40 Under 40

40 under 40

Welcome to the 2014 40 under 40, our list of the most influential young people in business. They’re in technology, yes, but also finance, fashion, film, real estate and even plant-based food. They’re all disrupting—and they’re all just getting started.

They’re revolutionizing two very different industries, but this year was the year that Kalanick and Chesky became the figureheads for the ongoing clash between the great potential of the Internet economy and the rules and regulations of the old economy. In the Internet economy, the web can connect hundreds of millions of us to powerful platforms and networks where we can help ourselves to extra inventory, whether it’s a spare bedroom in someone’s house or a driver-for-hire idling in between jobs. 
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In the real world economy, that ability can collide with entrenched interest groups and decades-old regulations. Kalanick’s style is to enter a market, cease-and-desist orders be damned, and ask questions later; Chesky’s is more diplomatic. What they have in common is growth. In the last 12 months, Uber has quadrupled the number of markets it serves to over 170 cities (you can now Uber in Abu Dhabi and Hyderabad); This June, it raised $1.2 billion at an $17 billion valuation, one of the highest ever for a tech startup. Airbnb has provided shelter for 20 million people—half of those this year—and on its peak night this summer, 425,000 people stayed in an Airbnb somewhere in the world. 
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There are other challenges, too, like Uber’s accusations of bad sportsmanwhip with rival Lyft. But both outfits are undaunted. Chesky continues to run Airbnb with his cofounders Nate Blecharczyk, who oversees technical strategy as CTO, and Joe Gebbia, chief product officer. Kalanick has been beefing up his team, most recently hiring former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe as SVP of policy and strategy. “We want to be regulated,” Chesky insists. “Because we want to be recognized.” 
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Travis Kalanick & Brian Chesky

The social media giant isn’t adding users as fast as it used to, but it’s finally minting money from them. Revenue and profits keep trouncing estimates—and the company proved its critics wrong when it comes to mobile monetization: in the second quarter this year, mobile advertising accounted for almost two-thirds of ad revenue, while the number of users checking in on mobile devices grew to 650 million. Months after the company’s $19 billion purchase of mobile messaging app WhatsApp, Facebook acquired Finnish startup Pryte, which makes it easier for people in developing countries to purchase Internet access for mobile apps. Zuck has been active on the philanthropic front, too: Last December, he and wife Priscilla donated 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, an amount valued at almost $1 billion and recognized as the largest charitable gift on public record for the year.

Mark Zuckerberg

The youngest prime minister in Italian history came into office in February on a burst of promise. A charismatic outsider, he pledged to break his center-left Democratic Party’s long ties to labor while he chased renewal by challenging Europe’s zeal for austerity. He’s auctioned off state-owned luxury cars and sacked the chiefs of state-owned companies, shaking up the country’s entrenched ruling class. But his more sweeping aims have collided with reality. His political and economic reform agenda is now meeting stiff resistance in the Italian parliament. And it may be sunk by a more urgent concern: the country is suffering a triple-dip recession that’s wiped out all its growth since 2000, complicated by a crushing debt load. In the face of all that, Renzi is vowing to press ahead, marshaling the optimism that swept him to power.

Matteo Renzi

Kobolyev has his hands full—and not just because at just 36, he runs a company that employs 175,000 and accounts for one-eighth of his country’s GDP. He took the reins at Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas company in March, a week after his predecessor was arrested on corruption charges and in the midst of his country’s bitter conflict with Russia, which also is Ukraine’s main gas supplier. Add to those combustible politics: fears over Europe’s energy security (which relies on Naftogaz pipes); Ukraine’s $5.3 billion in unpaid gas bills (Russia’s Gazprom cut the country’s supply in June); and a population so accustomed to cheap heat that they keep their windows open year round. Energy conservation and transparency initiatives underway, Kobolyev now just needs to shore up a gas supply for his 45 million countrymen—he’s already got some flowing in from Slovakia— before winter comes. Good thing he thinks negotiations are “fun.”

