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30 under 30 who are moving the world in 2015

Michelle Phan. Image: YouTube.


No more. Those who grew up in the tech age see things differently.

Their ambitions are way bigger — and perfectly suited to the dynamic, entrepreneurial and impatient digital world they grew up in.

If you want to change the world, being under 30 is now an advantage.

This, our fourth annual celebration of 30 Under 30s, is bigger than ever: 20 categories showcasing 600 millennials — no repeats from years past and every single one hand-selected by a blue-ribbon panel of expert judges.

Meet the Class of 2015

Some are names you already know: Blake Lively, James Harden, Iggy Azalea and Michelle Phan. Others are superstars in their own realms, such as Emily Weiss, Sam Altman, Austin McChord, Nat Turner, and Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre.

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Glossier founder Weiss, 29, went from Vogue assistant moonlighting as a beauty blogger to captaining a $10 million funded ecommerce site backed by the likes of Ken Lerer and Joshua Kushner (30U30 Class of 2012).

Altman, 29, is the handpicked successor to Paul Graham, cofounder of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's premier accelerator.

Related: Story of lunchtime high school trader a hoax

And then there's McChord, 29, founder of $100 million (sales) emergency back up and data protection service Datto, who refused a 9-figure acquisition offer for no other reason than "I loved my job and there was more ground for us to cover."

Flatiron Health's 28-year-old cofounder Turner is set on improving cancer outcomes with big data by compiling and analysing individual doctor-patient interactions as one big cancer trial.

To date he's raised $138 million, including $100 million from Google. Bayer and McIntyre, both 29, are the brains behind Ecovative, which uses mushroom-engineered materials for packaging that won't spend 10,000 years decomposing in a landfill — buh bye, Styrofoam.



How good are we at picking tomorrow’s superstars? Virtual reality pioneer Palmer Luckey, 22, this year's cover profile and a member of the Class of 2014, sold his company, Oculus VR, to Facebook in July for $2 billion.

Evan Spiegel, 24, and Bobby Murphy, 26, cofounders of Snapchat and 2014's cover, raised $485 million last year and has a reported valuation of at least $10 billion — and that's after turning down a said $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook in 2013.

David Karp, the 28-year-old founder of Tumblr and the previous year's cover, sold his company in 2013 to Yahoo for $1.1 billion. And none have done better than Malala Yousafzi, 17, the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

A walk through of the process: There are 20 categories of 30 people.

Nominations poured in from social media (check out our #my30Under30 campaign) and others. Each category was assigned to seasoned FORBES reporters, who researched candidates and worked to vet the finalists with a panel of expert judges in the field, among them billionaires Sara Blakely and Steve Balmer, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, famed restaurateur David Coleman, CEO of the College Board, and musician Taylor Hansen.

The Class of 2015 By The Numbers:

20: Categories
600: Winners
2,500+: Contenders
10,000+: Nominations
84%: College degrees
67%: Zero college debt
36%: Immigrants or first-generation
20%: Married
14: Average age they chose their dream job
12 p.m.: Average bedtime
No. 1 dream mentor: Elon Musk
No. 1 can't-live-without gadget: iPhone
Just 1 word for success: Persistence


30 Under 30: Art & Style

Michelle Phan, 27
Founder, ipsy



YouTube sensation Michelle Phan’s Vietnamese immigrant father was a compulsive gambler who disappeared when she was 6 years old. After her mother’s second divorce she was reduced to sleeping on the floor of their cramped apartment.

At one point the family was on food stamps. Then, when Phan was 15, she started writing a blog that described the fantasy life she wished she had, with lots of money and plenty of time to get dolled up.

In 2007, in response to a query from two readers who asked how she did her makeup, she made a seven-minute how-to video and posted it on YouTube.

“I didn’t think anyone would watch it but those two girls,” she says. Instead, 40,000 views a week poured in, with followers hungry for tips like how to make a facial mask out of unscented organic kitty litter.

Related: The worst CEOs of 2014

In 2012, her Internet popularity exploding, she started ipsy, a subscription cosmetics company that’s expected to yield $120 million in revenues in 2015.

She’s also got a line of makeup at L’Oréal, a music venture that promotes artists on social media and a deal with reality-TV giant Endemol for an online lifestyle channel. “I feel like this is just the beginning,” she says.


30 Under 30: Education

Alex Klein, 24
Cofounder, Kano



Teaching kids how to code is a hot topic — and a personal challenge for Alex Klein.

In 2012 his then-6-year-old cousin, Micah, dared Klein to invent a computer kit that's as simple and fun to build and LEGOs. That ask became an obsession and turned into Kano, a DIY hacker toy based on a small computer board called Raspberry Pi.

