally unfriendly petroleum-based products. Together with entrepreneur-turned-VC Samir Kaul, he's plunking down cash (he won't say how much, but it's a safe bet that it's in the tens of millions) on a slew of green-focused startups. Khosla Ventures' beneficiaries include Range Fuels andMascoma - headed by Mitch Mandich and Bruce Jamerson, respectively - both of which plan to produce ethanol from plant products other than corn; Ausra, a solarpower company chaired by David Mills and run by president John O'Donnell; and Transonic Combustion, run by husbandand wife Mike and Charity Cheiky, which is working, in ultra-top-secret stealth mode, on radically more efficient fuel injection technology. --A.L.

Mark Gorton

Glueckman and Kantor

Hjalmar Winbladh

Craig Venter

Sunil Shaunak

Diane Greene

Nick Grouf

Caleb Chung

Stoppelman and Simmons

Glenn Kelman

Dan Olschwang

David Della Terza

Jack Memishian

Martin Eberhard

Vinod Khosla
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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.