Andriy Kobolyev

The Ukrainian-born engineer toiled at Yahoo for nearly a decade with co-founder Brian Acton before traveling South America and eventually developing WhatsApp, the simple, free mobile app that works a lot like traditional text, letting users send and receive calls, video, and pictures, as well as messages. The startup ballooned to hundreds of millions of users—becoming especially popular overseas—and made headlines this February when Facebook—the very employer that turned Koum down for a job years before— bought it for $19 billion. It was the most expensive acquisition ever for a venture-backed startup; Koum famously signed the deal at the former social services office where he once stood in line to collect food stamps.

Jan Koum

No one ever said turning around Yahoo would be easy, Mayer is facing restless investors as ad revenue remains challenged—and in the wake of the sale of part of the company’s stake in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The sale earned $9.4 billion for Yahoo—a portion of which Mayer may use to add to the some 40 acquisitions she’s made in the past two years. But investors are questioning her ability to create value with that strategy: the company’s core business is now valued at less than its stakes in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan. Two bright spots: Mayer has turned Yahoo into a player in content with big name hires like Katie Couric. And search-related revenue is up 2% year over year.

Marissa Mayer

When he was just 30, Farley, was named the head of the New York Board of Trade. It was a tough gig: the NYBOT was an also-ran commodities exchange that did most trading on its physical floor at a time when the rest of Wall Street was going electronic—and being young and coming from the tech world won Farley immediate enemies with its old school traders. Five years later trading volume on the NYBOT—which was renamed ICE Futures US— had doubled and earnings were up sixfold. Farley’s new assignment is similar but exponentially bigger and more prominent: In May, he was named president of the New York Stock Exchange, making him the second-youngest person to ever run it (the youngest was William McChesney Martin, who was 31 when he was named in 1938; he went on to become the longest-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve). Farley’s plan to keep the old man of Wall Street relevant: modernize and simplify everything, from the NYSE’s trading systems to its office space. He’s already overhauled management. Says Jeffrey Sprecher, CEO of the Intercontinental Exchange, which bought the NYSE last year: “it’s his show.”

Tom Farley

Snap-happy Systrom has just begun to make good on Mark Zuckerberg’s $1 billion bet on the company in 2012, rolling out sponsored ads for the first time in November 2013. Since the acquisition—which paved the way for Facebook’s fatter bids for upstarts like WhatsApp ($19 billion), Oculus Rift ($2 billion) and SnapChat ($3 billion)—the mobile photo platform has ballooned about 10x in both size and audience, now having more than 200 million active monthly users and some 150 employees. In scaling one of the world’s most engrossing and consistently downloaded apps, Systrom has rolled out fresh features such as private messaging with Instagram Direct, new creative tools for photo-editing, and Hyperlapse, a standalone app for shooting steady-cam time-lapse video, over the past year. He also scaled his career up a few notches when he was named to the Wal-Mart board last month.

Kevin Systrom

Holmes, whom we put on our cover in June, dropped out of Stanford when she was 19 to found Theranos, a <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/06/12/theranos-blood-holmes/">revolutionary blood analytics company</a>. Ten years later, her private, Palo Alto-based company employs more than 500 and is valued by investors at about $9 billion. (She retains more than half the stock, so you can do the math.) Theranos performs blood tests for a fraction of the price charged by competitors and without the use of a syringe. Using a painless, patented method of pricking a finger instead, it can perform as many as 70 tests at a time from just a few drops of blood—about 100th to 1000th the amount drawn by venipuncture. Wowed by the potential commercial, military, and humanitarian applications, Theranos board members include three former cabinet secretaries (George Shultz, Bill Perry, and Henry Kissinger), two former Senators, a retired CentCom commander, a retired Navy admiral, and a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Elizabeth Holmes

He might be the most powerful activist shareholder you haven’t heard of. Early last year, Morfit was a largely unknown stock picker, working at a largely unknown hedge fund. Then in April 2013, he produced a detailed report, delivered by his boss ValueAct CEO Jeff Ubben at an investment conference, on how to fix a lumbering Microsoft. The report won ValueAct and Morfit respect among some of Microsoft’s largest shareholders. Behind the scenes, Morfit rallied support for a change at the top—and within a few months, CEO Steve Ballmer was out and Satya Nadella was in. Earlier this year, Microsoft added Morfit to its board, making him the company’s youngest director by nearly a decade. Morfit’s tip for getting managers much more experienced than he to listen is to prove he’s done his homework. “Please don’t say I dazzle people with data,” says Morfit. “It’s everything I am not. I’m not flashy.”

