Thought you were ahead of the game? Think again. There’s a whole load of kids just waiting to make even your decisions look like potty training. We’ve always had prodigies, but the staggering advances in technology over the past decade mean that the young’uns have an unfair advantage. For the spring issue of The Gentleman’s Journal we picked 30 of the most impressing entrepreneurs, entertainers and philanthropists born since 1984. Here, we bring you those 30 under 30 who made the list. Subscribe to thegentlemansjournal.com for more features and interviews from the Spring Issue.
DAVID KARP
27, Founder, Tumblr
When he was 20, David Karp used a fortnight’s holiday to develop an idea he’d been playing around with. By the time his two weeks were up, he’d created Tumblr. The now-ubiquitous blogging platform was launched in 2007, and attracted 75,000 users in its first two weeks. Last year, Karp sold the company – which now hosts over 140 million blogs – to Yahoo! For a staggering $1.1 billion. He remains CEO and is, presumably, laughing all the way to the cleaners.
PETE CASHMORE
28, Founder, Mashable
Until relatively recently, the most successful thing to come out of Aberdeen was granite. How times change. Since Cashmore started Mashable from his bedroom in 2005, aged just 19, he has pretty much entirely re-shaped the way we think about social media and online news. The pioneering site now has nearly 4 million Twitter followers and is acknowledged as one of the most important web endeavours in history.
JUSTIN BIEBER
19, Singer
Seriously? Yup. Disagree and you’ll have 49 million beliebers out there ready to string you up. Since he released One Time in 2009, the Canadian wunderkind has gone from mop-topped YouTube hit to full-on superstar prima donna. While it remains to be seen whether Bieber will take his pre-teen following with him into his 20s (and indeed control his increasingly odd behaviour), you can’t argue with record sales of 15 million and counting.
EVAN SPIEGEL & ROBERT MURPHY
23 and 25, Founders, Snapchat
Ever wondered who was responsible for the Selfie taking over the world? Look no further than this pair, the brains behind SnapChat. Spiegel and Murphy developed the fast-paced photo messaging app while still at Stanford University – since then, they have reportedly declined offers from Facebook ($3 billion) and Google ($4 billion). Not bad for a student in-joke, eh?
NATE LEVINE, 22, founder, OpenGov, Whatever the Daily Wail might have you believe, bureaucracy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It does, though, have its problems, and some of the most challenging have been created by the enormity of moving records from paper to digital. Nate Levine realised that government data storage was confused and inefficient – so he decided to sort it out with software. Since its launch in 2012, Levine’s company OpenGov has streamlined the processes of budgeting and documentation in over 50 government agencies across the USA, and is rumoured to be expanding into the private sector.
PATRICK & JOHN COLLISON
25 and 23, co-founders, Stripe
Sibling rivalry be damned – these brothers from County Limerick have changed the face of Internet payments and pioneered marketing software with Auctomactic and Stripe. Their entrepreneurial endeavours aren’t the end of it, either: Patrick moonlights as a scientist, specialising in artificial intelligence, while John is also a pilot and a pianist. Together, they have attracted over $40 million of investment to Stripe alone.
CHASE ADAM
27, founder, Watsi
About five years ago, Chase Adam was a volunteer for the Peace Corps in the town of Watsi, Costa Rica. Stepping onto a bus one day, he met an impoverished woman who begged him for money for her son’s urgent medical treatment. It suddenly occurred to him that if crowd-funding could be used for, say, music events, then surely it would work for charitable donation, too. The not-for-profit healthcare platform he went on to start uses donations to pay for medicine and treatment all over the world, and is completely transparent in its dealings – an absolutely revolutionary approach to public philanthropy.
YANNICK SONNENBERG
25, founder, Elefunds
Operating from Berlin’s trendy Schönhauser Allee, Sonnenberg’s Elefunds network rounds up its users’ online purchases and distributes the optional donation to charity, publishing the results to Facebook with the option for friends to give more. If it sounds too simple to be true, don’t write it off – with 35,000 regular donors, the site has established a completely new way of giving.