Illustrated storybook guides show kids how to design games like Pong and Snake, hack Minecraft and create websites, music, art and more. Klein and his cofounders took to Kickstarter in November 2013 looking to raise $100,000 in 30 days and wound up getting that much in just 16 hours.

Related: Billionaires who made and lost the most in 2014

By the end of the campaign they had raised $1.5 million from backers in 86 countries, including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak and Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, and to date have shipped more than 20,000 of the $150 kits around the world.

“We want to put the power to create technology in anyone's hands,” says Klein. “This generation just wants to pull the pieces together, build something cool and express themselves.”


30 Under 30: Energy

Brennan Potts, 29
Cofounder, Titanium Exploration Partners

Even with oil prices plummeting, fracking remains a boom industry especially in South Texas’ energy rich Eagle Ford Shale, where wily operators can extract oil for as little as $40 per barrel.

That opportunity has attracted a fresh generation of energy entrepreneurs like Brennan Potts, who teamed up with two older oil & gas veterans to form Titanium Exploration Partners in 2014.

The firm has raised $300 million in private equity funding (fracking is capital intensive) and amassed interests in over 25,000 acres and 100 wells.

Related: These animals are probably richer than you are

Potts splits his time between evaluating new investments and managing the drilling on the properties that Titanium already owns.

“We started this company in my home in Dallas and actually invested our first $20 million off my kitchen table.” Before Titanium, Potts worked in business development at Valor Petroleum and at Upland Oil & Gas, where he worked on a deal to acquire drilling rights on 39 million acres in Peru.

"Any success that I’ve enjoyed to date has been because people have believed in my ability early in my career."




30 Under 30: Finance

Ryan Israel, 29
Partner, Pershing Square Capital Management

On a Friday afternoon in 2008 Israel was a sitting at his desk at Goldman Sachs when he received a call out of the blue from Scott Ferguson, then a deputy at billionaire activist investor William Ackman's hedge fund, about an opening at Pershing Square.

Israel soon met Ackman, and the two bonded over their love of Warren Buffett and value investing. “Bill was the first person I met who knew more about Buffett and was more in love with Buffett than even I was,” says Israel.

The Wharton-educated Israel was a key player in Pershing Square’s home-run investment in Burger King and represents the $18 billion hedge fund firm on the board of Platform Specialty Products, the publicly traded specialty chemicals producer.

What’s it like working for one of the most high-profile and combative hedge fund managers on the planet? “We have arguments even when we agree,” says Israel.


30 Under 30: Food & Drink

Jason Wang, 28
Founder, Caviar


Image: Twitter


While working in San Francisco's financial district one day in 2012, Jason Wang and his colleagues found themselves craving Ikes Place sandwiches for lunch.

Problem was, Ikes doesn’t deliver and the trip across town and back would have taken a couple of hours. “We asked ourselves, why can't the good restaurants deliver?" Wang, recalls. "Why is it the mediocre and generic pizza, Thai, Indian restaurants on every single delivery website?"

With this thought, Caviar was born: A premium food delivery service that brings a city's best cuisine to your doorstep for a flat fee of $4.99 — think Má Pêche in NYC or Michael Solomonov's Federal Donuts in Philadelphia.

After raising $15 million in venture capital from elite outfits like Tiger Global and Andreesen Horowitz, Wang’s site was acquired by Jack Dorsey's Square for $90 million last August. That cash has fueled further expansion: Caviar now operates in 15 cities across the country and has grown from 10 to 110 employees in the last 12 months.


30 Under 30: Games

Jeffrey Rosen, 28
Cofounder, Humble Bundle


Image: YouTube


If asking customers to “pay what you want” seems like a good way to kill a business, then telling them “don’t give us a penny” sounds like suicide.

But Jeffrey Rosen’s digital game store does just that – and it’s making money and saving the world in the process. When Humble Bundle started selling collections of low-budget “indie” PC games in 2010, it invited customers to name their price and to specify how the payment should be divided, between creator, store and a pre-selected charity.

“We let people give it all to charity if they like,” says Rosen, “so they trust us and feel good about their purchase.”

Related: How Prince William and Duchess Kate make money

Now the company’s also selling games for major publishers including Electronic Arts and Warner Brothers, expanding into music and audiobooks, and has received more than $4.5 million in backing from Sequoia Capital, SV Angel and Y Combinator.

Best of all: In December, the company announced it has raised more than $50 million for charity over the last four years. “That’s when it really clicks,” says Rosen. “It’s like ‘Wow, we’ve done something really good.’”




