40 under 40

Welcome to Fortune’s 2018 40 Under 40, our annual ranking of the most influential young people in business. Read on to meet these disruptors, innovators, rebels and artists—and prepare to be inspired.

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The unsinkable Zuckerberg got through countless controversies this year, a maelstrom that would have capsized just about any other CEO. And yet despite privacy scandals galore, Russian dezinformatsiya run amok, and Zuck’s being hauled in to testify before U.S. and EU lawmakers, Facebook continues to soak up billions in online advertising revenues, sending the stock ever higher. In July its founder surpassed Warren Buff ett to become the world’s third-richest person. Still, the CEO faces ongoing fallout from the biggest missteps in the company’s history, along with an even graver threat: that younger users now view Facebook as the social network for their parents.

Mark Zuckerberg

Under Systrom, the photosharing app has been on the upswing for a while, but in 2018 it took things to another level: It crossed the billion-user mark, introduced a new videostreaming feature, and is reported to be worth $100 billion. It also seems to possess a Tefl on-like force field, leaving it unscathed by the privacy crisis engulfing its parent company, Facebook. “Insta” users either don’t know the two are related, or they’re too addicted to care. Other notable events for Systrom (at left) include becoming a father and first-level Master Sommelier—all documented, of course, on Instagram.

Kevin Systrom

Zimmer was warned he wasleaving a “sure thing” when he quit Lehman Brothers to help Green with a carpooling website called Zimride. Months later, Lehman collapsed, but Zimride morphed into Lyft, making the duo two of the most successful entrepreneurs of the past decade. This year, the No. 2 ride-hailing service behind Uber has surged, benefiting from its arch rival’s troubles: Over the past year, Lyft’s valuation has doubled to $15 billion, and its U.S. market share jumped from 20% to 35%. Next up? Bike-sharing.

Logan Green and John Zimmer

Wang attempted Twitter-, Facebook-, and Friendster-like startups, but none were as successful as the Groupon inspired firm he launched in 2010 and grew to offer meal delivery, hotel bookings, movie tickets, and more. Its 2015 merger with Dianping introduced reams of user-generated content, such as restaurant reviews, photos and recommendations. Now the combined entity is one of the largest “unicorns” with a valuation of $30 billion— a superapp Wang has called “Amazon for services.” This year he added bike-sharing to that list with the acquisition of China phenom Mobike; now the company is gearing up for a $60 billion IPO.

Wang Xing

Suryadevara made history when it was announced she would become GM’s first female CFO this fall, making the auto giant one of only two Fortune 500 companies led by a female CEO and CFO (the other is Hershey). After growing up in Chennai, India, she moved to the U.S. to attend Harvard Business School. She joined GM in 2005 and worked her way up to CEO of GM Asset Management, adding VP of finance and treasurer to her role in 2015. In recent years, she’s played a key part in GM’s stake in Lyft and divestiture of Opel, and in SoftBank’s investment in Cruise, GM’s self-driving unit.

Dhivya Suryadevara

It was 10 years ago next month that Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia traveled to the DNC in Denver to introduce their off beat home-sharing idea. Experts said it would never work, but the trio persevered, and today Airbnb claims a valuation of $31 billion and more than 300 million “guest arrivals.” Regulatory and other challenges persist, but it recently reached its first full year of profitability, named former AmEx chief Ken Chenault to its board, and saw 100% growth in its number of Chinese travelers. Coming soon: an IPO.

Brian Chesky

Neumann began with one shared office space in Brooklyn, but his vision quickly burst into a colossus. WeWork is closing in on 300 locations in more than 22 countries, and there’s news of a recent mega-round of venture funding, led by Soft-Bank, that would value the company at $35 billion. Skeptics insist WeWork is no more than a glorified—and wildly overvalued—real estate play, but Neumann tunes them out to focus on growth and social impact. His company has been a leader in hiring refugees and has set a goal to hire 1,500 in the next five years.

