66 Stanford affiliates honored on 2023 Forbes 30 under 30 List 

Dec. 8, 2022, 8:54 p.m.

If you are a Stanford affiliate and not on this list, please reach out to us at news ‘at’ stanforddaily.edu. 

Stanford students, graduates, post-docs and dropouts peppered the list of under-30s honored in this year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Out of a total of 600 honorees, 66 have studied or researched at Stanford.

The list, which the business magazine publishes annually to “honor young innovators on the edge of making it big,” is chosen from a list of 12,000 original nominees, which is narrowed down to an ultimate 600 recipients among twenty categories.

Here are the Stanford affiliates who made it onto this year’s list:

Arts and Style

  • Charlie Jarvis cofounded FairChain, a platform built to facilitate secure sales in the fine art world using blockchain. (Computer Science B.S. ’19, Computer Science M.S ’20)

Retail and E-commerce

  • Kimiloluwa Fafowora runs Gander, which works with brands to display user-generated videos on their websites. (MBA ’22)
  • Emily Gittins cofounded Archive which works with retailers to set up and operate resale sites where customers can list their pre-owned items for sale. (MBA ’21)
  • Sherwin Xia confounded Trendsi to help lower the barriers for entrepreneurs launching online businesses (Computer Science  B.S ’17, Biomedical Informatics M.S ‘17)
  • Liam Kinney cofounded Canal, a marketplace that helps online brands discover and sell complementary products from other companies on their websites (Classics and Classical Languages, Literature, and Linguistics B.S ’16., Artificial Intelligence M.S.)
  • Jeremy Wood started OpenStore, an e-commerce aggregator that has acquired more than 40 Shopify stores. (Symbolic Systems B.S. ’16, Computer Science ’17 M.S.)

Healthcare

  • Amira Barkal founded Pheast Therapeutics, a cancer immunotherapy company that uses activated immune cells to kill cancer. (Stanford Med School ’21)
  • Jessica Chao founded LingoHealth, a digital health platform that helps older patients and their caregivers navigate health in their preferred language. (MBA ’21)
  • Kevin Parker founded Cartography Biosciences to develop effective treatment approaches using molecular and computational tools that analyze the body through the eyes of the immune system. (Ph.D.’20)
  • Katie-Rose Skelly founded Known Medicine, which hopes to increase the amount of oncology drugs in clinical trials that make it to market. (Computer Science B.S. ’16 / BioMedical Informatics M.S. ’17)

Sports

  • Kenzi Inman helped transform the NBA’s global events department into a revenue-generating group that capitalizes on the rise of the experiential economy. (Management Science & Engineering B.S. ’18)

Marketing and Advertising

  • Jesse Leimgruber founded influencer marketing company NeoReach to help creators earn more money. (Computer Science B.S. ’16)

Venture Capital

  • Ilse Calderon sources and diligences new investments across consumer fintech, healthcare, and edtech at the pre-seed investment fund OVO.  (Science, Technology, and Society B.S.’16)
  • Alex Laplaza was the first hire at Lowercarbon Capital, a firm that invests globally in companies working to fight climate change and slash emissions. (International Policy M.A. ’20)
  • Jacqueline Wibowo was the first and only venture-focused hire at Whale Rock, helping lead the fund’s deployment of $1 billion across over 20 companies. (Public Policy B.A. ’17 Management Science & Engineering M.S. ’18)