30 Under 30: Healthcare

Nat Turner, 28
Cofounder, Flatiron Health

Vital medical data is often handwritten in charts using inconsistent notation and formatting, robbing researchers of the opportunity to use computers to analyse every interaction between a doctor and a patient as they would in a clinical trial.

Tackling this problem is Nat Turner, a born entrepreneur who sold an earlier company to Google for a reported $81 million. Turner and his cofounder, Zach Weinberg, started two companies together prior to Flatiron: an online food delivery service and Invite Media, an Internet advertising concern (the one Google bought).

But “Zach and I’s heart wasn’t in online advertising,” says Turner. Improving cancer care seems a worthier cause.

Doctors pay to use the data analytics system, but the big revenue will come from selling what Flatiron learns to drug concerns and insurers. The company has raised $138 million from backers, including $100 million from Google.


30 Under 30: Hollywood & Entertainment

Blake Lively, 27
Actor-founder, Preserve



As a kid, Lively idolised Martha Stewart, and hoped to create her own lifestyle brand one day. But when a starring role in “Gossip Girl” came along when she was 19, Lively deferred her entrepreneurial dreams to chase the spotlight.

Seven years later, Lively has established herself as one of the brightest stars in Hollywood, and she’s looking to leverage that fame into business success, launching her first web site, Preserve, last summer.

Taking a page from Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop playbook, Preserve sells clothes, food and home goods that reflect Lively’s taste in U.S.-made artisanal goods, crafts and foods.

Related: Famous failures who will inspire you

“I have the unfair advantage of having an existing brand,” she says. Preserve is no hobby for Lively: The actress is personally involved in everything from uploading photos to raising money.

Her mantra: Don’t stop striving. “I’ll never feel like I arrived. The people I look up to the most are the people that are continuing to up their game.”


30 Under 30: Law & Policy

Daniel Lewis, 28
Cofounder, Ravel Law

Lawyers spend some 30 per cent of their time (much more if they are junior associates at a big firm) researching prior cases, looking for ways to make their arguments more persuasive.

And for decades the estimated $10 billion-a-year legal research market was dominated by two huge players: Westlaw and LexisNexis, neither of which had much incentive to innovate. Enter Daniel Lewis. While in law school at Stanford, Lewis realised that the existing research tools for lawyers were antiquated and ill-suited for the Google-generation.

Along with his cofounder, Nik Reed, Lewis raised nearly $10 million in venture capital and launched Ravel, which uses data-visualisation and open-source case data to speed and improve the research process.

After only two years on the market, the tool is already being used at about half of the nation’s biggest law firms and the top 20 law schools — and has particularly taken off at elite law-schools like Harvard, Yale and Berkeley.

“We’ve seen great enthusiasm from the up-and-coming generation of new associates and lawyers — this helps folks do the kind of lawyering they wanted to do when they joined the law profession to start with.”




30 Under 30: Manufacturing & Industry

Eben Bayer, 29
Cofounder, Ecovative

Growing green packaging material out of mushrooms might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but it’s exactly what Eben Bayer is doing at Ecovative.

Bayer cofounded the company in 2010 with his friend Gavin McIntyre, whom he met while they were both studying mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. Since then Ecovative has raised over $14 million in funding, and its 65 employees already produce packaging for companies like Dell and Steelcase.

The process involves using agricultural waste to grow mushrooms—and, more important, their binding vegetative roots known as mycelium — in mold for 96 to 120 hours.

Related: Billionaire aims to be broke before he dies

The resulting material is tough enough to keep your laptop safe during shipping but won’t spend 10,000 years decomposing in a landfill. Best of all, the mushroom stuff costs the same — even less — than traditional Styrofoam. “We don’t go into a situation with a customer unless we can match their pricing or do better,” Bayer says.

“That’s how you’re going to get real scale and have real impact.” Next: mushroom-engineered materials that can be used to make cheap furniture sans the formaldehyde and other nasty chemicals in traditional pressboard.


30 Under 30: Marketing & Advertising

Jan Rezab, 27
Cofounder, Socialbakers

In its early days, Facebook felt like the Wild West to marketers.

The avalanche of consumer eyeballs to the site was tantalising, but it was tough to make sense of it as a branding opportunity or measure the effectiveness of advertising efforts on the social network. Jan Rezab wanted bring order to that chaos.

“We started Socialbakers because we saw a huge potential in Facebook,” says Rezab of his six-year-old social-media analytics company that has amassed more than $34 million in venture funding.

The Prague-based company, which helps brands monitor their impact on social media, has the largest social-media data pool of any social analytics company. It has more than 300 employees, 11 offices worldwide and 2,500 clients, including Nestle, Lenovo and Western Union.