Adam Neumann

The first unicorn to emerge from Hong Kong, SenseTime—often referred to as the world’s most valuable A.I. startup, with its valuation of $4.5 billion—was founded in 2014 by a group of academics at Hong Kong University. They brought in Xu, a Ph.D. in computer science with expertise in computer vision, to commercialize the idea. Xu has led SenseTime to the forefront of facial recognition tech, providing solutions for surveillance systems—the Chinese government is a big customer—as well as more than 700 corporate clients.

Xu Li

Fast-rising ByteDance owns Toutiao, China’s most popular news app with more than 700 million users; it also bought short-video app Musical.ly for $1 billion last year and used it to revamp its own version, Tik Tok, which became the world’s most downloaded nongaming iPhone app in the first quarter of 2018. Next up: Zhang is said to be mulling a Hong Kong IPO that could value the company, which has had a private-market valuation of $20 billion, at more than $45 billion.

Zhang Yiming

It's possible that Houston will regard 2018 as one of the most important years in his relatively young life. After 11 years running one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups, he finally took his popular cloud storage and workplace software company public in March. Wall Street cheered Dropbox's IPO, sending its shares up nearly 40% on opening day (they've climbed 13% since). With the successful offering, Dropbox's public market valuation jumped to $12.45 billion, surpassing the company's private valuation of $10 billion. Not bad for a guy who once famously rejected the late Steve Job's offer to sell Dropbox to Apple. 

Drew Houston

In Spotify's tenth year, Ek is still thinking of new ways to keep his music streaming company thriving. Already a leader in the industry, Spotify focused more on money than music for 2018. It went public via a direct listing in April, circumventing Wall Street and its expensive IPO-related infrastructure (fewer shares were sold than expected, but the stock had a strong opening and has slowly but steadily grown since then.) It also announced a revamped mobile app for non-paying customers focused on converting more of them to paying customers. The company is already seeing record user numbers, hitting 170 million monthly active users and 75 million premium subscribers.

Daniel Ek

In taking Stitch Fix public in November of last year, Lake became not only the sole woman to take a tech startup public in 2017, but one of the youngest female founders ever to lead a company into the public markets. After a bumpy start, the online retail and styling company's stock has surged, with shares more than doubling since the IPO. Currently valued at more than $3 billion, Stitch Fix has amassed 2.7 million active customers and is on track to bring in $1.2 billion in revenue this year—strong footing it will need as it tries to fend off a challenge from Amazon's new Prime Wardrobe service. Lake herself will close out the year with another launch: her second child is due in November, and she plans to plant a flag for other CEO moms by taking a full 16 weeks of maternity leave.

Katrina Lake

When is a dating app more than a dating app? When it’s Bumble, Wolfe Herd’s startup turned cultural phenomenon. The woman-first swipe app has acquired some 34 million registered users and an estimated $100 million in revenue since its 2014 launch, turning Wolfe Herd into a feminist business icon. Not that it’s been a smooth ride—Bumble and arch rival Match Group are suing each other, and Facebook’s getting into the market. But Wolfe Herd’s star keeps rising: She recently joined the board of Imagine Entertainment.

Whitney Wolfe Herd

After joining the company as a controller 10 years prior, Cozza was named president and CEO of Icahn Enterprises in 2014. Under his leadership, Icahn—the conglomerate with investments in a slew of industries, from energy and railcars to food and fashion, named after its founder, activist investor Carl Icahn—saw record net income last year of $2.4 billion. As of May, the University of Dayton alum also serves as chairman of the board at Xerox, where Icahn just won a high-profile shareholder campaign.

Keith Cozza

You may know Peele as an actor, or more recently as an Oscar-winning writer-director, but the Manhattan native has emerged as one of Hollywood’s premier producers. His production company has a flurry of active projects, including a horror drama series with HBO and a sci-fi anthology on the rebranded YouTube Premium. In June, newly named Amazon Studios chief Jennifer Salke’s first order of business was signing Peele to an exclusive TV deal. The Get Out director has paved the way for a new market of socially conscious horror, with the film earning $255 million off a budget of $4.5 million and the first Academy Award for original screenwriting ever won by an African-American.

