Archiv der Kategorie: Corporate Culture

The 5 Most Important Soft Skills to Look for in a New Hire

Personality traits that determine how an employee will hack it in a group setting are hard to detect. Here are the questions that will help tease them out during an interview.

1. Broadcasts flexibility and enthusiasm

Ask a candidate to describe a time when someone had to learn a new skill or process on the job. This is a good way to understand both his or her method of learning and attitude toward a new experience.

„If I’m placing someone in a fast-paced, innovative environment, I need to see and hear enthusiasm as a candidate describes how they fly up the learning curve,“ says Rakos.

2. Takes initiative and direction

A question about how they tackled a challenge and found a solution helps assess personal accountability. Candidates should mention how they prioritized tasks and what specific steps they took to accomplish something.

„I also need to see a level of self-confidence when I hear the candidate describe how they chose a solution,“ says Rakos. „Someone who gets bogged down in analysis paralysis is not the right fit but neither is a candidate whose actions sound fearless to the point of recklessness.“

And asking them what’s important in an ideal boss should elicit descriptions of a manager who provides general, visionary direction and then unleashes their employees to get the job done.

„I especially like hearing candidates place greater value on bosses who are mentors but not micromanagers,“ says Rakos.

3. Keeps ego in check

Ask candidates to describe both their greatest success in the workplace and a time when they made a mistake. That helps determine if they are more invested in their ego or in getting the job done and building a strong team. Also ask what their role was versus that of the manager or teammates.

What you want are answers that share the credit with the team as a whole. It’s even better if they mention specific people on the team, which shows they are aware enough to articulate the skills and abilities of others–and someone who is comfortable sharing credit.

„If I hear a lot of ‚I‘ statements and precious few ‚we‘ statements, I see trouble ahead,“ Rakos says.

4. Demonstrates curiosity and a desire to learn

A vaguely worded question works here. Ask about the best job they’ve ever had and what they learned.

„While it’s true that I am listening for specific skills, knowledge and processes that may be needed for the job I’m filling, I’m also specifically listening for how the candidate values the process of learning itself,“ says Rakos. As with every question, notice body language, tone of voice and facial expressions as much as words. Rakos says he wants to see someone’s eyes light up when they describe the joy of working alongside smart, curious people.

And asking what questions the candidate has for you, is a final way to learn a lot about them.

Candidates who ask probing questions about the organization’s culture, the hiring manager’s leadership style, and how success is measured and mentored, help themselves greatly.

5. Understands strengths and limitations

Ask them describe their work style. Also, ask how a former manager or co-worker would describe their work style. You’re looking for consistent answers that describe consistency, collaboration, listening skills and respect for the ideas of others.

http://www.inc.com/bartie-scott/how-to-hire-most-important-soft-skills.html

13 qualities that will help make you a great business leader

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Bad leadership is the root cause of why millions of people across the world do not enjoy going to work every day.

Good leadership provides the confidence to overcome hurdles. Good leadership encourages people to think big.

Good leadership inspires people to become the best they can be and creates a platform that enables people to showcase and begin exploiting their true potential.

A story about bad leadership

In my mid-20s, I experienced bad leadership within a blue-chip company. I’m not exaggerating when I say my last three years at that company were the most frustrating, confusing and even angriest period in my working life.

I was ambitious. I felt like I had a lot to offer my employer. I wanted to push myself; to take on new challenges. I challenged the status quo. I didn’t just come to work to do a job – I wanted to make a difference.

I wanted to climb the ladder and increase my influence on those around me.

Unfortunately, my manager (for their own reasons) wasn’t prepared to embrace my passion, drive, determination and creativity.

I would regularly have to explain myself and my ideas. The feedback I got was most often negative and conclusive:

“This isn’t going to work.”
“There are other people that look after that.”
“This isn’t part of your job description.”
“Why don’t you just concentrate on your job?”

I would often speak to people close to me to try and help me understand why my manager was entrenched in managing me in such a negative, condescending way.

The general consensus was that my manager was probably afraid of my ambition, afraid that I may outshine them.

What a crying shame that is.

The nail that sealed the “I don’t ever want to experience bad leadership again” coffin was when a new role was being created in our growing team.

It was a role that I felt I had the drive, passion and willingness to move in to and succeed in. It was a natural progression for my career.

I was ready to stretch myself, I was ready to take on more responsibility. I was ready to increase my influence and impact on this blue-chip business.

