Shankar Ramaswamy

Shankar’s theory on Lego: forget the kits and go straight for the plain bricks. It’s related to his theory on building the kind of platform merchants and developers can interact and work with to grow their businesses. Two years ago, before Shankar joined eBay and then X.commerce, he was with Amazon Web Services. “I always knew I would be some kind of engineer,” he says. As a kid, visits to his grandmother’s house every summer meant fixing a year’s worth of her broken technology: irons, tape recorders, and finally, helping to rewire an entire house. Shankar believes all of it—down to the plain-brick Lego—helps to understand technology problem-solving.