Science

  • Adrien Burlacot has combined genetic and biophysical tools to quantify the efficiencies of photosynthesis in green microalgae and improve them. (Assistant professor (by courtesy))
  • Nikhil Garg uses the tools of computer science and economics– including machine learning, data science, and game theory– to understand and improve government and marketplace allocation. (Electrical Engineering M.S. and Ph.D. ’20)
  • King Hung discovered a new mechanism by which tumor-driving cancer genes are amplified outside chromosomes. (Fourth-year Ph.D. in Cancer Biology and Graduate Researcher since 2019)
  • Raphael Townshend founded Atomic AI and is combining two of the largest breakthroughs of the last decade: the RNA revolution that has led to therapies such as the Covid-19 vaccines, and the revolution in predictive protein folding using machine learning. (Computer Science Ph.D. ’20)
  • Sneha Goenka co-led the development of a whole-genome sequencing process for disease diagnosis that set a World Record for speed. (Fifth-year Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering)
  • Allison Koenecke is aimed at correcting bias in underlying algorithms. (Computation and Mathematical Engineering B.S. ’21)
  • Jeromy Rech is working on ways to use chemistry to create plastics that can conduct electricity, which could lead to new solar panel materials, recyclable polymers, and medical devices. (Postdoctoral fellow since 2021.)
  • Natalie Rubio focused on growing meat from cells instead of animals. (Second-year Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering)
  • Maggie Miller recently solved a mathematical conjecture which was first proposed in the 1980s by Charles Livingston. (Postdoctoral fellow since 2021)
  • Chaunzhen Zhao has created a DNA-biosensor smartwatch that can assess cortisol levels found in sweat– accurately, noninvasively, and in real-time. (Postdoctoral fellow since 2021)

Manufacturing and Industry 

  • Leila Mashouf cofounded Rubi Laboratories in August 2020 to create more sustainable clothing. (Graduate research fellow)
  • Jamie Balsillie and Wilson Ruotolo co-founded Hedgehog, which builds robotic mushroom farms. (Balsillie: MBA ’22) (Ruotolo: Mechanical Engineering ’18, Robotics Ph.D. ’21)
  •  Amanda Calabrese and Greta Meyer started Sequel to reinvent the tampon to absorb more evenly and leak less (Both: Product Design Engineering B.S. ’19)
  • Sam Luyre founded Kargo, a supply chain technology startup that distributes 10-foot-tall towers that gather data on incoming and outgoing freight in real-time. (Dropped out)
  • Jake Hillard and Rebecca Wong cofounded Red Leader Tech to create 3D vision systems and a chipset that boosts the resolution and cost-efficiency of lidar sensors. (Hillard: B.S. Electrical Engineering ’18) (Wong: B.S. Electrical Engineering ’19,  Electrical Engineering MS ’22)

Social Impact

  • Sophia Kianni founded Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit working to make climate education more accessible to people who don’t speak English, three years ago. (Science, Technology, and Society B.S. ’24)
  • Izunna Okonkwo, 3. Olamide Oladeji and 4. Abuzar Royesh founded Pastel together to provide offline-enabled software tools for small businesses. (Okonkwo: MBA ’22) (Olamide: Fourth-year Management Science & Engineering Ph.D.) (Royesh: International Policy M.A. ’20, Management Science & Engineering M.S. ’21)
  • Tim Schnabel founded Switch Bioworks with a vision to engineer microbes to sustainably produce nitrogen “biofertilizer,” directly at the roots of plants. (Chemical Engineering and Economics B.S. ’15, BioEngineering M.S. ’17, BioEngineering PhD ’21)
  • Amelie Vavrosky founded Normally, a legal tech company devoted to streamlining processes including visa and immigration applications. (CodeX Fellow at Stanford Law School, International Policy M.S. ’22)

Enterprise Technology

  • Lawrence Lin Murata cofounded Slope which is building a business-to-business version of buy now, pay later software. (Computer Science B.S. ’17)
  • Tyler Han cofounded Voiceflow, which gives other companies the tools to build their own voice assistants. (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Summer Program)
  • Phoebe Yao started the company Pareto which provides round-the-clock data collection services for customers through a combination of automation and a team of data analysts. (Dropped out)

