Executive Vice President, Forbes Media; Publisher, ForbesWoman, Forbes Media LLC
How To Increase Your Chances Of Getting On The Forbes Under 30 List From The Editors Who Create It
Forbes Editors Kristin Stoller and Steven Bertoni break down the myths and rumors about the 30 Under 30 List—and share tips about how to increase your chances of making the list.
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About Moira Forbes
Moira Forbes, Executive Vice President of Forbes Media and Publisher of ForbesWoman, has conducted a series of interviews with prominent figures in business, media, and philanthropy. In a 2023 video, she hosted Forbes editors who addressed myths about the Forbes Under 30 list, stating that nominees must be under 30 and that the list is an editorial initiative, not influenced by payments. In earlier interviews, Forbes spoke with figures such as Kara Swisher, who criticized tech leaders for a lack of diversity and accountability; Christine Lagarde, who discussed the importance of confidence, energy, and generosity in leadership; and Mellody Hobson, who described money as representing security and emphasized the value of making oneself indispensable in a career. Forbes has also interviewed Tory Burch, who defined success as happiness and contributing to the world, and Adena Friedman, who said that being a working mother should not cause guilt and that gender does not define her potential. Other conversations included Priyanka Chopra-Jonas, who argued that technology has amplified women's voices, and Robin Roberts, who spoke about choosing to focus on fighting rather than fearing a health crisis. Throughout these discussions, Forbes has consistently focused on themes of women's empowerment, career advancement, and the role of leadership in driving social and economic change.
Transcript (36 segments)
M
Moira Forbes0:01
Foreign from Forbes, and I'm happy to welcome you to Forbes under 30 MythBusters Edition. And to get us to guide us through this, I have my esteemed colleague Kristen Stoller, the senior editor of Forbes under 30 and much much more. Kristen, thank you.
K
Kristen Stoller0:20
Thank you so much for having us. This is my favorite topic as you know, so I am pumped to dive in. Love to mythbust with you.
M
Moira Forbes0:29
Um, but I think maybe we should start with the question that I think you and I are asked the most: do you have to be under 30 to be on the under 30 list?
K
Kristen Stoller0:37
I love that question, that's a good one. Kristen, as you as the under 30 boss, I'm sure this comes up all the time, whether you're waiting for a train, cocktail parties, Forbes events. So let's put that one myth to bed. The answer is yes, you do have to be under 30 to be in the under 30 list. You can't actually be 30. So this year, if you were to make our under 30 North America list, you need to be 29 or younger by December 31st of this year. So I think that's born in 1994 or later, which I think is crazy. But you hear like, 'Oh, I was born January 2nd, give me a little bump.' What our answer is, sorry, 29 or younger, that's our only rule that we have to stick to.
M
Moira Forbes1:27
That's it because we have about tens of thousands of applications, you have to be on that, exactly exactly.
K
Kristen Stoller1:33
And what if, here's a lot too, I'm under 30 but my co-founder is 31. How does that work? That's a good question, so we do consider co-founders together as a pair, in a unit. However, we're only looking at co-founders who are under 30. So if you have a 31-year-old co-founder and you yourself are 28, you the 28-year-old could be on the list, and your co-founder unfortunately is not eligible. However, we typically mention a co-founder or someone in the bio of a person who does make the list. Yes, we'll give the co-founders shout out, right? They're welcome to come to our events, totally, but they're not a listener, exactly. That's it, exactly.
M
Moira Forbes2:08
Now we have a whole nomination process, yeah. And the reason of that obviously is we want to make it as open and equitable as possible.
K
Kristen Stoller2:16
We get this a lot: does it make a difference if someone nominates themselves or has a friend, boss, grandparent nominate them for them? That's a really good question. The answer is, unless it's someone who is ridiculously famous, like unless Bill Gates nominates you, no, it really doesn't make a difference. And going along with that, the volume of people who nominate you definitely does not make a difference. And in fact, it can kind of annoy us and our fellow reporters if we see, you know, 20 spamming nominations of yourself from your best friend, your grandma, your mom. One is enough, we look at everyone so we don't need to see it 20 times. In fact, it'll hurt you because it's a little bit desperate.
M
Moira Forbes3:00
It definitely appears desperate to us. Be quiet and confident, yeah. But you did mention Bill Gates, and we have in the past had, you know, big name folks, whether they're under 30 alumni, whether they are big time investors, big time entrepreneurs, take the time to write a little recommendation. Yes, and I would say that does make a difference if it's one of our alumni, we take another deeper look. If it is someone big in the VC world or a big entrepreneur or founder, we definitely look at it more closely than if it's, you know, your mom nominating you.
K
Kristen Stoller3:35
Yes, but also a warning: you don't want to pepper us with those kind of folks, and they really need to know you. Correct, exactly. We don't want you hounding like someone for a recommendation then they don't know you. We want someone who has worked with you or has partnered with you and really has, we'll say, some real knowledge of what you do. And it's not random, it's not you begging their PR person to get them to nominate you. We want to hear it straight from their mouth how you work with them and what they do.