What was the feedback from my manager when I went to them expressing my interest in this role?

We are going to look to bring someone in from outside the business. We want someone with more experience than you. It’s okay, there will be other opportunities for you in the future.

Now my manager may have thought that dangling this carrot may have been enough to pacify me.

As it turns out, I had stopped reaching for the carrot a long time before this exchange. I knew I was simply not going to be given the opportunity to exploit my potential with this manager.

Around half-way through this three-year period of experiencing bad leadership, I started to ask myself these questions:

“Why am I letting my manager hold me back?”
“How am I going to break free from this?”“
What more do I have to offer that I’m not being given the opportunity to do?”

Unbeknown to my manager (whom I would continue to work for during the next 18 months), I made the decision that I would start taking control of my own destiny. I made the commitment to myself that I would no longer be held back.

I decided that I was going to work for myself. I started moonlighting in summer 2004, and in summer 2006 I handed my notice in.

I made a commitment to myself that I would never experience bad leadership in my career again.

A story about good leadership

It wasn’t until a few years in to being a freelancer that I started to consider the potential of hiring someone.

My immediate thoughts were that if I do get in to the position of being able to offer someone a job, I was absolutely determined that my management style would be the complete opposite of what I had experienced.

There is a well-known saying in business and leadership: “behaviour creates behaviour.”

In addition, we all know how ideas, beliefs, experiences and perceptions all get ingrained within our minds over time. We also know how hard it can be to embrace change.

For me, although I had never experienced good leadership, never mind truly inspirational leadership, I knew what bad leadership was and I was committed to doing things the right way.

“Anyone who I manage and lead will be given the opportunity to exploit their true potential” was running through my DNA.

It was in early 2008 when I hired my first employee. Since then, I have dedicated time and energy into developing a leadership approach that is true to my aim above.

Here are some of the key attributes of being a good leader, alongside lessons that I’ve learned…

1. Hire exceptional people that have the potential to outshine you

The complete opposite of what I experienced. This ethos has been the key to the growth of my business.

Everyone benefits too, as exceptional people are working alongside exceptional people.

Some teams just work together. Good teams do great things together. Great teams grow together.

2. Praise your team regularly

In the hustle and bustle of daily life running a business and managing people, it can be very easy to miss out on providing praise and recognition when a team member goes above and beyond – or they just do something in their job description exceptionally well.

I have learnt just how important and valued it is to provide praise to individuals, both one-to-one and in a group environment.

After all we just want to do a good job and be respected, right?

3. Catch people in

Not only have I realised the importance of praising individuals, a lesson I have also learnt is how important it is to simply “catch people in”.

The small things people do, the ideas they bring to the table, the creative way they are thinking.

Highlighting the smaller details which add value to the day-to-day running of a business will encourage your team to speak up and champion larger ideas going forward.

Never underestimate the importance of people feeling valued.

3. Take time to find the right people

You’ve heard the saying, “hire slow, fire fast”.

Thankfully the second part isn’t one I have encountered regularly (though the phrase is applicable in a business case) but certainly hiring slowly has been a cornerstone of how we have built the team.

Remember that exceptional people are out there, you just have to be patient to find them.

4. Trust people

When I employed just three people, I published an article titled ‚11 Values That Are Helping Me Build a Great Team at PRWD‚.

In many ways it is the beta version of this article. Point three was “have complete trust in new team members straight away” and this is so important.

Trust your staff and see them flourish with the responsibility you have given them.

5. Throw people in at the deep end

As a direct follow-up on from hiring slowly, taking your time to find the right seat (or as one of my mentors Lily Newman champions, “get the right people on the bus”) can and should lead you on to having the opportunity to put new team members in the limelight very early on.

When it comes to whether a new starter will sink or swim, have faith they will swim.

6. Encourage people to push themselves

Some people have a natural hunger and desire to push themselves.

They want to embrace change, they want to take on new challenges and go outside of their comfort zone. Many people don’t have this natural hunger.

People have a natural tendency to think less of their skills, experiences and ideas compared to those around them.

If you don’t provide everyone – irrespective of their natural hunger – a platform and opportunity to open their mind, you are likely missing out on valuable insights to help your business, and the chance at helping your team realise the potential you see in them.