Mason Morfit

Back when he was a teenage computer camp geek in the 1990s, Jesse Cohn taught himself to program and earned an advanced IT certification issued by a company called Novell. So when some 15 years later—as a portfolio manager at one of the most influential activist hedge funds—Cohn launched a hostile bid to acquire Novell, he mentioned the accolade in his letter to the board. Novell soon sold at an even higher price, netting a windfall for Elliott, the $25 billion hedge fund run by Paul Singer, which owned a big block of the stock. A tech-savvy and surefooted negotiator, Cohn has since led more than 30 shareholder campaigns against the likes of Compuware, BMC Software, and lately EMC, becoming one of the most powerful and effective activists in the finance industry. Elliott has found his activist approach so lucrative—often doubling or tripling the firm’s original investments—that the fund invented a new role for Cohn dedicated to it.

Jesse Cohn

Despite new competition from the likes of Apple and others, Dorsey’s mobile payments darling Square continues to grow; it’s said to be raising capital at a $6 billion valuation. (A much-hyped move to the public markets, however, has reportedly been delayed). The tech star’s stock continues to rise: last year he was named to the Walt Disney Company’s board, and this summer the socially-minded St. Louis native made a pilgrimage to Ferguson, Missouri to document the racially-charged demonstrations (via Twitter, of course).

Jack Dorsey

Pictorial kingpin Silbermann continues to catalogue people’s image-based interests through his e-corkboard Pinterest. Now valued at $5 billion after a $200 million round of financing in May, the company claims more than 30 billion ‘pins’ in more than 750 million boards, and it’s displaced other social sites like Facebook and YouTube to become the top social referrer to retail sites and a major driver to media properties. Last November, Silbermann poached former Demand Media and San Francisco Chronicle executive Joanne Bradford to head partnerships; the company has since lured brands like Gap, Kraft and General Mills into purchasing ads—aka “promoted pins”—that may presage eventual profitability. With three-fourths of its usage now taking place on mobile devices, in April Pinterest deployed “guided search,” a kind of image-centric inspiration tool encouraging users to linger and browse during search, rather than the quick-as-possible turnaround that Google Search dominates.

Ben Silbermann

What started as Woodman’s personal passion—it was the desire to capture his own athletic feats that led him to devise a wearable, durable camcorder—has turned into a camera-selling machine, raking in nearly $1 billion in revenue last year and recently selling its 10 millionth GoPro. After a successful IPO in June (the company’s shares popped over 30% in its first day of trading), GoPro shares have more than tripled. But Woodman, an avid surfer, mountain biker and snowboarder, believes the next wave of growth will come from a content strategy: distributing the footage that’s generated by millions of his company’s users. GoPro “channels” that air videos—from close-ups of hummingbirds to a base jumper flinging herself off a cliff in high heels—are already available on Virgin America flights and Xbox gaming consoles, while a YouTube channel has more than 2 million subscribers. Woodman has even loftier goals: Promoting world peace by enabling people to share their passions with each other.

Nick Woodman

One of the last charter members of Team Obama remaining in the White House, the Manhattan native almost chose a career in fiction writing. Instead, he came to Washington for a job helping pen the 9/11 Commission Report and the Iraq Study Group Report. Entrée to the elite ranks of Democratic foreign policy thinkers yielded an introduction to then-Sen. Obama as he eyed a presidential bid, and Rhodes has been with him since, these days channeling the President’s voice on foreign affairs at a moment when the world appears to be melting down. Most recently, that meant drafting the uncharacteristically muscular speech the President delivered before the United Nations General Assembly in which he vowed to dismantle the ISIS “network of death.” Says Rhodes, “It’s the roadmap for where we’re trying to go and what we expect of others.” For a Q and A with Rhodes, see it <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/10/09/ben-rhodes-deputy-national-security-adviser/" target="_blank">here</a>.