Energy

  • Charles Bai founded Paces, which provides data and analytics for green infrastructure to help identify ideal locations to interconnect renewable energy to the power grid. (Degree unknown) 
  • Caleb Boyd cofounded Molten Industries, which is developing technology that generates a steam of pure hydrogen. (Materials Science and Engineering Ph.D. ’20
  • Benjamen Gao helped lead Stanford Mars BRIC, a research team exploring the potential of sending an autonomous robot to Mars to build radiation-shielding igloos and other structures out of biopolymer concrete alternative. (Math and Computer Science ’24)
  • Raafe Khan helped build one of the largest project pipelines in the country. (Graduate Certificate in Energy Innovation and Emerging Technology, Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources ’21)
  • Andy Zhao helping perfect laser furnace technology, which can rapidly heat iron ore using zero-emissions energy sources — an improvement on the traditional iron smelting process, which involves burning metallurgical coal. (Management Science & Engineering B.S. ’16) 
  • Tyler Hernandez and Michael Strand cofounded Tynt, which makes windows with the ability to adjust their tint to optimize visual and thermal comfort and reduce building energy consumption form light and HVAC use. (Hernandez: Chemistry Ph.D. ’21) (Strand: Management Science & Engineering M.S. ’18 and Management Science & Engineering PhD ’18)

Education 

  • Harrison Hochman co-founded Sparrow, which makes it easier for students to apply for fresh loans. (Management Science & Engineering B.S. ’20 and Management Science & Engineering M.S. ’21)
  • Anna Gabriella Casalme founded Novelly to help publish ebooks by underrepresented youth. (Human Biology B.S. ’15)
  • Jin Yun Chow cofounded Polygence to help others find great mentors and mentees in high school projects ranging from fashion history to computational genomics. (Fifth-year Ph.D. in Comparative Literature)
  • Shawon Jackson founded Vocal Justice, which aims to improve students’ confidence, communication and critical consciousness. (MBA ’21)
  • John Koelliker cofounded Leland to connect students and young professionals with career coaches. (MBA ’22)
  • Drew Bent cofounded Schoolhouse.world, a free, peer-to-peer tutoring web app (Policy, Organization and Leadership Studies M.A. ’20 and Graduate School of Business Dropout)
  • Lisa Wang created Almost Fun, a non-profit dedicated to helping students improve and enjoy math (Graduate School of Business, deferred indefinitely)

Finance 

  • Lydia Hylton joined Redpoint as a VC and sourced a deal to invest in Dune Analytics, a crypto-focused analytics platform whose valuation increased roughly tenfold in the six months after Hylton invested. (MBA ’21)
  • Marco Alban-Hidalgo, David Dindi and Emma Marriott co-founded Atomic Invest, a white-label product that lets businesses offer investing services within their apps. (Hidalgo: Electrical and Electronic Engineering B.S., Computer Science M.S. MBA, years unknown.) (Dindi: Chemical and Computational Engineering ’16 and Chemical Engineering B.S. ’15) (Marriott: Computer Science B.S. ’16 and Computer Science M.S. ’19)

Games

  • Alexandra Botez, one of the most popular chess players in the world, streams on Twitch with her sister. (International Relations B.S. ’17)
  • Alex Levy coordinates efforts with film and TV to create games based on Netflix intellectual property, as a founding member of Netflix’s first ever gaming strategy team. (High School Summer Program ’10)
  • Bobby Sherlock works as a marketing executive for titles such as “Multiversus,” helping the title become the best-selling game in the U.S. when it debuted. (MBA ’22)

Consumer Technology

  • Michael Yan and Ethan Horoschak confounded Simplify Jobs, a recruiting platform for internships and jobs. (Both: On leaves of absence.)
  • Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg cofounded Skiff, which provides end-to-end encrypted email, collaborative workspaces and productivity tools. (Milich: Computer Science B.S. ’19) (Ginsberg: Electrical Engineering B.S. ’19, Computer Science M.S. ’20)

(There were no Stanford affiliates in the ‘Hollywood and Entertainment,’ ‘Media,’ ‘Social Media’ and ‘Food/Drink’ categories.)

Oriana Riley ’25 is a News Managing Editor at The Daily. Every once in a while, she drops an iconic Campus Life article. Outside of The Daily, Oriana enjoys running a lot of miles and eating a lot of food. Contact Oriana at news ‘at’ stanforddaily.com.

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