40 Under 40

40 under 40

Fortune Editors

Welcome to Fortune’s 2019 40 Under 40, our annual selection of the most influential young people in business. Read on to meet these disruptors, innovators, rebels, and artists—and prepare to be inspired. Click here to view past years' lists: <a href="https://fortune.com/40-under-40/2018/">2018</a> | <a href="https://fortune.com/40-under-40/2017/">2017</a> | <a href="https://fortune.com/40-under-40/2016/">2016</a> | <a href="https://fortune.com/40-under-40/2015/">2015</a> | <a href="https://fortune.com/40-under-40/2014/">2014</a>. <a href="http://fortune.com/the-ledger-40-under-40/">Click here to read The Ledger 40 Under 40 list.</a>

Industry: Tech 
 
Before you say, “Hey Alexa,” say hello to Alison. A former journalist, Atwell is now a voice user interface (VUI) designer who is in charge of “training” Alexa and teaching her new skills. Though she’s certainly paving the way in technology, Atwell actually grew up on a nature preserve in northern Spokane, Wash. She spends as much time as she can outdoors and prefers to keep her own home a low-tech zone (she’s even gone without home Internet for years at a time). At Amazon, she helps companies big and small build products from the ground up, all starting with the concept of sharing information and tailoring Alexa’s responses to their customers. She’s worked with Disney, Best Buy, and companies like Sony Entertainment on voice-activated games like Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Rather than creating “magic words” for Alexa to respond to, Atwell says her goal is to facilitate a more natural interaction between Alexa and the user by helping Amazon’s voice-activated device understand how real people converse.

Alison Atwell

Industry: Tech 
 
As the vice president of artificial intelligence software and research at semiconductor giant Intel, Bansal has a lot on his plate. With Nvidia’s graphics chips becoming popular as a way to power deep-learning tasks as well as a new breed of A.I. chip startups emerging, Bansal is charged with keeping Intel ahead of the curve. His team of nearly 100 workers, scattered throughout the U.S., Israel, and Poland, work on A.I. technologies like reinforcement learning and natural-language processing, all intended to help keep Intel’s silicon chips working swimmingly with the latest A.I. software. One of Intel’s key A.I. projects involves specialized computer chips developed by Nervana, the startup cofounded by Bansal and acquired by the chip giant in 2016 in a deal reportedly worth over $350 million. The company revealed new details about the chips at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, whetting the appetite of investors looking for Intel’s next big breakthrough.

Arjun Bansal

Industry: Food 
 
A growing number of Americans are turning their backs on sugary soft drinks as they seek out healthier, more natural fare. That’s meant that some of the most established consumer giants have had to rethink what it means to be a soda company. Over at PepsiCo, Bartning is key in answering that existential question. In 2018 the five-year PepsiCo veteran, who has worked on iconic global brands like Levi’s, Visa, and NASCAR, led the launch of Bubly—a move intended to disrupt the sparkling water space. In less than a year, Bubly grew to more than $100 million in sales, quickly becoming one of the biggest names in the category. PepsiCo has given Bartning license to make big moves. She and her team launched a TV campaign during the Academy Awards and followed that up during the Super Bowl with ads featuring singer Michael Bublé.

Marisa Bartning

Industry: Tech 
 
Just 10% of the world’s venture capital–backed startups worth $1 billion had a female founder as of last year. Bose, the 27-year-old cofounder of fashion platform Zilingo, is set to join that too-exclusive club. Along with onetime neighbor and current CTO Dhruv Kapoor, Bose launched the four-year-old Singapore-based startup after visiting Bangkok’s Chatuchak market and realizing its merchants had no easy way to sell their goods online. What started as an aggregator of small fashion retailers has since expanded into business-to-business offerings, such as supply-chain tools, and has tapped into Southeast Asia’s booming Internet connectivity and smartphone adoption. Its latest round of funding in February—led by Sequoia Capital and Temasek Holdings and raising $226 million—valued the firm with 600 employees across eight countries at $970 million, putting it within a rounding error of unicornship.

Ankiti Bose

Industry: Retail 
 
Allbirds founders Brown, a former professional soccer player, and Zwillinger, a clean-tech engineer, are on a mission to change the world's carbon footprint, one cushiony pair of shoes at a time. The duo emphasize the sustainability of the product, constructed from natural materials like merino wool and eucalyptus fiber. They want the larger shoe industry, with its polluting and wasteful manufacturing processes, to follow their lead. Allbirds was profitable in its first year of operation, and three years later it has an estimated value of $1.4 billion. Its most recent $50 million round of funding paves the way for more retail locations and a launch in China.

