I think this list is missing 2 critical people. Gurbaksh Chahal is building his third company, having sold the first two for a combined $340M. I definitely think having 2 major exits before you're 30 should merit inclusion in the list. Second is Mark Zuckerberg. Regardless of what you think about his company, facebook has 750,000,000 members around the globe. Which if it were a country would make it the third largest on the planet. Not to mention he's parlayed a website he built in his dorm room into a $13.5B fortune. And if that doesn't qualify someone for the list, what will?
I think folks like Zuck graduated beyond such lists a few years ago. At least a partial goal of these lists is to introduce fresh faces and find the "next" Zuckerberg. Otherwise we'd be seeing the same people for a decade.
Well said, zaidf. This is Christine, one of the editors and writers for the project. At Inc., we largely focus on small, fast-growing companies, needless to say, pre-IPO or sale. And the names you'll see last year our list (LivingSocial, Foursquare), and previously (Modcloth, Mashable, Aaron Patzer, Mark Zuckerberg) won't appear on the list again. There are simply too many innovative, fascinating new, younger, companies each year for us to explore and profile to repeat names. Hope that makes sense.
This is a bit of an aside, but thank you for doing this. I've been enamored with the 30-under-30 list for many years, and it's become a goal of mine to get on it at some point. Don't have many years left to hit it, but I'm certainly going to try!
Yeah, if you wanted to put Zuck on a 30 under 30 list it wouldn't be "30 people under 30 to watch" it would be "30 people under 30 who you cannot avoid seeing in some way every couple of months"
The list is not meant as a historical record, it's meant to sell magazines. Neither of these two names would sell magazines because everyone knows about Mark Zuckerberg and most people in the industry know about Gurbaksh Chahal (he has been profiled in these types of articles many times).
I like the videos this year definitely. There's something about witnessing the actual passion behind the pictures and articles from the real people. Makes them seem more deserving of the praise.
However it's a shame they turned everyone into a cartoon after what looks like were photos from several professional photo shoots.
I wonder if it was one of those situations where 1 or 2 pictures came out terrible, so they decided to cartoonify everything and call it "by design".
I didn't work on this year's list, but I've worked on them in years' past. The bottom line: It's a subjective list--based on reporting by Inc.'s editors and writers (basically we talk to people and ask them who they admire/who they think should be on the list). We assemble a long list of names and narrow it down to 30, based a sense of who we feel is most impressive and most interesting.
One of the cool things about this list is that it's a one-shot deal, so we'll be looking for 30 new names next year. You can send nominations to 30under30@inc.com
Or put them in the comments here and we'll find them.
Hey, adriannica - check out my comment above for some of how we create the list. And here's a bit more of our methodology http://www.inc.com/30under30/2011/how-we-made-this-years-30-... (although mostly it involves lots of reporting and much internal debating.)
