John Leroy Hennessy is an American computer scientist who is chairperson of Alphabet Inc. (Google). Hennessy is one of the founders of MIPS Technologies and Atheros, and also the tenth President of Stanford University. Hennessy announced that he would step down in the summer of 2016. He was succeeded as president by Marc Tessier-Lavigne. Marc Andreessen called him "the godfather of Silicon Valley."

Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's third-largest technology company by revenue and one of the world's most valuable companies. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.