Tim Brown and Joey Zwillinger

Industry: A.I. 
 
For all the hype about artificial intelligence and its potential for breakthroughs in areas like medical treatment and self-driving cars, there’s a potential dark side too. Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, is one of the most prominent figures to highlight the problem of algorithmic and A.I. bias for the public. She was the lead author of the landmark “Gender Shades” study, which led Microsoft and IBM to improve their facial-recognition technologies to better analyze the faces of darker-skinned women. She continued her work this year, publishing a study about biases within Amazon’s facial-scanning technology, which has prompted heavy pushback from the online retail giant. Additionally, Buolamwini has appeared before Congress, informing lawmakers about the potential problems the tech could pose for the criminal justice system.

Joy Buolamwini

Industry: Politics 
 
Young, handsome, openly gay, a Rhodes scholar and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan—the man they call Mayor Pete is a political unicorn who has pockets of the Democratic Party buzzing with excitement. Yet it’s not just his impressive CV and millennial-friendly appeal that’s seen Buttigieg transform, seemingly overnight, from mayor of a midsize Midwestern city into a player in national politics. A skilled orator who can command a room of any size, he comes across as articulate and genu inely accessible. How will he fare in a crowded field? Supporters say Buttigieg offers a unique blend that could pave the way forward; he’s a self-described “democratic capitalist” who embraces ideas like a single-payer health care system and the Green New Deal. Buttigieg told Fortune that his passion for “big ideas and deep moral questions” comes from his father, Joseph, a literary scholar who worked as a professor at the University of Notre Dame (not far from Buttigieg’s hometown of South Bend, Ind., where he now serves as mayor). “[My father] believed that the importance of ideas was the effect that they had in the real world and taught me the power of putting ideas into action.”

Pete Buttigieg

Industry: Entertainment 
 
On June 5, Peloton confidentially filed for an IPO, which caps off an 18-month period that saw the launch of its treadmill and a bevy of hires to build out its “studio” content. The luxury exercise bike, which allows the user to stream a constant supply of high-energy fitness classes, retails for more than $2,000 and has made enough of a cultural statement to have its own parody Twitter account. Cortese, as COO and cofounder, has his hands in everything from product design to the supply chain to customer satisfaction. Just remember: It's not just about the bike. At Peloton, it’s about an at-home boutique fitness experience, a dynamic community of riders and coaches, and a well of content that never runs dry. Okay—and the bike.

Tom Cortese

Industry: Finance 
 
Dubugras and his cofounder, Pedro Franceschi, entered the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator with one startup idea (an augmented-reality company) and came out with a totally different one: fintech company Brex. Providing interest-free credit cards primarily to well-funded startups that lack enough of a revenue stream to get approved by bigger banks—a problem the founding duo (and Stanford dropouts) experienced firsthand, along with many of their Y Combinator peers—Brex has since become one of the fastest-growing private companies around. After reaching unicorn status just a few months after officially launching, Brex in June announced new funding led by Kleiner Perkins that more than doubles its valuation, to $2.6 billion. It’s an audacious second act for the young cofounders, both Brazilian natives who immigrated to the U.S. after selling their first startup, a payments venture called Pagar.me, in 2016. Brex, which monitors its card members’ bank accounts in exchange for offering them upfront credit, has already expanded to serve e-commerce and life science companies and hopes to move into other markets as well.

Henrique Dubugras

Industry: Entertainment 
 
Johanna Faries heads Activision Blizzard’s second major e-sports league, built around Call of Duty, a mega-popular first-person-shooter video game. To understand Call of Duty’s relevance: Activision boasted in a press release at the start of the year the game has “generated more revenue than the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the box office, and double that of the cumulative box office of Star Wars.” The new league is set to debut next year, with franchises in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City, Paris, and Toronto already announced. Before joining the gaming giant, Faries, a Harvard University alumnus, spent more than a decade at the National Football League, where she focused on business and fan development.

