40 Under 40

40 under 40

Welcome to Fortune’s 2016 40 Under 40, our annual ranking of the most influential young people in business—for the second time, 100 percent brand new. Read on to meet these disruptors, innovators, rebels and artists—and prepare to be inspired. <a href="http://fortune.com/2016/09/22/40-under-40-2016-intro/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Read more about the list here</a>.

On Sept. 1, Bechtel took the helm of his family’s century-old dynasty, one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the world (heard of the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel?). The fifth-generation leader now commands one of the biggest privately held companies in the U.S., with $40 billion in 2015 revenue. It falls on Bechtel, formerly president and COO, to steer the company through challenges like a collapse in commodities prices and new competition from Chinese contractors. He’s been preparing for the role since 2010, but he has a lifetime of experiences to draw from: His first stint at a Bechtel construction camp was when he lived in a trailer in the jungle in Borneo while his father worked as a supervisor on a liquefied-natural-gas plant. He was 3 years old. 
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Read more about Bechtel in "<a href="http://fortune.com/bechtel-construction/" target="_blank">Meet the Private Company That Has Changed the Face of the World</a>."

Brendan Bechtel

Ye runs a $42-billion-a-year oil business in China, (<a href="http://beta.fortune.com/global500/cefc-china-energy-229" target="_blank">No. 229</a> on the Fortune Global 500), yet few in China know much about the mysterious tycoon or the firm he created, CEFC. Ye bought a collection of oil ­assets in his twenties and ­secured loans from state-owned banks to expand abroad, a privilege for a private company. CEFC has oil agreements in Kazakhstan, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Chad and has gone into ventures with state-owned giants to transport oil to China, making him a rare powerful private player aligned with the Chinese government.

Ye Jianming

The Minnesota native earned Hillary Clinton’s trust as an ­adviser to her 2008 presidential campaign, and at the State Department, where he was the youngest-ever director of policy planning. After she left, Sullivan stayed on to see through the Iranian nuclear deal he was instrumental in launching. He rejoined ­Clinton for her second run, expanding his foreign-policy portfolio to include domestic affairs and outreach to businesses. If Clinton wins, look for Sullivan to take a senior White House post, possibly deputy chief of staff.

Jake Sullivan

The boyish maverick sparked outrage by ­challenging France’s ruling Socialist government to ditch cherished welfare-state orthodoxies and embrace wealth creation. He stepped down in August, ­fueling speculation that he’s running for President; tens of thousands have already joined his new movement, En Marche! There are ­doubters aplenty, but Macron is accustomed to breaking the mold: He married his high school teacher, who was 20 years his senior, then made a fortune as a Rothschild banker.

Emmanuel Macron

When the ­German multibillion-dollar enterprise software company tapped Saueressig as its new chief information officer, it made the native of Lobbach, Germany, the youngest-known CIO at a <a href="http://beta.fortune.com/global500/" target="_blank">Fortune Global 500</a> company. ­Saueressig, who ­began coding at 6, started at SAP while still a student and rose quickly up the ladder. Now the millennial CIO—who’s a fan of U2 and The Big Bang Theory—is charged with implementing the ­company’s digital trans­formation strategy from within and shaping IT’s role in that strategy.

Thomas Saueressig

Twilio became Wall Street’s knight in shining armor after a massively successful 2016 IPO, the first and so far only U.S. “unicorn” to brave the public markets this year. A former Amazon Web Services and StubHub engineer, Lawson founded Twilio in 2008 to create a simpler way to add messaging or calls to websites and apps. Now it has almost 31,000 customers, including Salesforce and Uber (which uses it to deliver texts from passengers to drivers); since the IPO, Twilio shares have quadrupled. CEO he most admires: late Intel chief executive Andy Grove.

Jeff Lawson

In March, General Motors showed how important self-driving cars are to the future of the auto industry, shelling out $1 billion to acquire Cruise Automation, a small, yet-to-launch self-driving software startup founded by Vogt and Kan (<a href="http://fortune.com/cruise-automation-general-motors-driverless-cars/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">read more about them here</a>). The deal marked the second billion-dollar exit for CEO Vogt, a robot-­obsessed MIT dropout who competed in two seasons of ­BattleBots. It’s a first for COO Kan, who has entrepreneurship in his blood—his mother and brother have each founded multiple companies.