Jordan Peele

It’s only appropriate that Prime Minister Ardern, a onetime DJ, became a rock star of New Zealand politics. Her fervent support among Kiwis, dubbed Jacindamania, helped reverse her Labour Party’s ailing fortunes this fall and catapulted her to the title of world’s youngest female leader. The buzz continued when she announced her pregnancy and in June painted a once-in-a-generation vignette: a female head of government, cradling her newborn and embarking on six weeks of maternity leave. Her time off is flexible, it seems. In July she announced welfare reforms—including a weekly stipend for new parents—as part of Labour’s promise to improve well-being in a nation that’s grappling with housing and immigration crises.

Jacinda Ardern

Walmart is transforming itself for the e-commerce era as it battles Amazon over the future of retail, and at the center of it are Dunn and Balbale. They’re young, urban, and digitally savvy, representing a new generation of Walmart employees—and a new type of customer that Walmart is trying to attract. (They’re new to this list too.) Following Walmart’s $310 million acquisition of his men’s clothing label Bonobos in 2017, Dunn took over all of its digital brands, revamping vintage-inspired line ModCloth and launching luxury bedding and mattress brand Allswell. Balbale, who came to the company through its $3.3 billion acquisition of Jet, where she was CMO, has seen her purview balloon. She now runs marketing for Walmart.com, all digital marketing for Walmart U.S., as well as social media. So far so good: U.S. e-commerce sales were up 33% in the most recent quarter.

Sumaiya Balbale and Andy Dunn

The former investment banker runs the $13 billion (market cap) Internet empire built by Barry Diller, parent to a portfolio of brands ranging from the Daily Beast to Investopedia to Match Group, the $11 billion online dating giant it spun off in 2015 and still controls. Other than Match, bright spots include the newly merged ANGI Homeservices, Dotdash, and Vimeo. Oh, and IAC stock, which has soared: Since Levin took over in mid-2015, shares have risen almost three times as fast as the broader market.

Joey Levin

Sud joined Vimeo as head of marketing in 2014; last year she was named CEO, charged with focusing Vimeo as a cloud-based platform for video creation, distribution, and monetization, targeting individuals and small- to medium-size businesses. With revenue expected to exceed $125 million this year, Sud’s boss Levin (above) has called Vimeo “the biggest nonpublic opportunity inside IAC.” Fun fact: Sud tries to sleep nine hours a night.

Anjali Sud

Perhaps no person encapsulates show business right now more than Glover. In May, “This Is America”—the viral single from his musical alter ego, Childish Gambino—debuted at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100, with 65.3 million streams in its first week. Two months earlier, Atlanta—the FX show created by and starring the Stone Mountain, Ga., native—pulled in 2.7 million viewers for its season two premiere, more than any other cable comedy over the past year. A seemingly tireless worker with a pulse on the cultural zeitgeist, Glover embodies the entertainment entrepreneur.

Donald Glover

Snap can attract users. Can it attract ad dollars? That was the question that dogged the Los Angeles media company after its highflying 2017 IPO. Spiegel spent much of that year watching rival Facebook reap the benefits of copying Snap’s product innovations. No more: Though the assault by Zuckerberg &amp; Co. continues, Spiegel has moved aggressively to hone Snap’s focus and chase software-driven ad sales—and to show the world he won’t back down. Now he just has to prove it by reviving Snap’s lagging revenue and stock price.

Evan Spiegel

The Irish-born brothers are a couple of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. Patrick and John dropped out of MIT and Harvard, respectively, and sold their first business—an online auction management company—for a reported $5 million in 2008. Then they embarked on the idea that would become Stripe, now a payments behemoth valued at $9.2 billion. The company processes tens of billions of dollars in digital commerce transactions each year, inking deals with the likes of Amazon, Lyft, and Facebook.