Johanna Faries

Industry: Work 
 
They are Olympic medalists, champions, and world-record holders. But as Nike-sponsored athletes, Alysia Montaño, Allyson Felix, and Phoebe Wright are also mothers who risked their reputations and legal action by revealing the ugly truth about women and sports: If you get pregnant, your sponsors are legally allowed to stop paying you. Montaño’s path to activism began when she, along with Wright, cooperated with a story in the New York Times this year that laid the facts bare. Felix followed with an op-ed of her own, triggering an outcry that forced the apparel maker to announce it would end financial penalties for pregnant athletes. Montaño talked to the Times off the record for almost two years before she just did it: “There was the nondisclosure agreement, but I knew the conversation could open doors in terms of equality and maternal health,” she says.

Allyson Felix, Alysia Montaño, and Phoebe Wright

Industry: Health 
 
Modern Health, a mental health startup from Y Combinator alums Friedensohn and Johnson, is just getting started, but the founders are confident that within a few years their service will be a check-the-box necessity for companies that tout their work/life balance credentials. The company offers holistic “emotional health services” to corporations, from counseling to career coaching, meditation apps, and other services online. They just completed a $9 million round of Series A funding, with investments from Kleiner Perkins and Jared Leto (who heard about their work at Y Combinator and invited them backstage at a concert where he was performing his Thirty Seconds From Mars song about depression, “Rescue Me”). Friedensohn comes from the world of health care startups and management consulting (with a side of CorePower Yoga instruction), and Johnson has a degree in neurobiology and did neuroscience research at UCSF. The combo leaves them poised to excel as millennials move into management and the stigma around talking about mental health issues in the workplace fades.

Alyson Friedensohn and Erica Johnson

Industry: Work 
 
The millennial-pink walls and tonal upholstery at The Wing’s woman-centric coworking spaces/social clubs may be dismissed by some as just aesthetics, but in fact every detail was chosen to make women comfortable: custom furniture designed to fit the average woman’s frame; colors proven to increase concentration and creativity. The all-woman leadership team, including cofounders Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan and CFO Diedra Nelson, oversees an empire that is expanding faster than WeWork or SoulCycle at this stage in its history. The original location opened in October 2016; by this fall The Wing will have 10 outposts, including its first international space, in London. The team has raised more than $117 million in two years, and The Wing is close to hitting 10,000 members. Meanwhile, connections between members are sparking ideas in all arenas—political campaigns have been conceived, magazines and startups launched, and a startup accelerator event has funded an initial group of 10 finalists. All this and a coworking space free of mansplainers? No wonder women are signing up.

Audrey Gelman, Lauren Kassan, and Diedra Nelson

Industry: A.I. 
 
As one of the youngest and most respected A.I. researchers in the world, Ian Goodfellow has kept busy pushing the frontiers of deep learning. Having studied under some of the leading deep-learning practitioners like Yoshua Bengio and Andrew Ng, Goodfellow’s expertise involves neural networks, the A.I. software responsible for breakthroughs in computers learning how to recognize objects in photos and understanding language. Goodfellow’s creation of so-called generative adversarial networks (GANs) has enabled researchers to create realistic-looking but entirely computer-generated photos of people’s faces. Although his techniques have allowed the creation of controversial “deepfake” videos, they’ve also paved the way for advanced A.I. that can create more realistic sounding audio voices, among other tasks. Apple recently took notice of Goodfellow’s work and hired him to be the iPhone maker’s director of machine learning in the company’s special projects group. He was previously a star senior staff research scientist at Google and researcher at the high-profile nonprofit OpenAI.

Ian Goodfellow

Industry: Health 
 
This Ivy League–trained M&amp;A lawyer turned venture capital investor bet on legal marijuana before it was in vogue, an early move that has paid off handsomely. After taking over as CEO in spring 2016, Gorenstein quickly rebranded the Canadian cannabis company (then known as PharmaCan) and last year oversaw the debut of Cronos’s stock on the Toronto Stock Exchange, as well as the Nasdaq through a secondary listing—making it the first cannabis stock to trade on a U.S. stock exchange. That’s helped make Cronos one of the most valuable publicly traded cannabis companies, with a market cap of $5.8 billion; its stock has returned some 9,800% under Gorenstein’s leadership. While a federal marijuana ban restricts Cronos’s ability to operate in the U.S., it received a major American stamp of approval in December in the form of a $1.8 billion investment from tobacco giant (and Marlboro maker) Altria—which now owns 45% of Cronos. The partnership could yield new products such as cannabis vaporizers.