The company, valued at $200 million, doubled revenues in 2014 - although it remains unprofitable.

Socialbakers is Rezab’s second company; he started his first, mobile-games business Redboss, at age 14. “I wanted to live my life fast and figure things out early,” said Rezab. “I’m just a person striving for speed. It’s in my DNA, it’s in everything I do. I watch movies at two times the speed; don’t ask me why. Over time, your brain just adapts.”


30 Under 30: Media

Danielle Weisberg, 28 & Carly Zakin, 28
Cofounders, theSkimm

Oprah is a subscriber, Sarah Jessica Parker reads it, and they are not alone: Over one million people, 20% of whom are men, receive theSkimm’s “news you need to know” in their inbox every morning.

Weisberg and Zakin met while studying abroad in Rome; when they reconnected at NBC News after graduation they noticed they were serving as “information concierges” to educated friends who didn’t have time to follow current events.

Frustrated by the lack of a future they saw for themselves in the news business they loved, and puzzled no one was appealing to their generation, the two quit their jobs and three days later sent their first Skimm.

Four days after that Hoda Kotb mentioned the site on the Today Show and Zakin’s inbox crashed. In the past year they’ve raised an additional $6.25 million, increased their staff to eight and partnered with Oprah.com.

“Our goal is to make news a lifestyle brand,” says Zakin, noting the newsletter is just the first part. Who are they still hoping to sign up? Says Weisberg: “Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, and every candidate running for election in 2016.”



30 Under 30: Music

Tyler Hubbard, 27 & Brian Kelley, 29
Musicians, Florida Georgia Line

Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley perform the same ritual before every concert — they gather friends, family, band and crew into a circle, then say a prayer and a chant before adding one final flourish.

“We usually take a shot of Fireball,” says Hubbard. Adds Kelley: “Saturday night, maybe another shot.” Why? Because as one of the duo’s songs goes: “It’z Just What We Do.”

Over the past three years Florida Georgia Line and its boozy, genre-bending brand of country has propelled it from utter anonymity to mainstream stardom. Hubbard and Kelley met at Belmont University in Nashville, bonding over their love of country, rock and rap; they quickly launched a band named after the geographical boundary between their home states.

Their smash single “Cruise” moved 8 million units in barely two years en route to becoming the most-downloaded country song of all time — and helped them earn $24 million last year — thanks partly to a remix featuring rapper Nelly.

Their new album Anything Goes, with its rock and reggae-tinged songs, sold 197,000 copies its opening week. “Country’s more of a lifestyle,” says Kelley. “The music’s always going to evolve.”


30 Under 30: Retail & Ecommerce

Emily Weiss, 29
Founder, Glossier

The former Vogue and W Magazine fashion assistant and NYU grad started beauty blog Into The Gloss as a side project in 2010, working on it from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. before her day job.

It quickly blossomed from sceney favorite to genuine must-read, generating some 10 million page views a month — and, crucially, a cult following — 60 per cent of readers check in almost daily.

After three years interviewing celebs and fashionistas about their beauty habits and testing a heap of products, Weiss discovered a huge gap in the (old-fashioned and rife for disruption) beauty market: stuff that feels luxurious without being frou-frou, and is accessible and affordable.

After raising $2 million and hiring folks from Index Ventures, Google and cosmetics giant MAC, Weiss launched Glossier in October, a direct-to-consumer line of beauty products that, she says, "You'll want to be friends with."

A month after launching her first collection of useful, prettily packaged and inexpensive creams and balms, Weiss announced Glossier had raised an additional $8.4 million in a Series A round led by Thrive Capital and existing investors including Lerer Hippeau, Forerunner Ventures and Bonobos' Andy Dunn to scale up.


30 Under 30: Science

Nevada Sanchez, 26
Cofounder, Butterfly Network

When he was 10 and growing up in New Mexico, Nevada Sanchez told his parents, a florist and a drywaller, that he wanted to start a technology company when he grew up.

They told him to go to MIT. Eight years later, he did just that, and while still an undergrad started working in the laboratory of Max Tegmark, a physicist who designed radio telescopes. Tegmark was approached by Jonathan Rothberg, one of the creators of next-generation DNA sequencing.

Rothberg wanted to use the radio telescope tech to create ultrasound devices that could image the body more accurately and, eventually, use sound waves to perform surgery.

“The opportunity was there and I thought I would go for it,” Sanchez says. He became employee number one at Butterfly Network, which has raised $100 million in seed funding and whose first device should hit the market next year.


