GQ China Editorial — Bay Area Tech Leaders | Marc Olivier Le Blanc
GQ China and the Bay Area's New Tech Elite — An Editorial Portrait Assignment
In the summer of 2015, San Francisco was at the center of something. The startup wave that had been building for years had produced a generation of companies — and company builders — that the rest of the world wanted to understand. When GQ China commissioned an editorial feature on the Bay Area's emerging tech leaders, they turned to San Francisco photographer Marc Olivier Le Blanc to make the portraits.
The assignment covered three subjects, three companies, and two days of shooting across San Francisco and the South Bay. It is the kind of editorial work that requires as much logistical intelligence as creative — tight windows, high-profile subjects, and no margin for a slow start.
Cal Henderson — Slack, San Francisco
The first shoot took place at Slack's San Francisco headquarters. Cal Henderson is a British programmer who had already built a significant career before most people had heard of him — as chief software architect for Flickr, one of the defining platforms of the early social web, and then as co-founder of Tiny Speck, the game company whose internal communications tool quietly evolved into something much larger.
That tool was Slack. Launched in August 2013, it grew with extraordinary speed into one of the most widely used workplace platforms in the world — and Henderson, as co-founder and CTO, was at the center of it. By the time this shoot took place, Slack was already valued in the billions.
Photographing Henderson at Slack's offices meant working in an environment that reflected the company's character: open, considered, and deliberately designed. The portrait session focused on capturing a technologist who is also, in some essential way, a builder — someone whose career has been a long argument for the idea that the right tools change how people work together.
Michael Temkin — Rabbit, Redwood City
The second shoot moved south to Redwood City and a conversation with Michael Temkin, CEO of Rabbit — a platform built around a simple but genuinely useful idea: watching things together online. In an era when streaming had fragmented viewing into a solitary activity, Rabbit created a shared window that let friends watch Netflix, Hulu, or YouTube simultaneously, regardless of where they were.
The session was loose and collaborative. Temkin brought energy to the frame, and the shoot leaned into it — the most memorable images from the day involved a pair of pink bunny ears, a nod to the company's name that turned out to be exactly the right note of playfulness for a brand built around connection and fun.
Rick Levin — Coursera, the Peninsula
The final day brought Marc to Coursera's offices for a portrait of Rick Levin, the company's CEO and former president of Yale University. Coursera had become one of the defining platforms of the MOOC movement — massive open online courses delivered by top universities to anyone with an internet connection, free of charge. Under Levin's leadership, it was scaling rapidly.
What made the shoot memorable was the office itself. A long hallway with painted words on opposing walls that, viewed head-on, appeared as abstract color. Step through and turn back, and the words resolved into a single coherent phrase: Advance Pedagogy. It was a detail that told you everything about the company's sense of purpose — education as mission, not just business. Marc shot Levin there.
On Assignment as a San Francisco Editorial Photographer
An assignment like this one — multiple subjects, multiple locations, international publication — represents the kind of editorial portrait work that San Francisco makes possible in a way few other cities do. The density of significant companies and extraordinary people within a thirty-mile radius is unusual. On any given day, within a short drive of each other, you might find a former Yale president, a Flickr architect turned Slack co-founder, and a startup CEO who built a platform for watching movies with strangers online.
Marc Olivier Le Blanc is a San Francisco editorial and commercial photographer. His portrait work has been published in GQ, National Geographic, Forbes, TIME, and a range of international publications. Photo assistance on this assignment by Zachariah Epperson.
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