Mike Gorenstein

Industry: Work 
 
Under Kate Gulliver’s expert eye, culture has become queen at the home-goods e-tailer. Ever since she joined as global head of talent and HR in May 2016, ranks of full-time employees have doubled to over 13,300—4,000 of whom joined last year alone. The influx of talent helped the company post record revenue last year—40% year-over-year net revenue growth in the fourth quarter—and find its way into the Fortune 500. But in the mad dash to staff up, Gulliver has achieved a level of inclusion far beyond anything Silicon Valley has been capable of thus far: Roughly half of Wayfair’s full-time employees are women, and she’s making sure talented non-white-male candidates can find their way into senior and leadership roles. To get there, Gulliver’s team has developed an in-house, data-driven program that has certified some 2,000 employees in non-biased behavioral interviewing skills, as well as an inclusive career-development curriculum.

Kate Gulliver

Industry: Tech 
 
Cal Henderson has a talent: building wildly valuable “dumb side projects” out of his true passion, gaming companies. In 2002, Henderson was so fascinated by an online gaming startup known as Ludicorp that he helped now Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield build image-sharing platform Flickr to keep the lights on. While the Ludicorp game that inspired Flickr didn’t work out, Flickr sold to Yahoo for $35 million. Fast-forward to 2014: Henderson and Butterfield programmed yet another game that failed to take off but had given birth to a successful internal messaging system. That system became Slack, the wildly popular workplace communication tool that makes users feel as if they are part of something more than the daily grind. Slack now has 1,500 employees and over 10 million active users, and it just went public via a well-received direct listing on the NYSE. One major innovation Slack users can trace back to Henderson: Slack’s thousands of emojis. Will he deliver a third transformative product? Perhaps. Henderson is still an active member of Slack’s internal “Games We Won’t Finish” chat channel. 
 
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Cal Henderson

Industry: Health 
 
Mei Mei Hu doesn’t have the typical pedigree of a pharmaceutical executive—especially not one who has embarked on the lofty, risk-filled quest of developing an Alzheimer’s vaccine. She’s not a scientist by training but rather a former McKinsey consultant with a Harvard Law degree who caught the drug development bug. Hu is also a female executive in an industry in which the C-suite is a notorious boys’ club. (Her mother is a renowned scientist and biotech entrepreneur, so maybe it runs in the family.) But Hu’s outsider sensibilities may prove a major asset as her company, United Neuroscience, seeks to succeed where countless other drug companies have failed. The firm is focusing on Alzheimer’s prevention rather than post hoc treatment—and if it succeeds, that could validate Hu’s innovative notion that vaccines can be just as effective for chronic diseases as they are for infectious ones.

Mei Mei Hu

Industry: Finance 
 
As an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, Omer Ismail didn’t even take a finance course (rather, he focused much of his efforts on editing the Ivy League institution’s student newspaper, The Dartmouth). Still, his smarts got him in the door at Wall Street’s most prestigious investment bank, where—a slight detour to earn his MBA at Harvard Business School aside—he worked his way up to managing director on Goldman Sachs’ private equity investment team. Ismail’s stature at the firm grew to the point that when Goldman was considering a new venture into the consumer banking space in 2014, he was handpicked to lead a strategy team exploring the possibility. When Goldman eventually did decide to go Main Street, Ismail became the division’s first employee and COO, charged with leading the bank’s foray into an entirely new business segment. Today, as a partner at the firm, Ismail oversees the entire U.S. consumer business. That includes personal banking arm Marcus by Goldman Sachs, which now has more than 4 million customers, as well as the Apple Card—Goldman’s headline-grabbing collaboration with the Silicon Valley behemoth that, like everything Apple does, promises to shift consumer finance paradigms.

Omer Ismail

Industry: Food 
 
In 2007, fresh out of undergrad, Georgetown University classmates Jonathan Neman, Nathaniel Ru, and Nicolas Jammet decided they were sick of the long-held undergrad tradition of scarfing down pizza for most meals and sought to open a salad shop. They started a salad revolution: Since then, Sweetgreen has grown like weeds, with 95 stand-alone restaurants and more than 120 on-demand pickup “outposts” in offices and coworking spaces across the country. Last year, the company began putting some of its ingredients—cherry tomatoes, goat cheese, beets—on the blockchain. Their aim? To track which factors contribute to flavor and monitor the whereabouts of their goods as they move from farm to store, upping the ante for how fast-casual restaurants can integrate buzzy technology into their operations. Last year, Sweetgreen announced $200 million in new funding, which boosted its valuation to more than $1 billion.