AVICII
24, DJ and record producer
Forget ABBA, there’s a new Swede on the block. Since 2010, when he had his first international hit with Seek Bromance, Avicii has climbed up the charts and into the kind of global fame normally reserved for RnB divas and Gallagher brothers. Ranked number 3 in DJ Magazine’s top 100 DJs list for the second year running, Avicii has played the game his own way, and set the template for hundreds of inferior imitators.
LUDMIL ALEXANDROV, 27, PHD candidate, It’s sobering to consider how little we actually know about the mutational processes that cause cancer, and this is precisely what Alexandrov is striving to change. His work is providing ever-more insight into the genetic faults that kill so many, and is one of the most ambitious endeavours in modern medical science.
PALMER LUCKEY
21, Inventor
To look at this happy-go-lucky kid from Long Beach, California, you wouldn’t imagine he was responsible for one of the most radical inventions in the history of gaming. The Oculus Rift device that he patented aged just 20 is a gobsmacking piece of kit, a head-mounted visual display of a kind never before imagined, let alone seen. There’s obvious enthusiasm for it, too: in the development stages, Luckey managed to ratchet up $16 million in private investment.
ONE DIRECTION
3.5 – the band itself, that is. Its five members are aged between 19 and 22
Say what you like about Simon Cowell, but taking a chance on this lot was a masterstroke. Since we first met them auditioning for the X-Factor – can it really be only three years ago? – the 1D boys have transcended their band’s rather unfortunate name to become the biggest British group of the modern era. Now that they’ve become the acceptable face of mass-produced pop and sold in excess of 20 million records, the only question is: what next? Will Harry go solo? Will Louis go into politics? Will we ever be able to remember the names of the other ones? Only time will tell…
ANDY MURRAY
26, Tennis player
Read the heading above again – 26. Yup, 26. How is that possible? It feels as if the infamously short-tempered Glaswegian has been stomping the courts of Wimbledon forever. Despite recently crashing out of the world top 5 for the first time since 2008 after a spirited but disappointing performance in the Qatar Open, he will no doubt be back on form come the summer. Murray, after all, means business – and not just his reported £30 million sponsorship deal with Adidas.
SAM SHIKIAR, 28, vice president, Goldman Sachs, How many representatives do you have? We’re betting it’s less than 7,300 – the number that broker-dealer Sam Shikiar has across the USA. He is currently head of the electronics commodities trading team at Goldman Sachs, having cut his teeth at Global Alpha and Equity Opportunities Funds.
RORY MCILROY
24, Golfer
Although he’s only been pro since 2007, County Down-born McIlroy has already made a name for himself as one of the greatest golfers of all time. Last year, he signed a deal with Nike for a rumoured £100 million, and despite controversial views on the organisation of the Ryder Cup and a hesitancy over whether to commit to the British or Irish teams for the 2016 Olympics, the future looks very bright indeed.
JONATHAN OSTREM, 29, post-doctoral scholar and consultant, Based in San Francisco, Ostrem has done pioneering work into combating cancer. He has spent the last decade creating a drug that effectively smothers Ras, a previously unstoppable form of cancer molecule associated with tumours in the lungs, bowels and pancreas.
ANDREW SUTHERLAND
23, creator of Quizlet
Astonishingly, Sutherland was only fifteen when he created the online learning programme with which he would make his name. Using his knowledge of code, he worked to construct a tool that would help him revise for his exams. He looked back at what he’d put together and realised it had wings – and it wasn’t long before Quizlet, as he named it, had become a standard revision tool across the American education system.
ZAKIYA SMITH
27, Education advisor
By the time she was 24, Harvard and Vanderbilt graduate Zakiya Smith was already a senior policy advisor at the White House, instrumental in forging the Obama administration’s ground breaking educational reforms. Although she left the President’s team in 2012 to pursue a similarly challenging role as an advisor to Lumina, a schools thinktank, her work for the government is already being felt across the classrooms of the United States.