John and Patrick Collison

The “closet in the cloud” service now claims more than 9 million members and has moved well beyond its roots: renting gowns for special occasions. Its two-year-old Unlimited service, where customers pay a flat fee for access to everyday clothing, grew 125% last year and is now up 150% year over year. This fall the company will launch an enterprise program, renting inventory on behalf of other brands and retailers. And earlier this spring it raised $20 million from Jack Ma’s investment vehicle at a valuation said to be north of $700 million, and Hyman was named to the board of Estée Lauder.

Jennifer Hyman

The ride-hailing startup’s name is a perfect description of its approach to 2018. In March the company snapped up rival Uber’s Southeast Asia operations, cementing its position as the dominant ondemand taxi provider in the region. In June, Toyota pumped $1 billion into the business in a round of funding said to value Grab at more than $10 billion. Now the duo are focused on transforming Grab into an “everyday superapp,” offering mobile payments, microfinancing, grocery shopping, and more.

Anthony Tan and Tan Hooi Ling

Armstrong is building Coinbase, the biggest U.S. Bitcoin exchange, into what his team hopes will become “the Google of crypto”—as relevant to the next wave of the web as Google was to the last. While it has a way to go, it’s on the right track: During this winter’s investment mania, Coinbase catapulted into the mainstream, eclipsing Charles Schwab in total accounts. Now the company is investing in upstarts and making acquisitions—including one that secured it a path to several tantalizing financial licenses.

Brian Armstrong

Last fall, The Barbadian singer launched a much-anticipated cosmetics line, Fenty Beauty, a collection that included 40 shades with a wide array of deeper tones. The venture went well beyond the standard celebrity brand extension and became not just a financial success, reportedly pulling in $100 million in its first 40 days, but also a social statement, with the darker shades selling out in many outlets and mainstream brands following with their own more complete ranges. Time named it one of 2017’s best inventions. In May she released a lingerie brand, Savage x Fenty, that caters to all body types and sizes.

Rihanna

Buterin describes his open-source blockchain platform Ethereum as a “world computer.” The skinny visionary’s experiment, which began as a white paper, now has a market valuation of $48 billion, making it the second-most-valuable crypto network next to Bitcoin. Ethereum caught a lucky break this year when the SEC said it would not regulate Ether, the network’s native coin, as a security. Rumor has it Google recently tried to hire Buterin to lead its own whispered crypto endeavors, but he declined.

Vitalik Buterin

In June the former Bernie Sanders organizer made history with her primary-election upset victory against Joe Crowley, a 10-term Democrat incumbent in New York’s 14th congressional district. Though it was her first time running for office, and though she faced Crowley’s 10-to-1 fundraising advantage, the Bronx native of Puerto Rican descent garnered 58% of the vote. If she wins—almost a sure thing given the overwhelmingly Democratic district—she’ll make history again as the youngest woman elected to Congress.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

What if you could buy stocks with your smartphone—and avoid annoying trading charges to boot? That’s how millions of young investors use Robinhood. Bhatt and Tenev, who met as Stanford math whizzes, launched the company in 2013 as an egalitarian challenge to oldguard brokerage houses. Five years later, it has shot to a valuation of $5.6 billion. This year they added Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to the trading mix and now hope to build Robinhood into a full-blown digital bank.

Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt

He’s been called the “Mark Zuckerberg of Russia,” but it’s time to ditch the epithet and recognize Durov’s achievements in their own right. After having his Facebook clone, VKontakte, the second-most-popular website in Russia, ripped away from him by alleged Kremlin cronies in 2014, Durov focused his efforts on Telegram. The encrypted-chat app has amassed more than 200 million monthly active users since its founding five years ago. It has even hosted one of the most extravagant “initial coin offerings” to date, raising a reported $1.7 billion in exchange for promised crypto coins. Now Durov, a newly minted billionaire, is fighting bans in Russia and Iran, where government leaders claim Telegram facilitates insurrection.