Ben Rhodes

White likes to go where the heat is: first, she helped run local and commerce businesses at Google, where she was a protégé of Sheryl Sandberg—who brought her over to Facebook, where she helped integrate ads into the company’s mobile experience before moving over to the newly-acquired Instagram as director of business operations. Last December, she joined Snapchat as COO, tasked with helping turn it into a viable business. White’s also a director of Lululemon.

Emily White

A lawsuit over its ownership, controversial emails dredged up from the past, a spurned $3 billion offer from Facebook: the ephemeral-messaging app Spiegel co-founded has grown to a reported 100 million monthly users– and it has all the fixin’s for a movie script. Spiegel and Stanford classmate Bobby Murphy created not just a mega-hit when they developed their app as part of a design class, but an entire new category in transitory communication.

Evan Spiegel

The South African native (and cousin of Tesla CEO Elon Musk) is co-founder and CEO of SolarCity, the largest installer of solar panels in the U.S. (See related story for more, <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/10/09/lyndon-rive-solar-city/" target="_blank">here</a>) The San Mateo, Calif. Company’s leasing revenue (the main driver of its business) was up 110% last quarter; after going public in 2012 at $8 a share, it traded recently at $60, giving it a $5.5 billion market value.

Lyndon Rive

Chetty, who focuses on economic mobility, is an economist on a breakout streak. His work on the “value-added” of teachers helped win him a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” in 2012, after President Obama cited his research in the State of the Union address. Last year, Chetty won the John Bates Clark Medal (known as the "baby Nobel"), given to the best economist under the age of 40. And he recently gave the same presentation to Obama’s chief economic adviser and to Republican Congressman Paul Ryan on the same day, a few hours apart. Chetty now oversees a staff of 10 researchers, a job he does not take lightly: “My biggest nightmare is always that someone is going to have made an error in the thousands of lines of code that are involved in these projects and that feeds into some public policy thing.”

Raj Chetty

Peter Wallace’s first big investment pitch at Blackstone flopped. After the meeting, a colleague called Wallace’s idea--a buyout of AlliedBarton Security Services--“dopey.” Four months later, after he pitched it again—this time in a meeting with Blackstone’s bigwig Tony James—Wallace was told to drop his “science experiment.” He persisted, and it paid off. Two months later, in July 2008, Blackstone bought Allied; it’s expected to reap a billion-dollar profit for the firm. That ability to think for himself has won Wallace lots of fans at Blackstone, where he’s one of the most senior executives in its buyout business. After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, he headed to Wall Street, rather than follow his family’s well-groomed path into media (grandfather Mike was the legendary 60 Minutes correspondent; father Chris is an anchor on Fox News.) It’s also helped that his deals have been huge successes. In addition to Allied, Wallace has also led Blackstone’s buyouts of SeaWorld, The Weather Channel and Vivint Solar, which in October spun out its solar division in an IPO, creating a $1.1 billion profit for Blackstone and its investing partners. SeaWorld CEO Jim Atchison says Wallace is one of the people he turned to for advice on how to deal with blowback from Blackfish, the scathing documentary that questioned the theme park’s treatment of orca whales. “He’s brilliant,” says Atchinson. “When you think all you have is a choice between A and B, Peter’s great at coming up with C.”

Peter Wallace

When Garfield made our list last year, she was a top executive at British Telecom, bringing broadband to the Brits. This year, as the newly installed CEO of Severn Trent, she’s delivering a service even more vital: water. (The UK’s third largest publicly traded water company, Severn Trent supplies to over 8 million Britons.) The move made Garfield the youngest ever female CEO on the FTSE (and one of just five women) and tracks her career’s upward trajectory: in 2013, she was appointed to the board of grocery giant Tesco; in 2014, Fortune named her the 14th Most Powerful Women in Europe, Middle East and Africa. As for the water business, she’s working to make Severn Trent more innovative and customer-focused while protecting its record for issuing the “lowest bills in the land.”

