B2B software has been the most consequential category in technology for the last decade. Not the most visible — consumer apps get the cultural coverage — but the most consequential, in terms of dollars moved, workflows changed, and operational leverage created. The founders who shaped this category built more than companies. They built the frameworks, the playbooks, and the cultural norms that every B2B company that followed has inherited.
1. Patrick & John Collison — Stripe
The Collison brothers built the payments infrastructure that most of the internet economy depends on by solving a problem that developers had been tolerating for years. Their contribution to B2B is not just Stripe the product — it is the demonstration that developer experience is a valid competitive moat in enterprise software. Every company that has since competed on DX owes a debt to Stripe's original thesis.
2. Stewart Butterfield — Slack
Butterfield's contribution to B2B is the bottom-up enterprise sales motion. Slack did not sell to IT departments. It spread through teams who adopted it independently and then refused to give it up. This model — product-led growth before the term existed — became the template for how an entire generation of B2B companies approach distribution. The Salesforce acquisition at $27.7 billion validated the model at a scale that silenced every skeptic.
3. Frank Slootman — ServiceNow, Snowflake
Slootman ran two of the most significant enterprise software IPOs of the last fifteen years. His playbook — intense focus on execution, extreme clarity about what the company is selling and to whom, relentless accountability to metrics — is now the reference manual for late-stage B2B scaling. His book Amp It Up codified an operational philosophy that most enterprise founders had been practicing instinctively but had never articulated at this level of discipline.
4. Tobi Lütke — Shopify
Lütke built the infrastructure layer for commerce and did it by refusing to compete on features with Salesforce and SAP, choosing instead to win on accessibility and speed-to-value for small and medium businesses. Shopify's platform strategy — build the tools, let partners build the ecosystem — created a flywheel that no direct competitor has been able to replicate. The decision to prioritize merchant success over Shopify's own revenue lines is the clearest example in recent B2B history of long-term platform thinking winning over short-term extraction.
5. Aaron Levie — Box
Levie built Box in the middle of the enterprise file-sharing market while Dropbox was building the consumer version of the same idea, and found a sustainable business by going deeper into compliance, security, and workflow integration than any consumer-oriented competitor would follow. His public commentary on enterprise software strategy — prolific on Twitter/X and in long-form writing — has influenced how a generation of B2B founders think about market positioning and the consumerization of enterprise UX.
6. Dheeraj Pandey — Nutanix
Pandey built Nutanix into a $2 billion+ revenue enterprise infrastructure company by identifying that the hyperconverged infrastructure market was about to go through the same disaggregation that every other enterprise infrastructure category had. His ability to build in a capital-intensive market — hardware plus software, sold through channel partners, to the most conservative buyers in enterprise IT — while maintaining a culture that attracted top engineering talent is a case study in founder-led enterprise scaling.
7. Olivier Pomel — Datadog
Pomel built Datadog into the dominant infrastructure monitoring platform for cloud-native companies by making a bet that cloud adoption would accelerate faster than the incumbent monitoring vendors could adapt. The product expansion strategy — starting with infrastructure monitoring and expanding into APM, logs, security, and beyond — is the template for how a focused B2B tool becomes a platform. Datadog's net revenue retention, consistently above 130%, is the metric that every infrastructure software company benchmarks against.
8. Eric Yuan — Zoom
Yuan left Cisco WebEx to build the video conferencing product that he believed WebEx should have been. His focus on reliability and simplicity — two things that every video conferencing product before Zoom had sacrificed for features — was the thesis. The pandemic accelerated adoption by years, but the product was already winning before COVID because the fundamental experience was better. Yuan's decision to prioritize happiness (his word for it, and he meant it operationally) as a company metric created a culture that built differently than enterprise software companies typically do.
9. Melanie Perkins — Canva
Perkins built the most used design platform in the world by making graphic design accessible to people who were not designers. The product decision — take a professional tool's output quality and reduce the skill requirement to near zero — is the same move that every great B2B democratization play has made. Canva's $40 billion valuation reflects the size of the market that unlocks when you remove the expertise requirement from a tool that everyone needs.
10. Howie Liu — Airtable
Liu built Airtable by finding the gap between spreadsheets and databases — a gap that millions of people were filling with hacked-together spreadsheet solutions — and creating a product that felt like the former but worked like the latter. The no-code movement Airtable helped define has created an entirely new category of business software, one where the end user builds their own tool instead of waiting for IT. The platform's influence on how teams think about data, workflow, and tooling has been disproportionate to its revenue at any given point in time.
What these founders built beyond their companies
Every founder on this list changed not just their market but the practice of building B2B software. They established new norms for how enterprise products get distributed (PLG), how enterprise companies get scaled (Slootman's playbook), how enterprise platforms get built (Shopify's ecosystem model), and how enterprise software gets designed (Canva's accessibility thesis).
The influence of these ten founders on the B2B companies being built right now is not metaphorical. It is architectural. The companies being built today are built on top of their infrastructure, following their playbooks, and competing in markets they defined. That is what it means to be influential in B2B software.