Pavel Durov

Inspired by a lost pair of glasses and a grad school budget, Blumenthal and Gilboa, along with two other cofounders, started the socially conscious and affordable eyewear company in 2010 while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. The “try before you buy” idea took off, and their direct-to-consumer model pioneered an enduring retail wave; the duo now steer a billion-dollar brand that has raised nearly $300 million. Through their “buy one, give one” model, Warby has donated more than 4 million pairs of glasses to the needy.

Dave Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal

When the Harvard grad and ex–investment banker became CEO in 2011, the then Dallas-based, highend hotel outfit ran 19 properties, mostly in the Americas. Today it claims 61—with 25 more in the works—ranging from bespoke outposts in Beijing, London, and Luang Prabang to Silicon Valley’s Sand Hill Road. Cheng’s fingerprints are all over these sites and the explosive growth. It may be the family business—Rosewood was bought by the conglomerate founded by her late grandfather—but the vision is all hers.

Sonia Cheng

At an age when many people are considered too young to entrust with much responsibility, Tubbs runs an entire city—Stockton, Calif., pop. 320,000. In fact, he was elected as both the youngest mayor in history of any sizable U.S. city and Stockton’s first black mayor. And with youth has come an unconventional idea. Tubbs is implementing universal basic income, a hot but largely untested economic theory that involves government giving cash to citizens to eliminate poverty. Starting as soon as this fall, the city will give $500 a month in donated money to up to 100 local families to spend as they please.

Michael Tubbs

In July, UCLA and UCSF scientists made an exciting proclamation: Gene editing could potentially be used as a much more efficient form of cancer immunotherapy. The technology at the heart of that discovery is what’s known as Crispr, and Zhang is one of the scientists who pioneered its use in human cells, sparking a flurry of interest in using Crispr to tackle everything from inherited diseases to cancer. Earlier this year, Zhang and colleagues helped launch a new Crispr-focused startup, Beam Therapeutics, with $87 million in funding.

Feng Zhang

Tosi spawned her whimsical bakery in 2008 from the Momofuku restaurant empire. Now she’s building her own culinary kingdom with her 14-location Milk Bar chain, which serves up cult goodies like Cereal Milk soft serve and Crack Pie. Last year she raised her first-ever round of funding to expand to more cities. And with two James Beard awards, a third cookbook on the way, and a judging spot on various seasons of MasterChef, she’s well on her way to building her own lifestyle brand.

Christina Tosi

The beauty industry needed a fresh face. Enter Weiss and her Glossier brand, which preaches minimal, individualized selfcare. Weiss, an art-school grad, learned the ropes as a Condé Nast assistant and blogger. Her Into the Gloss platform gave birth to the Glossier line of products, which are direct-to-consumer, simply designed, and oh so Instagrammable. Young shoppers have latched on to Glossier, and investors have too. It has raised $86 million and is valued at $390 million.

Emily Weiss

Four years ago, Hamilton was living out of a hotel room she shared with her mother. Today she’s a VC who has deployed some $4 million across 100 companies led by underrepresented founders (including Blendoor, our No. 34) through her venture firm. She’s also raising an added $36 million to invest exclusively in startups founded by black female entrepreneurs. (She’s calling it the “It’s about damn time fund.”) Hamilton aims to close the funding gap for women of color, who receive only 0.2% of total VC dollars—and others are taking note.

Arlan Hamilton

Entrepreneur turned investor Duggal launched Female Founders Fund in 2014 as a seed-stage venture fund to invest in female-led technology companies. After 700 investor meetings, she raised $5 million, which she invested in companies like Thrive Global, Zola, and Maven. By 2018, times had changed, and in May, Duggal closed $27 million for her second early-stage fund, with a roster of limited partners including Melinda Gates and Katrina Lake (see No. 8).

Anu Duggal

Stad has made a career by surprising people. His collection of hedge funds focuses on public securities and Asia, yet two of its biggest wins have been funding pre-IPO debt for Spotify and buying a big slug of Uber. His breadth masks his age, a source of surprise to some. (“I had no idea he was under 40,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.) Stad prides himself on “being creative in a traditionally uncreative industry,” which is paying off as his decade-old Dragoneer punches above its weight, investing alongside far more established firms.