Every human has the ability to offer more than they think – they just need to be inspired to go outside their comfort zone and think “what if I…”

7. Create ways for people to fast track their careers

One of the things that genuinely gives me goosebumps is when I see my colleagues doing things which they probably expected to only be doing years later – or not even at all.

One of the areas we explore during the interview process is the candidate’s response to changes in their life, and what they feel about facing up one of humankind’s biggest fears, public speaking.

I have been doing public speaking since 2009 and I am often able to provide my team with speaking opportunities within their first year of working in the business, something which took me over five years to reach.

Leaders should harness what they have to help their team achieve things far quicker than then did.

8. Embrace the 34-hour working week (or don’t let the business completely consume your team)

I run an agency and there are few if any agencies who have a 34-hour working week. In fact, there are few businesses globally who have a 34-hour week.

For me, even before I became a father for the first time, having a healthy work-life balance was crucial for me.

There was no way I was going to let running a business mean I didn’t have much of a life outside of my business.

There is no work-life balance – there is just a life balance that you have to work on.

9. Be human

Some would look at my leadership style and come to the conclusion that I’m a little too open; maybe I share too much.

The way I see it, I am just being a leader who isn’t afraid of exposing his weaknesses and explaining what he is working on in order to become a more positive leader.

In this age of robots and artificial intelligence, being relatable and communicative with my team leads to stronger team dynamic; one built on trust and understanding.

This will lead to a team working together and for one another, rather than simply logging their hours and ticking boxes.

The more human you are, the more you connect with your team.

10. Be approachable

It is easy to get consumed with the day-to-day activities of running a business. It is easy to be in your “leadership bubble” and want to focus on just what is in front of you.

Some people may perceive this as ‘unapproachable’.

For me, I have learnt that being approachable, giving my team the confidence that, irrespective of their role or position in the business, they can come and talk to me, is invaluable.

It ensures I am staying connected with my team, even when new levels of management are being created.

Never underestimate the value of being approachable by any member of your team – it brings you even greater respect from everyone.

11. Be genuine

I have to hold my hands up and say ‚Be Genuine‘ is one of my company’s brand values, alongside ‚Be Expert‘, ‚Be The Change‘, ‚Be Experimental‘, ‚Be Open‘ and ‚Be Happy‘.

Being genuine and having integrity is absolutely essential if you are to create a culture that empowers people to want to be the best they can be.

Being frank and honest and showing some of the inner workings of the business, whether good or bad, isn’t a case of “showing too much” or “worrying your team” – it is simply demonstrating that you are real.

With your team believing in you and sharing in your vision as a result, it will only help you and your business grow and flourish.

Don’t try to be someone that you aren’t – just be yourself and you will be respected.

12. Be transparent

I have huge amounts of admiration for the brand Crew. It is one of the most open and transparent businesses I have come across.

The leadership style within Crew is the complete opposite of the vast majority of businesses.

It reminds me of one of the statements from the exceptional book ‘REWORK’ that has stayed with me for a long time – “out-teach your competition, don’t be afraid of explaining how you do what you do – customers will respect you and come to you.”

Expose areas of your business that will encourage your team to have a greater sense of belonging.

13. Have humility

One of the greatest lessons I have learnt during my entrepreneurial journey is that no matter how much knowledge and experience you amass, you should never disrespect or disregard the ideas and opinions of other people.

Always provide people with the opportunity and confidence to share with you their very best ideas, especially if it’s in a subject area you aren’t an expert in.

Humility is actually the cornerstone of my article “Re-invented HiPPO”. The new HIPPO entails a list of attributes to which we should all aspire: Humility, Integrity, Passion, Positivity and Openness.

Respecting other people is one of the greatest ways to build trust and confidence.

https://econsultancy.com/blog/68211-13-qualities-that-will-help-make-you-a-great-business-leader

Knowhow weitergeben – Nur wenige Chefs fördern den Austausch ihrer Mitarbeiter

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Mitarbeiter tauschen sich aus. Quelle: imago

Viele Chefs wissen, wie wichtig der Austausch ihrer Mitarbeiter ist – aber fördern ihn nicht.

Der Erfolg eines Unternehmens hängt davon ab, ob Mitarbeiter ihr Wissen teilen oder für sich behalten. Die Mehrheit der Chefs weiß das auch. Doch nur wenige Führungskräfte fördern den Wissensaustausch tatsächlich.

Wissensmanagement ist ohne Erfahrungsmanagement blind.

