The first of them is Vitalik Buterin, who came upon the idea when he was 19 years old, in November 2013. He had explored the emerging crypto space for three years before outlining his own idea in a whitepaper, addressing things he thought projects like Bitcoin could benefit from, like programmability. He had also set up the Bitcoin Magazine in 2011 together with Mihai Alisie, another co-founder of Ethereum. Alisie helped incorporate the startup, opened a bank account for the pre-sale, and dealt with the legal matters around the process.
Anthony Di Iorio met Buterin at a Bitcoin meetup in 2012, and he was one of the first people who were asked to be a co-founder. However, after Ethereum decided to go down the non-profit path, Di Iorio took a backseat. Amir Chetrit was working with Israeli startup Colored Coins, a project to manage real-world assets as tokens on top of the Bitcoin network, at the time he met Buterin, who was part of the same project for a time. However, he stepped down for his lack of input at a co-founders’ meeting in June 2014, but remained a co-founder.
Charles Hoskinson was introduced to Buterin and Ethereum through Di Iorio, and was named CEO in 2013. He played the main role in setting up the Swiss Foundation for the project, as well as the legal framework around it, but he left as the team declined to take the for-profit route. He had supported Ethereum Classic when it forked, and went on to create Cardano (ADA) in 2016.
Gavin Wood met the other five co-founders at the announcement of Ethereum in 2014 during the Bitcoin Conference in Miami. As a computer programmer, he offered Buterin to write an implementation of Ethereum in the C++ programming language. Once his testnet was up and running, he asked for a seat at the top table—which was granted, but with some pushback. In April 2014, he published the Ethereum Yellowpaper and later proposed Solidity, the native programming language of the platform.
Jeffrey Wilcke heard about Ethereum while he was working on Mastercoin, the first ICO. He decided to write an implementation in Google’s Go language without reaching out to Buterin about it. He named it Go Ethereum, later shortened to Geth and still in use. He was added to the co-founders list at the same time as Wood. The fact that there are two seemingly competing implementations is actually a net positive for the project, as this guarantees that there is always a backup that might not have been created otherwise. However, the DAO hard fork and a series of hacks caused Wilcke to hand over Geth to Peter Szilagyi.
Last but not least, the most experienced of the co-founders was certainly Joseph Lubin, who had already made a successful, diverse career in programming, business, and finance before getting in contact with Di Iorio and later Buterin. Di Iorio and Lubin largely funded the project, and Lubin was another one of the voices calling for a for-profit path. Later, he built ConsenSys, a company that acts as an incubator for other blockchain startups. He has also worked hard to get Ethereum many of the influential, institutional partners it now has.