Steve Papermaster, 41
Founder and CEO, Agillion; Founder, the Powershift Group; Founder, Texas Technology Network, Austin
Papermaster is a master, all right—of balancing several projects at once. His Powershift Group venture capital fund invests in new companies, and he founded and runs Agillion, an Austin start-up that develops Internet-based software. But he's also a guy who believes it's time for Texas techies to get involved in politics and public policy, and he's taking the lead. Along with Austin entrepreneur Peter Zandan, the UT grad launched 360.Summit, an Austin-based group of high-tech CEOs and community leaders. Papermaster has George W. Bush's ear on high-tech issues—he's hosted fundraisers for the presidential hopeful—and co-chairs his national high-tech advisory council. Last fall he founded the Texas Technology Network, a spin-off of the powerful Silicon Valley-based TechNet lobbying group of high-tech executives. The industry can't afford not to get involved, he says: "A lot of government leaders don't understand the Internet economy and the maniacal pace. We're dealing with time compression, and government is used to moving at a snail's pace."

Steve Wallach, 54
Vice President of Technology
Chiaro Networks, Richardson
Wallach became something of a high-tech celebrity in 1981 after writer Tracy Kidder made him a key character in The Soul of a New Machine, a Pulitzer prize-winning book about of a team of inventors at Data General (where Wallach then worked) racing to build a new minicomputer. Soon after, he was lured to Dallas to co-found Convex Computer, a supercomputer maker that was bought by Hewlett-Packard in 1995, and cemented his reputation as the state's resident high-end computing whiz. An entrepreneur at heart, he left HP after only a few years to pursue the next New New Thing. Since then, he has invested in start-ups and taught at Rice University, and he sits on the White House Advisory Committee on High-Performance Computing and Communications, Information Technology, and the Next Generation Internet. Most recently, he joined the tech team at Chiaro Networks, a start-up that is developing next-generation optical networks that will be built in Texas. Chiaro doesn't even have a product yet, but it has already received early-round funding from Sevin Rosen and Intel.