Daniel Kan, Kyle Vogt

Atlassian, based in ­Sydney, is an anomaly in modern-day techland: The enterprise software firm is 14 years old yet had one of 2015’s most successful IPOs. Cannon-Brookes and Farquhar, who met in college in their native Australia, colead the company, which provides collaboration software to 60,000 customers (Tesla, Amazon, P&amp;G, and Coca-Cola among them). Farquhar heads ­engineering and research; Cannon-Brookes, product design and sales and marketing.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Scott Farquhar

Uber’s efforts in China may have grabbed headlines this year, but back at home the ride-sharing giant has continued to grow, largely thanks to Holt, who was elevated to run the company’s North American operations. A Stanford MBA who worked at Bain and Clorox—where she oversaw Hidden Valley vinaigrettes—Holt joined Uber in 2011 when she was hired to set up the then-fledgling startup’s Washington, D.C., operations: “I love finding solutions to problems and doing whatever it takes to get the best end result.” Quirkiest habit: Falls asleep watching Frasier on her iPad.

Rachel Holt

Ready, who grew up in rural Kentucky and did not know how to use a computer until he got to college, landed at the $46 billion payments giant in 2013 when it acquired the company he ran, Braintree, for $800 million. He’s since been credited for ­turning millennial favorite Venmo into the next billion-dollar payments app. With mobile payments expected to soar, Ready’s task is to help PayPal take on Apple, Google, and Samsung in the mobile wallet wars. Secret to his success: “I’ve always been willing to jump in the deep end of the pool before knowing how to swim.”

Bill Ready

The former ­investment banker runs the $3.2 billion Internet empire built by Barry Diller as an “anti­conglomerate.” His first year as CEO brought the $460 million IPO of Match Group; now the 13-year IAC veteran is seeking ways to spin off the company’s digital businesses, which were restructured in 2016 into six operating units. Next up, the Chicago-area native tries his hand at video site Vimeo, which has more than 280 million monthly viewers: “I look at all that clay and momentum and say, ‘There’s a lot we can do here.’ ” First concert: Bob Dylan, with his dad.

Joey Levin

Smith isn’t your typical tech entrepreneur: His online survey company is based in Provo, Utah, and his cofounders are not fellow techies but include his dad and brother. After bootstrapping for more than a decade, Smith has now raised $220 million in funding. The company’s swanky new offices (ice cream parlor, basketball hoop) might sound right out of Silicon Valley, but unlike many of ­today’s startups, Smith’s is already profitable—and ­expected to go public in the next year or two. Fan of: Diet Mountain Dew.

Ryan Smith

Two decades ago, Gay was playing soccer professionally in Belgium, sporting a bleached-blond hairdo. Today, after climbing the ranks of the business world, he is CEO of Energy Recovery, which makes gear that recycles energy for, among other companies, those in the fracking industry. When he took over in 2015, he became one of the youngest black CEOs of a ­public company and was able to usher in a game-changing deal with oil services giant Schlumberger. As a result his company’s stock has more than quadrupled in value. In the family: His sister is the writer ­Roxane Gay.

Joel Gay

The star of Apple’s annual developers event in June wasn’t CEO Tim Cook or a new device but Saint John, who persuaded the audience of thousands to rap to the Sugar Hill Gang's “Rapper’s Delight.” A former head of music and entertainment marketing at ­PepsiCo, where she inked its $50 million sponsorship deal with ­Beyoncé, Saint John joined Apple in 2014 when the tech giant acquired Beats, for which she led marketing. Since then, she has been charged with making Apple Music into the next big thing—and so far has signed marketing deals with Mary J. Blige and Taylor Swift.

Bozoma Saint John

Katsuyama ­became an instant hero to average Joe ­investors when Michael Lewis’s book Flash Boys portrayed his IEX Group—with its alternative trading platform that adds a split-second speed bump to stock orders—as the antidote to front-running by high-frequency traders. His vision became reality this summer when he won SEC approval and officially launched IEX as a national stock exchange alongside the likes of Nasdaq and NYSE. Overall, despite backlash from Wall Street traditionalists, IEX has raised more than $100 million in funding.

Brad Katsuyama

Posnett headed to Holly­wood after college, but after two years (her biggest role was an extra in Phone Booth, a 2003 Colin Farrell thriller), she decided to move on. It set up her true starring role: ­Posnett has become one of tech’s most prominent dealmakers, leading deals like crafts retailer Etsy’s IPO and Demandware’s $2.8 billion acquisition by Salesforce. “Doing a deal is all about telling a story. And how to tell a story, particularly someone else’s story, is something I learned from acting,” she says. Most admires: Angela Merkel.