Liv Garfield

As chief information officer of Europe, Middle East, and global operations of Barclays, Watson helped the bank manage its tech department more like a startup than a stodgy bank. His team launched numerous mobile banking apps, got bank accounts open faster, and pioneered new forms of mobile payment. In April he moved west—way west—to Nike, where he’s already spearheaded a big deal with Juniper Networks. A rare openly gay executive in the C-suite of a Fortune 500 company, the London-born Watson has been a champion of diversity throughout his career, and in 2013 became the first non-U.S. citizen to join the board of LGBT advocacy group GLAAD.

Anthony Watson

The notoriously shy daughter of Oracle founder Larry Ellison has proven she’s more than a fat wallet. Ellison first caught Hollywood’s attention in 2010, when she was an executive producer on the Oscar-nominated western True Grit. A year later, she started Annapurna Films (named after a section in the Himalayas she hiked in 2006) and has turned out a steady stream of critically acclaimed hits ever since, including The Master and Zero Dark Thirty. Last year, Ellison became the first-ever female producer to have two films nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award in the same year, thanks to her backing of American Hustle and Her. Next up: Foxcatcher, the thriller based on the life of Olympic wrestling coach John du Pont that Ellison produced, debuts in November and is already getting Oscar buzz.

Megan Ellison

Micromax started as an IT software company—it was even a distributor for Nokia phones—but Sharma hit upon a winning formula by making cheap cell phones with a month-long battery life; ever since he’s been toying with new ideas (it’s released one phone that emits frequencies that repel mosquitos and another that doubles as a computer mouse). In five years since founding the company, handset sales have grown from 10,000 to 36 million; revenue hit $1.2 billion last year. That could scale much bigger now that it has a deal with Google to make its sub-$100 phones for the Indian market, seen as the next big area of growth for the global tech giants. Last year the company hired Hugh Jackman as its brand ambassador.

Rahul Sharma

Tetrick’s Hampton Creek is best known for its Just Mayo brand of eggless mayonnaise, but it’s more than a condiment company; it’s a food technology company with a social mission. Tetrick’s team of culinary scientists, technologists, and biochemists is aiming to help make our food system more sustainable, affordable, and healthier by creating a new breed of products made from plants (part of the goal: creating an index of all the world’s plants). First came Just Mayo—the top-selling mayonnaise brand in Whole Foods and due in 33,500 stores from Wal-Mart to Tesco by the end of the year. But in two years, Tetrick says mayo will make up less than 3% of the company’s revenue, with the rest coming from new ventures like cookie dough and scrambled eggs made from plants. The endeavor has attracted big name investors like Li Ka-shing, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Jerry Yang and Khosla Ventures; Bill Gates has cited Tetrick’s venture as one of three companies leading the reinvention of food.

Josh Tetrick

Smolyansky’s Lifeway and its yogurt-like kefir have helped make probiotics sexy while benefitting big time from the natural and health food wave. Gross sales hit $109 million in 2013, up from $12 million in 2002, the year Smolyansky became the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded company after her father, the company’s founder, died of a heart attack. She’s invested heavily in R&amp;D, rolling out new products like a children’s line, savory flavors, and frozen kefir. A recently acquired Wisconsin facility will let the company increase production capacity five-fold—which would make Lifeway the largest kefir manufacturer in the world. Along with her role on the U.N. Foundation’s Global Entrepreneurs Council, Smolyansky has also gotten involved in producing movies on social issues like teenage homelessness and sexual assault on college campuses.

Julie Smolyansky

Sure, her father, Bernard Arnault, is France’s richest man and the head of LVMH, the world’s largest luxury goods company—but Arnault fille has business smarts and savvy in her own right. The LSE grad and one-time McKinsey consultant was named to a top spot at Louis Vuitton, LVMH’s flagship brand, last year. Hopes are she’ll bring the same magic touch and eye for talent that she did to Dior—and she’s off to a good start, having helped woo the buzzy designer Nicolas Ghesquière to be the handbag company’s creative head. Arnault’s knack for scouting and scoring talent—she’s signed other rising stars and this year launched an LVMH young designers prize—is considered one of the company’s best weapons in its luxury arms race with Kering. No surprise, then, that many think she’ll have her père’s job one day.