30 Under 30: Social Entrepreneurs

Kiah Williams, 28
Cofounder, SIRUM

It’s outrageous: Every year $5 billion worth of unexpired prescription medicine in the U.S. is destroyed unopened, usually by hospitals and nursing homes when the patient they were originally prescribed for dies or otherwise no longer needs the meds.

Meanwhile, some 50 million Americans don’t fill their prescriptions, usually because the drugs cost too much.

After the passage of so-called Good Samaritan laws (now on the books in some 40 states) made donations of unused medications legally viable starting in the mid-2000s, Kiah Williams left the Clinton Foundation to team up with her fellow Stanford grads Adam Kircher and George Wang to develop SIRUM (Supporting Initiatives to Redistribute Unused Medicine).

The non-profit currently works with 12 healthcare sites (largely in California, but also in Colorado and Oregon) and has so-far distributed $3 million worth of meds to some 20,000 patients.

“We’re like the Match.com for unused drugs.” Next-up: national expansion.


30 Under 30: Sports

James Harden, 25
Shooting guard, Houston Rockets



As a chubby teenager with asthma, James Harden knew his NBA dream was a "long shot." But the future superstar forced himself to get up early before school to jack up shots in the gym and lift weights.

That work eventually earned Harden a scholarship to Arizona State, where he played for two years before being drafted third overall in 2009 by the Oklahoma City Thunder.

More than five years later, Harden is living out his fantasy, now as the starting shooting guard for the Houston Rockets with an Olympic gold medal to his name. "Most of the days I didn’t want to get up, it was too early," he says, looking back at his teenage years when he was unknown and, yes, beardless.

"But I had to, and it definitely paid off." Today, Harden is one of the league's most likeable — and marketable — players, complete with prodigious facial hair and a quirky fashion sense.

His on-court talent earned him a five-year, $80 million contract extension in 2012, while his off-court charisma has led to endorsements with Nike, Foot Locker and sports drink company BodyArmor. "Sometimes you’re just born and gifted with something," he says of his eccentricities. "The beard, the mohawk, the way I dress, it’s just instilled in me."


30 Under 30: Consumer Technology

Alan Schaaf, 27
Founder, Imgur


Image: YouTube.


Alan Schaaf hated the tedious process of sharing images on the Web.

In 2009, as a student at Ohio University, he built a simple uploader, Imgur, in two weeks and shared with the Reddit community. It was a hit. Today Imgur is the biggest image platform on the Internet attracting 150 million unique visitors and 5.5 billion page views a month. “Imgur is now a staple of the Internet,” says Schaaf.

“We get people sucked in — we’re the best place to explore the Internet’s images.” For five years Schaaf bootstrapped the platform, paying the bills with display ads before raising $40 million from Andreessen Horowitz in April 2014.

This year Schaaf will focus on native ads and working directly with brands to help them create content. “Imgur gives you a sense of serendipity,” says Schaaf. “You unexpectedly come across something you weren’t looking for, but glad you’ve found it.”


30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology

Austin McChord, 29
Founder, Datto

Do you love your work enough to pass up a 9-figure payday?

That's the question Austin McChord had to answer when an established security firm offered to buy him out (at the time he was the company's sole shareholder) for more than $100 million. "I said no because there's more ground for us to cover," McChord explains.

"I loved my job and the people working at the company." Datto provides emergency back-up and data protection services to large firms who trust it to get them back online - fast.

When Hurricane Sandy took down a New York City-area high-frequency trading firm, Datto had them back online in a matter of minutes and it claims it can restore IT-services in a matter of seconds now.

That speed and reliability has translated into spectacular growth: the seven-year old firm is profitable, nudging $100 million in sales and has more than 330 employees. Last year, McChord took his first outside funding, $25 million from GeneralCatalyst, looking to tap its expertise and "play for real."


30 Under 30: Venture Capital

Sam Altman, 29
President, Y Combinator

Since the legendary computer programmer and entrepreneur Paul Graham founded Y Combinator along with 3 others) in 2005, the accelerator has funded and coached more than 730 start-ups.

Nearly thirty of those firms now have market valuations in excess of $100 million and some (Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe) are worth billions.

So when Graham decided he wasn’t the right person to continue to grow Y Combinator, some were surprised that his handpicked successor wasn’t a name-brand venture capitalist or superstar entrepreneur, but a hyper-kinetic, virtually unknown 20-something named Sam Altman.

Altman — a Y Combinator grad himself who built and sold (for $43.4 million) a moderately successful location-based services company called Loopt — officially took over the accelerator in February and has big plans to expand the number of companies in the program by a factor of 10 over the next decade.

“We want to have an impact. It’s cool that you can make a list of the problems in the world and then fund companies to solve them.”