Kim Posnett

While at Harvard Business School, Anthony and Hooi Ling bonded over the idea of making taxis safer in their native Southeast Asia (both hail from Malaysia). Since then the pair have built a business reportedly valued at more than $3 billion and operating in over 30 cities. In the past year, Singapore-based Grab has raised more than $1 billion, opened an engineering office in Seattle, and partnered with China’s Didi Chuxing, India’s Ola, and Lyft in the U.S. to serve one another’s customers.

Anthony Tan, Hooi Ling Tan

Launched four years ago, Blue Apron has quickly gone from a novel curiosity to a $2 billion power­house and the leader of the “meal kit” pack. The 4,000-person startup passed its six-year sales target in its second year in business and now sells 8 million boxed meals each month, which adds up to $1 billion in sales. Salzberg attributes the company’s success to logistics and its team of agro-ecologists, who work with hundreds of farms to help them grow foods more sustainably and predictably. First concert: Phish.

Matt Salzberg

When ­McKeever launched Ides Capital last summer, she became the only woman running an activist hedge fund that’s shaking up U.S. companies (<a href="http://fortune.com/2016/09/22/dianne-mckeever-ides-capital-40-under-40/" target="_blank">read more about her here</a>). She’s already winning her first activist fight: In June, Boingo Wireless, provider of Wi-Fi hotspots, reached a settlement with Ides, agreeing to add three new directors—­including the first woman—after Ides criticized its board as “stale, pale, and male.” Boingo’s shares have risen more than 20% since ­McKeever announced the campaign. Hobby: She’s a “hard-core videogamer.”

Dianne McKeever

More than a quarter of the web runs on WordPress’s blogging software. Although the Texas native has built a healthy business out of parent company Automattic—it now has 500 employees and its first ­marketing chief and recently raised $160 million at a $1 billion–plus valuation—he’s focused on the long term, he says. That’s why he’s doing his best to avoid an IPO (for now at least) and continues to run the WordPress Foundation, whose mission is to keep the blogging software freely available to all. Fun fact: He’s a fan of qwerty keyboard ­alternative Dvorak.

Matt Mullenweg

You won’t find video production skills on this French-raised, former eBay strategist’s résumé. Yet Simo heads one of Facebook’s most important features to date, according to her boss, Mark Zuckerberg: live-streaming service Facebook Live. Video has long been huge for Facebook, but Facebook Live started life in 2015 as a promotional tool for celebrities and has evolved into a powerful—and polarizing—spotlight on social crises, capturing several chilling shooting deaths that became news events. Most admires: Bob Iger.

Fidji Simo

Zadeh, the son of Iranian immigrants, got a Ph.D. in bio­engineering but fell in love with product design after learning to use Photoshop. In 2010 he found his way to the then-nascent home-sharing startup, where he joined as the ninth employee. Today “Joebot,” as he’s known around the office, leads product efforts for the company, which hit 100 million users this summer. Up next, Airbnb plans to help guests experience more than just a local roof, and Zadeh’s job as the “conductor” of Airbnb’s apps and website will be more important than ever.

Joe Zadeh

She thought she was going to be a biotech patent IP lawyer, but ­Haurwitz’s love of science propelled her in another direction: partnering with famed biochemistry researcher Jennifer Doudna to cofound Caribou, one of the leading startups pursuing commercial applications of the ­genome-editing tool Crispr. So far Crispr-based research has largely focused on cancer, but the Texas native says Caribou’s gene therapies hold promise for ­modifying the body’s microorganisms to treat other illnesses. Her hobby: knitting.

Rachel Haurwitz

A veteran Googler and Princeton computer ­science grad, Bavor heads the search giant’s ambitious new virtual-reality unit (motto: “VR for everyone”). Reporting directly to Google CEO ­Sundar Pichai, Bavor oversaw this year’s launch of the company’s new VR operating system along with the debut of its own headset, controller, and hardware blueprints for other manufacturers to build on. Now it falls on Bavor to make VR mainstream—and to beat out front-runners like ­Facebook’s Oculus VR and HTC’s Vive.

Clay Bavor

Watts’ mission at STX, an ambitious Hollywood studio founded in 2014, is to build out its various divisions: film, TV, digital, and music. Launching a new entertainment conglomerate is no small feat, but Watts has the ­pedigree—she cut her teeth working on productions with the likes of Beyoncé, Elton John, and Madonna (and her late mother, Tessa Watts, was a lauded record executive and music-video producer). STX is well capitalized, giving Watts $7 billion over the next five years for developing and distributing films alone. ­Admires: Richard Branson.

