A Decade of Under 30
Within minutes of our publication of the first Forbes 30 Under 30 list nine years ago, our phones and inboxes filled up, Forbes.com lit up and Twitter blew up. Even the biggest professional successes tend to take a while to prove out—it’s a nice and rare feeling to know you’re sitting on an instant winner. We got a lot of things right out of the gate. First, timing. A generation ago, the Bill Gates and Michael Dell types were the exception. But over the past decade, wunderkinds became the rule: Digital natives had the vision and tools to disrupt pretty much every industry, and funders lined up to write billion-dollar checks to entrepreneurs not yet old enough to rent a car. Second, our process enabled us to evaluate thousands of nominees…