Delphine Arnault

Tang Yan calls his Chinese social app Momo a “combination of Snapchat and Tinder.” And just like them, he’s pushing the limits in his country. Momo is huge in China, ranking as one of the top social apps with 150 million registered users (52 million active monthly) after being released in 2011. It’s been called “hormone-filled” by state media, but Tang says Momo wasn’t built for dating or one-night affairs. (Mo is part of a Chinese word meaning stranger.) Rather, the location-based system, which allows users to find new friends around them, is targeted at China’s big city arrivals who want to find a new social circle. Of course, they many also want a partner: Of the 900 million messages sent each day, 600 million are between two people and five percent are about hooking up. (Momo also has tens of thousands of groups for dating, sports, and entertainment.) Tang, has already set up a subsidiary in San Francisco to think about U.S. expansion.

Tang Yan

In less than three years, Bahl’s online marketplace (he co-founded it with high school pal Rohit Bansal) has exploded to become India’s largest. The eBay-backed company now has 2,500 employees, over 50,000 merchants, and crossed $1 billion in sales this year;Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of the storied Tata Group, invested personally. Unfazed by competition from Amazon’s foray into India, Bahl is doubling down on a diverse product lineup including DNA testing, automobiles, and real estate, targeting $2 billion in sales by year-end.

Kunal Bahl

Kevin Chou has built this “free-to-play” mobile gaming company from a tiny start-up operating over a dim sum restaurant to $360 million in revenues and a $1 billion valuation. Kabam’s success comes down to a willingness by take risks and embrace unexpected partnerships. The company switched out of social apps for sports fans and into gaming in 2009 after advertising revenue dried up. Along with more than two dozen of their own games, the 800-employee firm has teamed up with Hollywood studios to produce three hugely popular games including “The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth”, “Fast &amp; Furious 6: The Game” and are now planning their first fighting game, “Contest of Champions,” in partnership with Marvel. The company expects many more movie tie-ups moving forward as well as a big push into Asia, signaled by its collaboration with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba. The newly public firm has invested $120 million into the company and Kabam will publish several of its mobile games on Alibaba Group’s mobile applications.

Kevin Chou

The designer’s leather-studded apparel and handbags regularly appear on the red carpet, but it’s the Morning After Clutch (MAC) that put Minkoff on the map. Her company, which she founded with brother and CEO Uri in 2005, sold its one-millionth MAC bag and crossed $100 million in gross sales this year. Next up: Three new company stores in the U.S. and wearable-tech products like a text-message notification bracelet and a compact mobile charger.

Rebecca Minkoff

The Iranian-American son of Qualcomm cofounder Younes Nazarian made an early fortune in wireless before pioneering celebrity nightclubs in the 90s famous for hosting Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Now, he helms the entertainment and hospitality conglomerate SBE (it stands for Samy Boy Entertainment, a reference to his childhood nickname), a collection of six hotels, 16 clubs, and dozens of restaurants (SLS hotels, the Raleigh, the Redbury, and hotspots Umami Burger and Katsuya are all his) with collective revenues of some $500 million. His largest project to date, the much-anticipated SLS hotel-casino in Las Vegas, opened in August, developed over eight years at a cost of $800 million.

Sam Nazarian

Indian-born Gadde has proved vital to Twitter’s efforts at international expansion. While over 70% of the social media company’s 271 million users are overseas, it’s been banned in multiple countries. When the Turkish government blocked Twitter last March, Gadde and her 90-person legal team filed lawsuits in local courts, eventually prevailing. Also on her list of recent milestones: helping steer the company through one of the most anticipated (and unlike Facebook’s, incident-free) initial public offerings in recent years. Gadde, the only woman on Twitter’s executive team, says the most important aspect of her job is allowing as much content to flow freely while respecting local laws. A graduate of Cornell undergrad and NYU’s law school, Gadde previously spent close to a decade at the Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich &amp; Rosati.