M
Moira Forbes4:04
Now another myth: there is a secret way, like a code of things you have to unlock to get on the under 30 list. An algorithm? Yes, a secret handshake. But no, seriously, what—how do you get in the list? And what are, again, very different categories—if you're an actor versus if you're an industrialist, we look at different things. But in general, what are some of the core things we're looking for to getting on the list? Because there's many ways.
K
Kristen Stoller4:30
Yeah, there's no one specific thing that will make us put you on the list. There's no one secret, I guess. But I mean, the biggest thing you looked at because we're Forbes is we want founders, we want entrepreneurs, we want people who are actually, you know, doing the thing, making the companies, who are just the top person there. We're not looking at hired hands, we're not looking at really, you know, the CMO or the CFO unless of course you're on the marketing list, then we will look at you as a CMO. But we look at a lot of things: we look at revenue, we look at impact, we look at funding, we look at who your investors are, how many users you have, if there's scale, if the company has room to grow. And again, like you said, it's different for every list. You know, for the food and drink list, you really could—we don't expect them to have millions of dollars in funding. But for consumer tech, if we're, you know, if they only have a million in funding, then that's kind of a red flag for us. So it definitely depends on the category.
M
Moira Forbes5:27
Yeah, back to like back to food or retail, if you have a part—not much revenue but they suddenly have a partnership to be in every one of these thousands of stores, whether it's a Target or a Walmart or a Whole Foods, that's a flag in a good way saying, 'Wow, if you pass their test,' you know, because we're looking at limited information, obviously.
K
Kristen Stoller5:45
Exactly. Um, and that's also important: people can have great ideas, but we also want folks, when we say scale, are proving that not only do they have a great idea but they're actually executing on it.
M
Moira Forbes5:56
Totally, totally. And Steve, I know you've been doing this for the entirety of under 30, which I just want to tell everyone out there is really cool. Steve has been seeing this from the beginning. I started when I was 13. Yeah, exactly. What has been, like, the biggest thing for you that you really look at and are impressed by?
S
Steve6:12
That's a good question. A lot of it is, again, we want bold thinkers, people trying something different and new, and that they're getting traction. You know, they might eventually fail, it might, you know, fizzle out, but we want bold ideas, not doing the status quo. And again, these are folks that they're such standouts—like they're usually trying to get their first job or trying to get a promotion. Meanwhile, while their peers are trying to do that, they're the ones raising money, they're the ones giving people promotions, they're the ones creating jobs. But we really want these entrepreneurs that are taking big swings and have, you know, have amazing partners come on, whether that's like mentors in a way—if it's that could come in the form of an investor, that could become in form of a bigger partner, that could be, you know, uncommon form of a big charity. So a lot of it is big ideas but not just, you know, ranting about it at two in the morning. You've actually earned millions of dollars, you've raised millions of dollars, you've found incredible reputable partners that are going along on this journey with you.
M
Moira Forbes7:11
Yeah, Steve, do you— to put them on the list? Let me see, let me check my wallet here.
S
Steve7:14
I love that. Everyone's always like, 'Oh, like I heard my friend's dad.' No, I have never even—I don't even know how that would work, and I've never even been approached. Same, I—it is the biggest myth out there, and I have to constantly tell people like, 'We are journalists, yes, we're not taking money, this is a totally editorial initiative.' So for me to hear that, it's just wild.
K
Kristen Stoller7:36
Yeah, yeah. The brand of under 30 is worth a lot more than whatever people would pay us, so we're not going to mess with that. Plus that's our careers, exactly. We are objective journalists.
M
Moira Forbes7:44
Yep, yep, exactly. The other big thing I get asked that I want to myth bust about too is: people ask me, um, do you tell us ahead of time, do you tell people ahead of time if they make the list or not? And the answer is no. Everyone finds out the same day when our list goes live. Um, we don't tell anyone ahead of time that I've ever known of. So no, you might ask for more information if you're quote a finalist, but that means you're a finalist, doesn't mean you're on the list at all.
K
Kristen Stoller8:13
Exactly, exactly, exactly. Yeah. And when is the—speaking of deadlines and nominations—when are nominations due? Yes, so for our North America list which goes live, uh, this fall or late this fall, uh, nominations are due September 1st. And then for our Europe and Asia lists, uh, we don't have a cutoff deadline yet. We will close nominations probably sometime around January 2024. And our local list, our nominations have already closed, and our inaugural local lists will go live in August. That's a lot of elves right there, let me know. Um, and when is the—when's the, uh, the big North American list going live? Big North America, remember, so check week after Thanksgiving. It'll be there. All right, keep updating your Forbes pages, yeah.
M
Moira Forbes8:53
Kristen, another myth I want to address is the famous, especially on social media, let's just call it the under 30 to fraudster pipeline. Yes, you know, it happens sometimes, like everything, and they love calling us out on this. Is there a pipeline? Do you have to have—do we have the underground pipeline going down?