Sophie Watts

As head of Caterpillar’s analytics team, the ­former Accenture consultant has been tasked with transforming the 91-year-old bulldozer and hydraulic mining shovel­maker into a “digital first,” data-driven company. Her 120-person group has been overhauling internal processes and developing new, customer-facing software services, like a tool that uses sensor-based data to predict when equipment will wear out long ­before it does. The division is also experimenting with drone data to optimize large job sites.

Morgan Vawter

In 2010, when Stein was launching his New York City–based “robo-adviser” startup, plenty of grizzled banking veterans told him he would never reach $5 billion in assets under management. The warnings were “intimidating,” he says, but they didn’t stop him: Betterment now has almost $6 billion in AUM for its 175,000 customers, making it the largest startup in the wealth management industry. In January the 200-person company launched Betterment for Business to help companies manage their employees’ 401(k) plans.

Jon Stein

It’s hard to describe what Tim Ferriss does. Best-selling author? Check. Angel investor? Yup. Chinese kickboxing champion? Yeah, that too. Perhaps the description that best captures Ferriss’ growing influence is one that recently dubbed him the “Oprah of audio.” Not only has his weekly podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show, now reached 80 million downloads, but the self-help guru drives sales of books, teas, sardines, toothpaste and any other product or tool he happens to mention on his uber-popular series. Speaking of Uber, Ferriss was an early investor in the ride-hailing service—and in Facebook, Alibaba, Twitter, Evernote and more—and has been an increasingly sought-after advisor to tech entrepreneurs. His next book, Tools of Titans, comes out in December.

Tim Ferriss

At a recent gig at Google, Adam Grant was asked how to make the search company’s employees more productive and happy. His answer: Just ask them what they want to do. That simple advice from anyone else would probably be dismissed. But Grant is the management consultant of the moment to Silicon Valley and the Fortune 500’s biggest names. His second best-seller, Originals, came out earlier this year. Sheryl Sandberg is a big fan (and the two are now penning a forthcoming book together about resilience). Among some of Grant’s unconventional advice for managers: Don’t recruit star hires or ivy leaguers. They tend not to elevate others, and aren’t as loyal. That and other pieces of advice from Grant are still far from the common wisdom, but if Grant keeps saying it they just might become it.

Adam Grant

Lake has grown online styling service Stitch Fix into a force in the retail world. Customers of the subscription service receive regular “fixes,” or boxes of clothes it curates using a mix of data analytics and human artistry; patrons can either purchase them or send them back. Outside revenue ­estimates for 2015 hover around $250 million, with reportedly less than $50 million in outside funding. This year Stitch Fix hired over 2,000 people and expanded into menswear and women’s footwear. Look for a plus-size offering in 2017. Most admires: Reed Hastings.

Katrina Lake

The creator of the Broadway and pop-culture sensation Hamilton: An American Musical thought it would be a hit only with ­history teachers. How wrong he was: The 2015 show about the life of ­Alexander Hamilton has grossed more than $100 million in ticket sales and become the year’s cultural sen­sation, including a soundtrack that hit the Billboard top 10, Hamilton-themed indoor cycling classes, and a book. That’s on top of the awards: a Grammy, 11 Tonys—oh, and Miranda’s Pulitzer.

Lin-Manuel Miranda

The self-identified anarchist, sailor, and ex-head of Twitter’s security team captains a crew of coders that has developed what many experts deem to be the best encryption tools on the planet. Marlinspike (yes, his name is a pseudonym), a dreadlocked hacker and founder of the small San Francisco-based non-profit Open Whisper Systems, has devised data-jumbling schemes that secure people’s digital conversations from the prying eyes of hackers and spies—while controversially frustrating law enforcement and intelligence agency investigations. This year WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google’s Allo all baked his crypto protocols into their messaging apps, battening down the communications of more than a billion people worldwide.

"Moxie Marlinspike"

Buterin’s favorite toy as a child? Microsoft Excel. This programmer, born outside Moscow and raised in Toronto, has spent the last few years reimagining a world in which all business logic—would-be corporate contracts, agreements, and bylaws—is encoded into, well, code. Buterin is the creator of Ethereum, a blockchain-based decentralized network that could serve as the basis for the next generation of peer-to-peer apps, like Uber (a ride-hailing app) without Uber (the company). He is the cofounder and chief scientist of the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss non-proft organization that helps maintain Ethereum's core technology, including a bespoke billion-dollar cryptocurrency, Ether, which remains, in spite of a recent hacking crisis, the second highest valued digital money next Bitcoin.