Der neue Mitarbeiter hat einen vorbildlichen Lebenslauf: Er hat studiert, promoviert und kann jahrelange Berufserfahrung in unterschiedlichen Unternehmen vorweisen. Doch zum wirtschaftlichen Erfolg seines neuen Arbeitgebers trägt er wenig bei: Er hat schlicht keine Ahnung von den Unternehmensstrukturen und -abläufen. Und die Kollegen verraten nix.

So etwas ist gar nicht mal selten – und kostet Unternehmen einiges, wie eine Studie der Wirtschaftsprüfung KPMG zeigt. Zwischen 50.000 und 500.000 Euro Produktionsausfallkosten können pro Unternehmen und Jahr entstehen, wenn sich neue Mitarbeiter alles selber beibringen müssen – vom Bedienen der Telefonanlage und der Software bis zu den Arbeitsabläufen. „Je höher der Transfer von Erfahrungswissen in einem Unternehmen ist, desto geringer fallen die Konfliktkosten aus“, sagt Günter Bruns, Senior Fellow der Rheinischen Fachhochschule Köln (RFH).

Bewusstsein ist da, wird aber nicht umgesetzt

Gemeinsam mit der Fachhochschule Burgenland und deren Projektpartner FHS St. Gallen hat die RFH das Europa-Institut Erfahrung & Management (Metis) gegründet, das 600 Führungskräfte in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz zum Erfahrungs- und Wissensmanagement in ihren Betrieben befragt hat.

Die erfreuliche Nachricht: 85 Prozent der Chefs wissen laut Untersuchung, wie wichtig die Weitergabe von Erfahrungswissen ist. Aber nur ein Viertel der Befragten setzt das Wissen auch um. „Es gibt zwar ein Bewusstsein für Erfahrungswissen, aber in der Realität fehlt vielen Führungskräften die notwendige Entschlussfreudigkeit bei der Förderung der Weitergabe“, sagt Bruns. Durch kulturelle und damit oftmals auch sprachliche Barrieren mangele es in vielen Unternehmen an Wissen darüber, wie Mitarbeiter ihr Wissen möglichst effektiv weitergeben.

Kreative Querdenker sind gefragt Quelle: imago, Montage

Dabei hat die Untersuchung ergeben, dass der Erfahrungsaustausch in einem Unternehmen insbesondere dann von großer Bedeutung ist, wenn Mitarbeiter operative Probleme lösen, Entscheidungen treffen, komplexe Zusammenhänge erkennen oder sogar Krisen bewältigen müssen. „Wissensmanagement ist ohne Erfahrungsmanagement blind“, sagt Bruns. Denn die jeweiligen Kenntnisse haben in dem einen Unternehmen vielleicht einen hohen Stellenwert – in einem anderen aber wiederum so gut wie keinen. Und: Wie ist das Wissen zu bewerten? Ist es erst wenige Wochen alt oder schon überholt, weil der Mitarbeiter es vor mehreren Jahren erworben hat?

Trotzdem beurteilen laut Studie viele Chefs die typischen Wissensmanagementmethoden skeptisch – und setzen sie dementsprechend selten ein. Intranet, Social-Media-Plattformen, Storytelling oder Erfahrungsberichte ausscheidender Mitarbeiter würden sogar selten von jungen Managern genutzt werden. „Dieses Ergebnis zeigt, dass man sich von vielen Methoden verabschieden und die etablierten Methoden verbessern muss“, sagt Bruns. Das sei zum Beispiel das Storytelling – Betroffene berichten, wie sie Erfahrungswissen vermitteln. „Eine wichtige Voraussetzung dafür ist allerdings, dass der Feedback-Prozess, also das Vertrauen zwischen Absender und Empfänger von Erfahrungswissen stimmt.“

Kleinen Unternehmen fehlen die Ressourcen

Neben effektiven Wissensmanagementmethoden brauchen Unternehmen für den optimalen Austausch nach Ansicht der Experten auch eine altersübergreifende Belegschaft. „Die Crux ist, die unterschiedlichen Generationen so zusammenzuführen, dass jeder seinen maximalen Nutzen daraus zieht“, sagt RFH-Präsident Martin Wortmann.