Vijaya Gadde

Reffkin has the kind of résumé that exhausts you. He graduated from college (Columbia) in just over two years. At 25, after spending two years at McKinsey and two at Lazard and getting a Columbia MBA in between, he became a White House Fellow, during which he spent a year working with Treasury Secretary John Snow. Then he returned to banking, spending five years as a VP at Goldman Sachs and a year as now-president and COO Gary Cohn’s chief of staff. In 2008 he raised $1.3 million to help the Success Charter Network open its first school in the Bronx. Last year he launched Urban Compass, a tech-driven New York City real estate firm with 96 agents, an easy-to-use app, and $73 million in funding from big names like Marc Benioff and Ken Chenault. The Berkeley native hasn’t abandoned his public-service mission: Reffkin also founded America Needs You, a nonprofit that provides career development and mentorship to first-generation college students.

Robert Reffkin

In 2007, Amoruso was working odd jobs at shoe and record stores when she realized she was bad at working for other people. So she set out to chart her own course selling vintage clothing on eBay, earning $70,000 in revenue in her first year. She saved most of it to start her own fashion retail site, Nasty Gal, a fashion website that attracted a cultish following among millennial girls tired of Abercrombie, Aeropostale and American Eagle. It is now a $100 million brand with customers in 150 countries (and soon, its first brick and mortar store in Los Angeles). This year, Amoruso turned her unconventional path to the C-Suite into a best-selling advice book, #GirlBoss; with her trademark candor and details about her colorful past that that include hitchhiking, petty theft, and dumpster diving, the book resonated with the anti-“Lean In” crowd. Nasty Gal recently went through a rough patch, reportedly cutting 10% of its workforce, but Amoruso has said that she's "hell-bent" on continuing her company's early success.

Sophia Amoruso

The grandson of a ship chandler (“the lowest of the low” in the sailor’s hierarchy, Logothetis says), the London-born Greek businessman still considers himself an underdog. The Financial Times uses another word: “tycoon.” At age 19, he took over his family’s then-tiny shipping business, and over the next two decades displayed an almost uncanny knack for buying low and selling high. He bought ships for cheap during a glut, sold them at the market peak, and bought big again during the 2009 lows, snapping up some $7 billion in diversified assets since then. His holding company Libra Group now controls 30 subsidiaries across five continents, with solar assets, 80 ships, 90 helicopters and more than 40 hotels. He remembers standing in line at a New York Starbucks while Lehman was collapsing, reading headlines about the markets tanking, and thinking, “this is the opportunity of a lifetime.” No kidding.

George Logothetis

After almost three years as head of Sony Pictures Animation, Minghella—daughter of the late director Anthony Minghella—was tapped to be president of production at Columbia Pictures, a title she shares with veteran producer-screenwriter Michael de Luca. Among her successes: helping to get Sony the rights to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.

Hannah Minghella

The daughter of the Donald has emerged as a top dealmaker in her own right, spearheading projects like the highly competitive and complex $200 million deal with the U.S. government to redevelop the Old Post Office in Washington D.C. (“In every aspect of the deal, Ivanka was the lead. She is very thorough,” says Kevin Terry, who led the government’s negotiations). Along with her family, Ivanka is hard at work building out the Trump Hotel Collection from 12 hotels to 30 by 2020. She’s also building a legacy apart from her family’s real estate business: The Ivanka Trump Collection of clothing and footwear has grown into 11 different product lines and is sold in Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bloomindale’s and more.

Ivanka Trump

He may be a self-described garbage man, but Morris has gilded ambitions. His company, Rubicon Global, based in Atlanta, is bringing an Uber-like approach to waste management by matching multinational clients with local haulers. With operations in all 50 states, he plans to go public in the next two years. More interesting is his other network: the Kentuckian has emerged as a major Republican power broker well beyond his hometown of Lexington. He’s established himself as a key connector in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street for Sen. Rand Paul, as the likely presidential contender builds a donor base—and he will figure prominently in any Paul bid as an ambassador to business leaders. Morris himself sounds destined to run for office: “Once I pick up all this garbage.”