Nicolas Jammet, Jonathan Neman, Nathaniel Ru

Industry: Retail 
 
That's a lot of lip kits! Kylie Cosmetics launched in 2015 with one product, its signature Kylie Lip Kit, and has since expanded to a full makeup line and last month debuted Kylie Skin. Kylie Cosmetics and Jenner herself have a combined 150 million followers on Instagram, a built-in target audience for 100% of their marketing efforts: beauty shots, how-to videos, announcements of capsule “collab” collections with celebrities, including her famous siblings in the Kardashian/Jenner clan. But Kylie Cosmetics, which had spent its young life entirely online, launched its biggest collab late last year, when it began selling in Ulta Beauty, which has almost 1,200 stores nationally. The beauty chain said it reported better than expected 9.4% year-over-year same-store sales growth in the fourth quarter, thanks in part to Jenner’s line.

Kylie Jenner

Industry: Finance 
 
Kristo Käärmann cofounded TransferWise with fellow Estonian-in-London transplant Taavet Hinrikus, the first employee at Skype, after realizing how much money financial firms make on cross-border money transfers. With a relentless fee-cutting approach, the nine-year-old firm has risen to become one of the highest valued private fintech startups in Europe. After a new round of fundraising in May, investors pegged the company’s worth at $3.5 billion. The numbers speak for themselves: Whereas the global average cost of ferrying $200 internationally was 7% in the first quarter of the year, as measured by the World Bank, TransferWise on average charged just 1%. (For any sum sent abroad during that period, Transferwise’s average fee was even lower: 0.63%.) The operation has 5 million customers and moves $5 billion every month.

Kristo Käärmann

Industry: Finance 
 
As head of investment research at the world’s largest hedge fund, Karen Karniol-Tambour has reached an enviably influential position in the world of finance—and all before turning 35. A graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Karniol-Tambour joined Bridgewater Associates straight out of college in 2006; 13 years later, she’s reportedly one of the few people fully in the know when it comes to the Ray Dalio–led firm’s thinking on its investments. In her time at Bridgewater, Karniol-Tambour has established herself as an expert on global markets. That expertise has helped deliver results for Dalio and his firm over the past decade; Bridgewater's flagship Pure Alpha fund outperformed most of its competitors by posting gains of 14.6% net of fees in 2018, which was widely considered a difficult year for hedge funds at large. Karniol-Tambour’s future looks exceptionally bright; her mentor, Bridgewater co-CIO Bob Prince, has said he expects her to succeed him one day.

Karen Karniol-Tambour

Industry: Food 
 
With a background in organic chemistry, Laura Kliman spent time in the pharmaceutical industry researching cancer and Alzheimer’s drugs before switching to the biofuels sector. But she ended up working in restaurants after becoming disillusioned with the impact she was having on the world. That’s how Kliman happened to be working as a pastry chef in Chicago in 2016 when she heard about Impossible Foods on NPR. Intrigued by the plant-based meat company’s combination of culinary arts, hard-core science, and environmental mission, she landed a job there as a flavor scientist tasked with minimizing the off-flavors that come with using plant-based ingredients to replicate the taste and texture of meat. Her research led to the Impossible Burger 2.0, which launched in January. Now as a key leader on the R&amp;D team, Kliman is working on new products like the Impossible Sausage. If she’s successful, she’ll have convinced a population of meat eaters that the company’s plant-based alternative is not just better for their health and planet but also just as good as the real things.

Laura Kliman

Industry: Retail 
 
Since shipping their first soon-to-be-iconic minimalist suitcase in early 2016, Away’s Jen Rubio and Steph Korey have sold more than a million bags; they posted $150 million in sales in 2018 and expect to double that this year. By selling direct to consumers, the company’s products cost less than half of those from competitors like Tumi; by wallpapering social media with influencers toting the sleek suitcases, Away has locked down its spot as visual shorthand for the smart modern traveler. (Take note of your sponsored posts on Instagram; even ads for Clear airport security clearance show a young woman rushing through an airport with an Away carry-on.) Away’s latest funding round raised $100 million, and its resulting valuation vaulted to $1.4 billion, landing the company unicorn status and setting up its continued expansion. Rubio and Korey have opened six stores in the U.S. and one in London so far; they plan to open 50 more over the next three years and continue to add to their product line with apparel, lifestyle, and wellness accessories.