JAKE HELLER, 29, co-founder, Casetext, Having a comprehensive legal system is a good thing, obviously. But how on Earth is the layman to make sense of it? Jake Heller wondered the same thing, and decided to start Casetext, a sort of legal Wikipedia with crowd-sourced entries. ‘Making all the world’s laws free and understandable’ – quite a mission statement, but one that is obviously not beyond Heller and his supporters; their investors include everyone from CrossLink Capital to Ashton Kutcher.
Tom Sellers
, 27, chef, Tom Sellers has come a long way since being kicked out of school in Nottingham, aged sixteen. He discovered the excitement of cooking through Marco Pierre White’s White Heat and rose up the food chain (sorry), working for the likes of Noma’s Rene Redzepi and Thomas Keller. The time came to strike out alone, and when finally Sellers opened his stunning restaurant Story in South East London last year, it received five-star reviews across the board.
GREG KIMBALL, 26, Manager of digital strategy at L’Oréal, Greg Kimball’s doesn’t look like he should be head of the world’s biggest digital departments. This, though, is precisely what he is, and with his responsibilities he has changed the way that conglomerates like L’Oréal approach social media., Georgina Dent
, 19, chef, Georgina Dent is nothing short of a prodigy. She began working at Nathan Outlaw’s legendary restaurant in Cornwall before she’d even taken her GCSEs, and is now chef de partie. She has already worked with some of the greatest chefs in the UK, including Sat Bains and regular Gentleman’s Journal contributor Marcus Wareing. Having won last year’s hallowed Observer Food Monthly for best young chef, her future looks incredibly tasty indeed.
CARRYN MCLAUGHLIN
29, Vice president, JP Morgan Chase, Carryn McLaughlin is in control of handling over $2.7 billion of business, having obtained her CFP six years ago. Shooting up JP Morgan Chase’s pecking order quite so quickly is achievement enough in itself – but to land with such an impressive portfolio is something else entirely.
EESHA KHARE
19, student and inventor, Eesha Khare isn’t even into her third decade but has already come up with an invention that might change the way we use electronics. Her brainchild is a supercapacitator that may one day replace batteries, making portable electrical devices more efficient and less environmentally harmful. You’re right to be gobsmacked – American talkshow host Conan O’Brien was so impressed he invited her onto his show as a guest.
ALLISON LAMI SAWYER
29, entrepreneur
After acing a master’s degree in nanotechnology, Allison Lami Sawyer launched her Rebellion Photonics company in 2010, looking into cutting-edge technology and complicated problem-solving. Amongst her most spectacular solutions is a device that is capable of ‘seeing’ gas leaks before they would otherwise be detectable. Our bet is that it’ll be installed in every kitchen in the western world before the decade’s out.
JUNO TEMPLE
24, actor
Originally from Somerset and daughter of respected documentary-maker Julien Temple, Juno’s roles keep on getting better and better – as do her performances. From Christopher Nolan’s final Batman outing to the hilarious indie flick Greenberg, she has kept her CV diverse by never entirely falling for mainstream cinema’s bait. Snagging an Oscar before her 30th might seem ambitious, but don’t bet against it.
LENA DUNHAM
27, writer and actor
Groan, you might be thinking – but how on earth could we have left out Lena Dunham? Her sitcom Girls – which she wrote in its entirety – is the funniest, cleverest, most painfully true and – ah, to hell with it – just the best thing on TV anywhere right now. As if that wasn’t enough, she’s just published her first collection of essays.
MALLORY BLAIR, 25, founder, Small Girls PR, Mallory Blair started her fantastic PR firm Small Girls (Blair herself is 5”3) three years ago, and has since then scored an absolutely remarkable string of successes. Her firm now takes care of the image of many high-profile clients including GE, Gawker and MeetUp from its Brooklyn HQ.
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