Nate Morris

After stints at Twitter and Foursquare, designer-marketer Tristan Walker was invited by revered tech investor Ben Horowitz to become an Andreessen Horowitz entrepreneur in residence. While there, Walker cooked up the idea for a health and beauty brand for people of color, filling a long-decried gap in the market. The first brand under his Walker &amp; Co. is Bevel, a shaving line with sleek, vintage-inspired products that combat razor burn, a particular problem for black men. It is sold by subscription only, and signups are growing by an average 50% a month. Many see Walker as a key player in efforts to address Silicon Valley’s lack of diversity. To that end, he also co-founded Code2040, which places minority engineers in summer internships at top tech companies, named for the year when the majority of the country is projected to be nonwhite.

Tristan Walker

This HBS grad and former Ernst &amp; Young tax consultant hit a winning formula with her <a href="http://fortune.com/2014/10/09/sarah-kauss-swell-water-bottles/">stylish and sustainable stainless steel water bottles</a>; they’re now found almost everywhere the plugged-in, style-conscious shop: Nordstrom, the Container Store, Starbucks, Williams Sonoma, J. Crew, Athleta, and many more. Facebook ordered 500 of them. They were (of course) the official water bottle of this year’s TED conference. And revenue has tripled in the past few years to north of $10 million. “It’s crazy when you have a call with someone like Starbucks,” says Kauss, “and you get off the phone and you think, 'That was a $2 million phone call.”

Sarah Kauss

It’s been a whirlwind year for the personal finance startup founder: LearnVest opened and staffed a full-time 50-advisor “planner hub” (with alums from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley) in Arizona as its revenue from its consumer clients ballooned 400%. It partnered with Fidelity and Putnam Investments to offer content to those giants’ individual investors. And it launched a brand new service tied to 401k plans, which in less than a year has signed up more than a dozen major employers. Meantime, she closed her latest $28 million venture round, bringing her total funding to more than $73 million.

Alexa von Tobel

Mike Patterson has never been wary of going first. In the Navy, he helped plan the military’s first drone-enabled strikes (back then the drones themselves couldn’t carry missiles). He left the Navy shortly before September 11, 2001, but returned to the military briefly to assist in retargeting the drones after the terrorist attacks. After shifting to finance-his first gig was in private equity at Goldman Sachs—Patterson co-founded in 2007 Highbridge Principal Strategies, an offshoot of the JPMorgan-owned multi-strategy hedge fund, where he launched one of the first funds focused on direct lending. His timing was perfect: within a year, the credit crunch hit and companies came knocking; now, with $7 billion in his funds—mostly made up of loans to distressed low-profile, mid-sized companies—Patterson has become a go-to guy for companies in trouble, or, as Patterson puts it, “need help with complicated problems." (He won’t say which, but you have heard of some.) The loans are risky, but Patterson has never a default, and has produced an annual return of 13%, far better than most hedge funds in the same period. Along with his loan fund, Patterson is also responsible for co-heading Highbridge’s entire $19 billion debt investment division. Patterson is passionate about helping fellow veterans. When JPMorgan wanted to do more to assist vets two years ago, Patterson helped develop a hiring program for the bank.

Michael Patterson

Once named Britain’s youngest dame, MacArthur broke world records at age 28 in a 71-day, death-defying solo sail around the globe. After witnessing abandoned fishing villages—their resources depleted by whaling—she turned her focus toward global resource constraints, promoting the “circular economy” movement, in which products, buildings, and the like are designed with reuse in mind. She’s pulled in many big corporate giants, including Cisco and Unilever, to her cause.

Ellen MacArthur

The self-styled social media marketer has his share of haters for his brash manner, but before you roll your eyes, consider that he’s now on his third successful act: First he built his father’s brick-and-mortar New Jersey wine shop into a $45 million business by bringing it online and creating Wine Library TV, the oddly viral wine-tasting web show. Its success made him a social media marketing guru—which then led to a 10-book deal with HarperStudio. Now he’s focused on VaynerMedia, a digital agency he launched in 2009 that advises the likes of GE and PepsiCo and has grown to nearly 500 employees. Vaynerchuk, an early investor in Twitter and Uber, has also launched a VC fund with Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross to invest in startups like Birchbox and Medium. @GaryVee may be loud, but his influence is real, and he isn’t going away.