Marc Stad

Lampkin was a full-stack web developer by 15 and holds degrees from Stanford and MIT. But that wasn’t enough to get her in the door at Google. With its 55,000 employees and only a handful of black women in tech roles, Lampkin thought … bias? So she founded Blendoor to help tech companies eliminate bias in hiring. Clients include Salesforce, Google, and Airbnb. Blendoor also publishes the BlendScore report, a revealing datadriven ranking of the diversity strength of 160 companies.

Stephanie Lampkin

Put down your phone. Go outside. Do something else. This is the gospel that Harris, a modern-day Neil Postman, preaches. Formerly Google’s resident “design ethicist,” he left after becoming disillusioned with the ways tech companies prey on people’s time and attention. Then he single-handedly kicked off an international conversation about digital distraction and app addiction with his viral writings and talks. In January, Mark Zuckerberg co-opted Harris’s signature phrase, “Time well spent,” as a design goal for Facebook.

Tristan Harris

Ries became a corporate guru after his 2011 book The Lean Startup influenced a generation of startups and big companies alike. Now he’s focused on building the LTSE, a new exchange with listing standards that prioritize long-term investing. Wall Street’s short-term focus is a well-acknowledged problem. Will Ries solve it? Right now he’s still pursuing the complex regulatory path required, but he’s raised some $19 million to fund it—and he did, after all, write the book on successful innovation.

Eric Ries

Former venture capitalist Jurich started the $1.7 billion market value Sunrun in her cofounder’s attic a year before the 2008 recession. She weathered the crisis and survived, taking the company public in 2015 (with her 1-month-old daughter on her hip at the opening bell). Sunrun’s customer base has grown by 38% annually for the past five years, and in 2018 Sunrun took market share from SolarCity, owned by Elon Musk’s Tesla, to become the leader in residential solar, battery storage, and solar energy services in the U.S.

Lynn Jurich

The California native is on the front lines of the world of e-sports. Under Nanzer’s supervision, Overwatch League began its inaugural season in January, and already the multiplayer, first-person shooter game is game company Activision Blizzard’s fastest-growing franchise, with revenues of over $1 billion. By integrating existing e-sports organizations with traditional sports owners, Nanzer has helped the league secure 12 permanent franchises around the world—and hopes to take it to continental Europe and the Middle East next season.

Nate Nanzer

After working at Google and Aéropostale, Zak brought her retail and tech backgrounds to the table with an idea to start a fitcentric company to make buying—and wearing—bras a more comfortable experience. Launched in 2013 with the help of her cofounder, co-CEO, and husband, David Spector, ThirdLove, with its half-cup sizes, its quiz to determine what bra works best, and its convenient direct-to-consumer format, has been a viral success, yielding annualized revenue growth that has exceeded 450% for the past two years.

Heidi Zak

The Chaiken brothers are tackling one of health care’s biggest problems: the sky-high cost of prescription drugs. Blink’s strategy is to use e-commerce to score patients lower prices for their medicine. Their mission is to upend the byzantine and opaque pharmaceutical supply chain, in which middlemen often take a cut without passing savings on to consumers. So far, it seems to be working: Blink has partnered with drug giants Eli Lilly and Roche and has a participating pharmacy in most zip codes.

Geoffrey and Matthew Chaiken

El Kaliouby is training machines to master the fuzzy realm of human feelings. The Egyptian-American entrepreneur cofounded Affectiva, a venture-backed “Emotion A.I.” startup, as a research scientist at MIT in 2009. Since then, the firm has analyzed 6.8 million faces—the better for decoding how to tell a smile from a smirk—and signed up 25% of the world’s biggest companies as users. Marketers, eager to test ads and products, have pounced on the mind-reading technology, though it’s also being applied to more virtuous use cases, like assisting individuals with autism and diagnosing depression.

Rana el Kaliouby

<a href="http://fortune.com/the-ledger-40-under-40/">Click here to read the The Ledger 40 Under 40 list.</a>