John Stanik

Jason Hoffman has a Ph.D. in molecular pathology, but to him the transition between the biological sciences and his current role as CTO of Joyent was completely natural: "Fundamentally, what I've always been is a systems scientist, meaning that whether I was studying metabolism or diseases of metabolism or cancer or computer systems or anything else, a system is a system," says Hoffman. He draws on this broad systems background in the work he does at Joyent providing scalable infrastructure for Web applications. Joyent's cloud-computing infrastructure has become the foundation for many of the increasingly popular applications developed to feed into the social-networking site Facebook.com.