Steph Korey and Jen Rubio

Industry: Politics 
 
Kratsios is President Trump’s nominee for chief technology officer of the U.S. Kratsios got his start studying political science with minors in political economy and Hellenic studies at Princeton University. Then he continued his education under the wing of Peter Thiel, the billionaire contrarian investor and early Trump supporter. Kratsios, who once interned for Sen. Lindsey Graham, hails from the world of venture capital, an industry that concerns itself with the future. Now he is helping the administration think through its policies on the so-called industries of the future, such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and 5G networking.

Michael Kratsios

Industry: Tech 
 
You might not have heard of Liu’s Royole, but the 36-year old’s $5 billion company is the manufacturer of the world’s first foldable phone screen, which it debuted in 2018. The FlexPai, as it is called, was really just a ruse to showcase Royole’s flexible tech. The Shenzhen-based company sells flexible screens and sensors to manufacturers and produces a few products (the aforementioned phone, even some tech-embedded clothing) to demonstrate its applications. Liu, a Tsinghua University postgraduate with a Ph.D. from Stanford, founded Royole in 2012 after leaving his role as a research scientist at IBM’s global R&amp;D center. In 2014, Royole produced the world’s thinnest flexible display. At just 0.01 millimeter, it achieved Liu’s dream: a screen that he could roll up and carry in his pocket.

Bill Liu

Industry: Tech 
 
Makarim’s roughly $10 billion company takes its name from ojek, the Bahasa Indonesian word for motorcycle taxis, millions of which swarm through cities like Jakarta. In 2010, at age 26, Makarim created Go-Jek as a way to connect those buzzing drivers with passengers. He decked out 20 drivers in Go-Jek’s now signature green jacket and used dispatcher equipment to direct them all. When the company was still a fledgling, Makarim’s insight was to encourage his drivers to take on odd jobs during nonpeak hours. Drivers began delivering food and parcels. When the official app launched in 2015, after Makarim returned from studying for an MBA at Harvard Business School, Go-Send and Go-Food sat alongside Go-Ride as mainstays of Go-Jek’s business. Makarim has added many more services to Go-Jek (yes, there’s even a Go-Massage) while the company’s payment features and third-party credit services have introduced finance options to Indonesia’s millions of unbanked citizens.

Nadiem Makarim

Industry: Health 
 
If you know anything about the gene-editing field, chances are you’ve heard of Trevor Martin. The 30-year-old wunderkind has amassed the sort of résumé you usually expect from decades-long veterans of the life sciences. But Martin cofounded his gene-editing company Mammoth at the ripe old age of 28—and he won the support of none other than Jennifer Doudna, one of Crispr’s original inventors, to help him do it. Crispr is widely recognized for its potential to treat diseases ranging from cancer to inherited disorders by slicing and dicing away aberrant code in human DNA. Martin’s company, however, wants to explore how the technology can be used to diagnose diseases in the first place—in many ways a genetic search engine. Major names like Apple CEO Tim Cook and former Grail CEO Jeff Huber have invested in Martin’s cause.

Trevor Martin

Industry: Transportation 
 
She's bagged takeout schnitzels and cold-called 200-plus restaurants in her mission to build out Uber Eats, a path that eventually led her to broker major deals with Starbucks and McDonald’s. Uber Eats is on pace to be the largest food-delivery company outside China, and Meyerdirk is a big reason for that. She's scaled up the Eats team, which works with over 220,000 restaurant partners in more than 500 cities in 35 countries across six continents. As detailed in Uber's IPO filing this spring, her business notched $1.5 billion in revenue during 2018, up 149% from the year prior. Though Meyerdirk started out in investment banking, Uber wasn't such a U-turn. “Two close friends worked at Uber,” she says. “One has known my husband since college, and the other was a former colleague. When two people you trust agree, it probably makes sense to listen.”

Liz Meyerdirk

Industry: Tech 
 
Inspired by the success of runaway podcast sensation Serial and a few other shows back in 2015, Michael Mignano became obsessed with the medium. A first attempt at starting his own podcast flopped when he encountered the complicated process of recording, editing, and uploading shows, not to mention selling ads. So he pivoted and with Nir Zicherman formed a startup called Anchor that would help would-be podcasters get off the ground. After a career in web development and software, Mignano persuaded his old bosses at Aviary and Adobe to put up some of the backing. Within a few years Anchor drew the attention of streaming-music giant Spotify, which was trying to break into the podcast market. In a deal in February, Mignano and Zicherman sold Anchor to Spotify for more than $150 million. 
 