Vitalik Buterin

With the launch of ClassPass in 2013, Kadakia created a next-generation gym membership that let users book an unlimited number of fitness classes at a variety of studios for a flat, month-to-month fee. Now in 39 cities and armed with $84 million in funding, the company is focused on profitability. In the past 15 months, ClassPass rolled out tiered packages and raised prices 50% in some markets. As Kadakia tries to balance the needs of partner studios and members, the classically trained dancer will have to show off her fanciest footwork yet.

Payal Kadakia

The Atlanta-based entrepreneur and computer science Ph.D. got his start as a spam email blocker. He joined junk-mail eradicator CipherTrust in 2000, rising to become chief technology officer. After the company’s sale to Honeywell spinoff Secure Computing, Judge founded PureWire, an Internet traffic scrubber that Barracuda Networks scooped up in 2009. Two years later he cofounded phone-fraud-fighter Pindrop Security. Now he leads Wi-Fi device maker Luma—and invests in startups like Amazon-backed data shielder Ionic Security.

Paul Judge

This software developer’s idea of a sabbatical? Starting an all-female investor group during the four-month gap between her previous job as Twitter’s director of product and joining Slack, a $3 billion hyper-hot corporate-messaging startup. During her first year heading product strategy, the number of active users relying on the service tripled to more than 3 million. Her latest project: an $80 million fund for startups that buy into Underwood’s vision of turning Slack into a hub for everyday business tasks like arranging transportation.

April Underwood

Founded by Power in 2006, Clique Media Group (CMG) operates multiplatform women-focused media brands, including WhoWhatWear, Byrdie, Obsessee, and MyDomaine, and has quietly scaled up without the piles of venture capital common to new media startups. (It even turned down an offer to sell to Yahoo.) The profitable, L.A.–based company is set to grow revenue by nearly 100% this year after launching a clothing line with Target; a new app and a shoe line are in the works, too, and a Power-penned advice book came out this spring.

Katherine Power

Professional organizers have long preached the emotional benefits of decluttering the home, but it wasn’t until Kondo that the subject became a global fixation. Her organizational advice comes with instructions as quirky as they are precise. You should hold your belongings one by one: If an item “sparks joy,” keep it; if not, thank it for its service and let it go. Her KonMari Method has attracted legions of fans, and her breakout book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 99 weeks.

Marie Kondo

Instead of helping a lot of people in one area, say, health care or education, Lief’s Ubuntu is working with 2,000 children in one place—Port Elizabeth, South Africa—to help meet all their needs, from prenatal tests to education to medical care and counseling, from the womb to adulthood. That formula was novel enough to win Bill Clinton and Desmond Tutu as major supporters and attract a six-figure donation from Trevor Noah. Now, to scale the idea, Lief is building an institute in New York dedicated to helping other would-be do-gooders set up their own ­narrow-but-deep charities.

Jacob Lief

Zakin and Weisberg have found a huge following for their millennial, women-focused daily email newsletter. Covering everything from the presidential election to North Korean nuclear developments in a cheeky, irreverent voice, theSkimm has amassed more than 3.5 million subscribers, and recently raised $8 million in funding and launched its first product extension, an app that can integrate into your calendar. Next up: a new video venture, Skimm Studios.

Carly Zakin, Danielle Weisberg

You may not have heard yet of the ­Independent Journal Review, the conservative news site Skatell founded four years ago, but its traffic now rivals that of the right’s most recognizable online news brands, including Drudge and Breitbart. Skatell is no stranger to the official Republican apparatus: He started out as the digital guru for the Republican Governors Association. And while he’s a full-time entrepreneur now, as his party struggles through an identity crisis, he’s building out a platform that could help it reach the younger voters who will be vital to its rebirth.

Alex Skatell

The British-born star of CBS’s The Late Late Show With James Corden catapulted to fame this year with the runaway success of “Carpool Karaoke,” the addictive, happy-making series that features him driving around with A-list celebrities and musicians and singing along to their hits or favorite songs. His episode with Michelle Obama has garnered 43 million views. No wonder Apple bought the rights to the series. (While Corden is unlikely to star in the Apple shows, he will serve as producer.) As for his TV show? It just won two Emmys.

James Corden

Top 10

Welcome to Fortune’s 2016 40 Under 40, our annual ranking of the most influential young people in business—for the second time, 100 percent brand new. Read on to meet these disruptors, innovators, rebels and artists—and prepare to be inspired.