CFO since 2013 and the first woman to hold the job at Microsoft, Hood played a key part in the negotiations for the company’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn in June. The former investment banker is now considered Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s right hand. She is overseeing the financial side of the $85.3-billion-in-revenue company’s transition to cloud computing, including nearly $7 billion in spending on new data centers last year. After Microsoft’s COO left this year, Hood took on responsibility for worldwide licensing and pricing.