Entrepreneurs Are in the House

Earlier this month Obama signed up for Mike Krieger's Instagram and immediately posted this photo taken with the app's photo-alteration technology.

Image: Instagram

Warren Buffett’s secretary Debbie Bosanek will probably get the most attention, but four entrepreneurs also will be sitting in first lady Michelle Obama’s box during tonight’s State of the Union address.

They are:

• Bruce Cochrane, president and CEO of Lincolnton Furniture in Lincolnton, North Carolina. The state has lost a lot of its furniture-manufacturing industry, but Cochrane decided to buck the trend and start a new furniture company there. In January, his company began production at a plant his family once ran, before the new owners of Cochrane Furniture moved operations to China.

• Hiroyuki Fujita, founder, president , and CEO of Quality Electrodynamics in Cleveland. Fujita came to the U.S. from Japan in 1988 and received a PhD in physics from Case Western Reserve University in 1998. He founded QED in 2006, and the company is now one of the world’s largest suppliers of MRI radio-frequency antennas. In 2010, he founded a second company, eQED, which makes solar-energy-related electronics.

• Mike Krieger, cofounder of Instagram in San Francisco. Krieger was born in Brazil and came to Stanford University in 2004 to study computer science and cognitive science. In 2010, he teamed with Kevin Systrom to found Instagram, a social mobile startup with more than 15 million registered users. He’s been working with an H-1B visa but has applied for a green card so he can stay in the U.S. permanently.

• Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, also will be in the first lady’s box. She’s a social entrepreneur—in 1997, she founded College Track, an after-school program to prepare underserved students for college. She also is the founder and chair of Emerson Collective, which funds education reform efforts.

Check back later to read more State of the Union coverage from Portfolio.com.