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Michael Mignano

Industry: Tech 
 
Pei—born in China and raised in Sweden—has spent his entire professional life in the smartphone industry. The 29-year-old, who dropped out of the Stockholm School of Economics, joined Nokia in 2010 before jumping to Chinese phonemaker Meizu in 2011 and then Oppo in 2012. Pei cofounded OnePlus with Oppo vice president Pete Lau in 2013. The company is now more popular in India than Apple, with 33% of the premium smartphone market—slightly less share than Samsung’s. When the first OnePlus phone launched in 2014, sales were entirely online and customers were by invite only, but the company has since opened offline stores and ditched the invite-only marketing ploy, enabling sales to balloon. Though based in China, OnePlus now sells phones in 38 regions around the world, including the U.S. The company’s latest model, the OnePlus 7, raised $144 million in sales within one minute of its China release.

Carl Pei

Industry: Entertainment 
 
Her mission, she says, is to “normalize women in football,” a lofty goal for one of the most male-dominated industries in the world. And yet Samantha Rapoport has achieved what few have even dreamed of: a winning streak of inclusion that has turned NFL owners, coaches, and executives into gender advocates. For the past three years, Rapoport has hosted a program that matches high-potential female candidates with team owners, general managers, and coaches. Now some 42 women, 59% of whom are women of color, are thriving in coaching, scouting, and football operations jobs at the professional or college levels. Twenty-five of the 32 NFL teams participate. “The societal implications are profound,” she says. “I’m so grateful for the chance to do this work. You can’t argue that women can’t be a part of football or anything else.”

Sam Rapoport

Industry: Health 
 
Conversations about drone technology fall across a wide spectrum. The devices are both tools of lethal warfare and innocuous deliverers of consumer goods. But Rinaudo and his company, Zipline, are using them for a far more humanitarian goal: delivering essential medical products in some of the world’s poorest nations. Rinaudo told the audience at Fortune’s recent Brainstorm Health conference that Rwanda is now delivering 60% of its national blood supply outside of the capital city of Kigali via Zipline drones (the figure has since risen to about 70%)—and many of the beneficiaries are new mothers suffering from hemorrhage. What’s more, Zipline’s technology is precise enough to literally drop off medical supplies to individual plots with no need to land, take off, or generally traverse precipitous terrain. It’s a 21st-century solution to medicine’s “last mile” problem—i.e., actually getting the product to the people. Zipline recently raised $190 million at a reported $1.2 billion valuation. Rinaudo says the cash infusion will be used in part to help set up some 2,600 health care delivery hubs in Rwanda and Ghana by the end of the year.

Keller Rinaudo

Industry: Food 
 
The cost of food waste globally is a massive $2.6 trillion a year, with about a third of the food that U.S. farmers produce ending up in landfills. James Rogers is on a mission to change that. In 2012, the materials scientist got a grant from the Gates Foundation to start Apeel, which is attempting to prolong the shelf life of produce. The startup makes an edible substance out of plant material, which suppliers apply to the outside of fruits and vegetables to slow the rate of water loss and keep oxygen from getting in—two of the key causes of spoilage. Rogers’s idea has attracted big-name investors, raising more than $110 million from firms including Andreessen Horowitz and hedge fund Viking Global Investors. Apeel avocados, the company’s first launch, have twice the shelf life of the conventional equivalent and are now sold in the likes of Costco and Kroger. Next up: Apeel avocados in Europe this fall and Apeel asparagus and limes this summer.

James Rogers

Industry: Transportation 
 
Even amid curvaceous new BMWs and Audis, it was Scaringe and his startup electric-car maker, Rivian, that grabbed the most attention at the Los Angeles Auto Show in November. In a theatrical nighttime unveiling at L.A.’s Griffith Observatory, CEO and founder Scaringe debuted his gleaming silver creation, 10 years in the making. The R1T electric pickup truck boasts more battery range than anything from Tesla, yet it’s fast enough to keep up with the zippiest sports cars (it goes from zero to 60 mph in three seconds). With black hair and black glasses, Scaringe is sometimes compared to Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent. But Scaringe has long been fascinated with the car industry, from when, as a boy growing up in Florida, he helped a neighbor rebuild Porsches to later working at MIT’s Sloan Automotive lab while earning a master’s and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Now with $1 billion in backing from Ford and Amazon, he’s ready to take on that other genius electric-car-making executive sometimes compared to a comic book hero (or villain)—Elon Musk.

