We are excited to announce this year’s TechFellow class, an amazing group of 21 individuals who we believe have the potential to be the next Andrew Mason or Mark Zuckerberg.

It is a privilege to work with Sean Parker and Michael Polansky at Founders Fund, both of whom have an incredible nose for talent and raw entrepreneurship. Together, we share the belief that we can inspire individuals to start or build the next Groupon or Facebook by creating a program that celebrates the rising stars of the technology industry, many of whom have already made substantial contributions to society through their work as innovators or entrepreneurs.

The TechFellow program creates a unique investment pool of $100,000 per award winner to invest in start-ups of their choice throughout the year. This collaborative investment program, combined with events and workshops, is designed to generate break-out start-up ideas and catalyze the formation of founding teams that otherwise would not have come together. We find that many of the participants want to brainstorm with a VC partner as they create their plans to change the world, and we look to invest in those who are looking to build transformative companies. (NOTE: one such entrepreneur, Christophe Bisciglia, was celebrated for engineering leadership in last year’s Tech Fellow class. After a year of collaboration, NEA invested $5 million in his latest start-up, WibiData, which is tackling some of the most exciting challenges with Big Data). Will the next Groupon or Facebook emerge from this year’s class? We don’t know, but we’re willing to bet on entrepreneurs who are up for that challenge!

The TechFellow awards are a very tough selection process involving many of the highest profile names in the technology community. NEA was thrilled to have four of its portfolio company executives selected this year. They are:

• Diego Berdakin, founder and President of BeachMint, who is one of the original pioneers of the “subscription e-commerce” model that has fast become one of the most attractive economic models in online retail…
• Matthew Prince, founder and CEO of Cloudflare, who has built one of the fastest growing cloud security services in history that today protects a substantial percentage of global internet sites…
• Clara Shih, founder and CEO of Hearsay Social, who literally wrote the book on doing business over Facebook (“The Facebook Era”) and has built the leading social CRM platform for large enterprises using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google…
• Brian Totty, SVP of Engineering at Groupon, who has built the platform that powers one of the fastest growing businesses in the history of business, in 6 continents around the world…

Congratulations to the winners -- we are thrilled to see what will come from this year’s class! The entire list of TechFellow award winners can be found here.

Jon’s perspectives on VC and entrepreneurship can be found at www.oneblockoffsandhillroad.com or on Twitter @jonsakoda.