Sophia Amoruso

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.