R.J. Scaringe

Industry: Tech 
 
When Parisa Tabriz joined Google full-time in 2007, she took the title “security princess” rather than the considerably more mundane “software engineer.” A 2016 promotion lent her a new one: “browser boss.” Tabriz is responsible for Google Chrome, a product that serves as a gateway to the web for billions of people. In addition to keeping Chrome safe and secure, Tabriz manages Google’s “project zero” team, a squad of elite hackers tasked with rooting out vulnerabilities in tech products. (You can read more about the group in this <a href="http://fortune.com/2017/06/23/google-project-zero-hacker-swat-team/">2017 Fortune feature</a>.) Tabriz has been a force for social good as well, mentoring teens, women, and other underrepresented groups in a field often dominated by men. Last year she cofounded OURSA, a security conference designed to counter the diversity imbalance among speakers at other industry confabs such as the RSA Conference.

Parisa Tabriz

Industry: Finance 
 
The 31-year-old Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs alumnus is helping to bring the tech revolution to real estate, an industry notoriously slow to change and stuck in its ways. Deploying a model somewhat akin to crowdfunding, Cadre allows individual investors to pitch in on commercial real estate deals for as little as $50,000. But unlike traditional real estate investment funds—in which investors are at the mercy of fund managers who make decisions on their behalf—Cadre’s platform allows them to pick and choose the specific properties and deals they want a part of. Cadre has drawn a fair amount of scrutiny for its ties to Jared Kushner, who cofounded the company alongside Williams and owns a stake in the company valued at up to $50 million. Recent reports claiming Cadre has received $90 million in funding through secretive offshore vehicles have raised conflict-of-interest questions on Kushner’s part, given his high-ranking position in the Trump administration. But with Cadre approaching a $1 billion valuation that would make it the latest “proptech” unicorn, and Williams having lured investors like Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Jordan to his cause, this millennial is certainly one to watch.

Ryan Williams

Industry: Work 
 
If it were up to her, Jessie Wisdom would nudge everyone toward happier, more productive lives. She’s the social-scientist cofounder of Humu, along with Wayne Crosby and Laszlo Bock, the former SVP of people operations at Google. The venture-backed technology firm has invented a behavioral “nudge engine” platform that is being used by companies to help boost productivity, innovation, and retention in the workplace. But unlike the hoodie-wearing keyboard jockeys of older venture cycles, Wisdom grounds her philosophy in empathy. “Technology’s come a long way—and can do a lot of things—but it can’t feel,” she says. Wisdom has a Ph.D. in behavioral decision research from Carnegie Mellon and has assembled a team that includes organizational psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists. “When we make product decisions, we make sure that the whole team is considering the complexity of what it really feels like to be a person at work on any given day.”

Jessie Wisdom

Industry: Finance 
 
He may have started as Ken Griffin’s protégé, but the Beijing-born Zhao has earned his own spot at the top of the finance world. After completing a doctorate in statistics from UC–Berkeley, Zhao ascended from quant research to overseeing the core market-making business for Citadel Securities, the computerized trading firm founded by Griffin (but run separately from his $30 billion Citadel hedge fund). Zhao proved so good at growing its products and revenue that when the firm decided it needed a new CEO in 2017, he was the obvious choice. Under Zhao, Citadel Securities has not only widened its lead as the top market maker in U.S. stocks—thanks in part to the petabytes of data the firm collects to inform its trading—but also expanded into the hot arena of initial public offerings. It began to serve as a designated market maker for IPOs a few years ago; last year, Spotify picked Zhao’s firm to oversee the music streaming service’s first-of-its-kind “direct listing” on the NYSE, bypassing traditional IPO underwriters. Zhao, who became a U.S. citizen in 2016, has since turned Citadel Securities into the go-to firm for the pioneering practice: It managed Slack’s highly anticipated direct listing in June, after serving in the same role for Uber’s traditional IPO this spring.

Peng Zhao

Fortune’s 2019 40 Under 40, our annual selection of the most influential young people in business.