K
Kristen Stoller9:12
I don't believe there is, despite people wanting to believe it on social media. I mean, we have had over—I'd say with the Asia and Europe—over 15,000 listers in the past decade or more. Of course, when you're making so many picks like that, you're never going to get it right, no one does. Um, but I will say that people thinking that the majority of under 30 listers go on to commit some kind of big scam or fraud or criminal act is inherently false. And another thing is that people have to realize that under 30 is a snapshot, it's a shot in time. So if someone has raised a ton of money and been vetted by some of these amazing corporations or are big investors, we go off what we can see publicly and it's a snapshot. If something goes wrong down the line, it's just like if you went into a sports All-Star game or if you won a trophy for something, right? And as with every private company, even if it's us covering just a private company outside of under 30 or with under 30, journalists can only get so much access. With a public company, it's a little different, we're able to get more public records, but with a private company, we are really going off of, you know, our interviews with investors and what the company will give us. So we don't even have as much access as, you know, a Morgan Stanley or anyone else does.
M
Moira Forbes10:26
Yeah. And a lot of these folks have some of the top investors in the world.
S
Steve10:29
Yeah. And if—and they're getting vetted, that's it.
M
Moira Forbes10:31
Exactly. And then also, rumors of the pipeline: has Elizabeth Holmes been under 30? Elizabeth Holmes—30 list?
K
Kristen Stoller10:35
Elizabeth Holmes—contrary to popular belief, um, nope, she's never made the list.
M
Moira Forbes10:42
So we got lucky there, exactly. Um, and then, but, you know, we talked about—you, you very coined it, I stole it from you—the under 30 to fraud pipeline, that's a myth. But there's another real one, which we like to call the under 30 to billionaire pipeline, or, you know, it—the best. We love under 30 because it's like, um, like Minor League Baseball, people go on to, you know, whether it's, you know, the Fintech 50, whether it's, you know, top top self-made women, you know, billionaire lists, Forbes 400, right? We love that pipeline.
K
Kristen Stoller11:12
Yeah, I mean, we've had, you know, people from Mark Zuckerberg to—you interview—Daniel Ek of Spotify. It's—it's really—we can name all day.
M
Moira Forbes11:20
Exactly, right. Another myth: there's 20 categories for the under 30. Yeah. Um, and obviously a lot of companies could be one or the other, right? Especially with technology, right? Because technology is so much, you know, interwoven in all these categories. Yeah. Is it true that if I apply for the wrong category, I'm not going to make the list? For example, if I have a—if I'm not sure whether I'm a retail company or if I'm a consumer tech company, how do I choose? And does it hurt me if I quote pick the wrong one or the wrong fit?
K
Kristen Stoller11:53
That's a great question. The short answer is no, it doesn't hurt you at all. The longer answer is—I'll let you in a little behind the scenes. So we have over 40 reporters working on our under 30 North America list, and the good news is we all talk, we're all friends, we all share tips and stories. So if I get something in for the retail list and I'm like, 'Ah, you know what, they applied for retail but I actually think that we should look at them for both retail and consumer tech and put them in both pools and see where they fare,' I'm going to reach out to our consumer tech reporters and say, 'Hey, I've got this person for retail, you should also look at them. Let's put them in front of both judges and see.' So we internally will discuss, it's not just we have our silos of retail, tech, finance. We're all—we're all friends here, we're all talking. Yes, just don't double apply because that messes everything up.
M
Moira Forbes12:39
Exactly. Um, so yeah, and speaking—applying, again, there's no one way to get on the list. No, but if I'm applying for—let's just say I'm an entrepreneur, because there's many different ways, but most of our folks are entrepreneurs in some way—and I have that application, what information will help me stand out? What sort of things will help the judges, help the editors make a call on me in, like, shots? You know, how do I come across in the best light?
K
Kristen Stoller13:05
So yeah, I think the biggest thing is being transparent about your finances, about what your funding is, who your investors are, what your revenue is, and what your revenue model is. That's a big one. Other than that, the thing I see the most that people don't do is clearly explain what their product is. Yes. And I'll have to go back to them, and if I can't understand it, I don't know how we expect our judges to understand it. So being clear and putting in the clearest terms, especially in categories like energy or finance where there's a lot of buzzwords and a person may not know it, explain it like I'm—the dumbest person alive, like what do you do in the most simple terms.
M
Moira Forbes13:41
Yes. Show everyone, show your numbers, yeah. And then as we say, explain it to us like we're five years old. Exactly, and that's a good—that's a good for your—that's a good training for your pitching too, everyone out there.
K
Kristen Stoller13:52
Exactly, yep, that's it.
M
Moira Forbes13:54
Awesome, well I want to thank everyone for joining and especially thank Kristen Stoller, senior editor, big boss of Forbes under 30.