Bis vor einigen Jahren glaubten laut Wortmann noch viele Unternehmen, dass die Alten durch ihre mittlerweile starren Arbeitsweisen den Erfolg des Unternehmens mindern würden; die junge Generation blicke hingegen in die Zukunft und sei innovativ. Nur was viele vergaßen: „Jüngere Mitarbeiter sind leichter manipulierbar, steuerbar und beeinflussbar – weil ihnen die Erfahrung fehlt“, gibt Wortmann zu bedenken.

Mitarbeiter aus der Produktion werden unterschätzt

Hinzu kommt, dass sowohl kleine als auch große Betriebe unterschätzen, wie wichtig der abteilungsübergreifende Austausch in einer Organisation ist. „Führungskräfte aus oberen Etagen neigen dazu, dem Wissen eines Mitarbeiters, der beispielsweise die Maschinen in der Produktion bedient, zu wenig Bedeutung beizumessen“, sagt Wortmann. Entweder ignorieren sie aus Erfahrung des Experten deren Kompetenzen oder sie vertreten die Ansicht, dass deren Tätigkeit nur einen geringen Beitrag zum Erfolg des Unternehmens leistet. Dabei könnte sein Erfahrungswissen womöglich einen enormen Beitrag zur Verbesserung von Produktionsabläufen leisten.

Arbeit ist nicht zur Selbstverwirklichung daVöllig falsch. Wer die Arbeit nur wegen des Gehaltschecks macht, der wird langfristig nicht glücklich - sondern unzufrieden, unmotiviert und unproduktiv. Umgekehrt gilt: Mache nie dein Hobby zum Beruf. Der Grund liegt auf der Hand: Betreibt man das Hobby aus einer inneren Motivation (Neugier, Spaß, Glück) heraus, ist man im Beruf vor allem auf die Belohnung (= Gehalt) fixiert. Verliert man dann den Job, fällt man in ein Loch - beides ist nicht dann nämlich nicht mehr da: Motivation und Belohnung. Quelle: Fotolia

Viele Unternehmen halten laut Bruns das Wissen erfahrener Mitarbeiter vor allem dann für hinderlich, wenn sie mit Innovationen eine neue Zukunft einschlagen wollen. „Die Chefs vertreten häufig die Ansicht, dass Erfahrungen nur dazu dienen, das Alte gut zu finden.“ Das ist seiner Meinung nach falsch, denn: „Diese Mitarbeiter haben meist Erfahrungen mit Innovationen gemacht, die wiederum nützlich für neue Technologien sein können“, sagt Bruns.

Vor allem in kleinen Unternehmen vernachlässigen die Führungskräfte den Wissensaustausch ihrer Beschäftigten, wie aus der Befragung hervorgeht. Während große Konzerne oftmals in Weiterbildung und Mentoring investieren, beklagen die kleinen bis mittelständischen Betriebe, dass ihnen die Ressourcen fehlen, um den Wissenstransfer zu fördern. „Im Tagesgeschäft geht bei Klein- und mittelständischen Unternehmen der Transfer von Erfahrung häufig unter, weil ihnen im Vergleich zu größeren Unternehmen die nötigen Ressourcen fehlen“, sagt Wortmann.

http://www.wiwo.de/erfolg/beruf/knowhow-weitergeben-nur-wenige-chefs-foerdern-den-austausch-ihrer-mitarbeiter/14473692-all.html

Silicon Valley Top 100

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There’s a misconception that Silicon Valley is all about creating frivolous apps and getting paid buckets of money to do it while working in a frat house. Some of the brogrammer culture does exist in pockets, but it doesn’t define the cradle of innovation where thousands work and create in Silicon Valley.

Instead, after months of research and debate, Business Insider is proud to present the Silicon Valley 100, our annual list of the people who matter most and define what it means to be in Silicon Valley.

This isn’t another who’s who list based on long-standing reputation; rather it is a look at who made a difference in the past year. These are the star executives breaking new ground at companies, the venture capitalists who did more than make big bets on the future, and the companies that want to change industries and your life.

100. David Boies

Jay Janner-Pool/Getty Images

Lawyer and board member, Theranos

Boies has provided legal counsel for a slew of troubled tech startups, ranging from Napster to Hampton Creek and now Theranos. The legal expert is defending the company from inquests by several government agencies and is considered a force to be reckoned with — he helped the US win the 1998 case United States v. Microsoft Corporation, in which the government accused Microsoft of becoming a monopoly.

99. Andre Iguodala

Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Tech investor and NBA player

Iguodala plays for the Golden State Warriors, the NBA team owned by a spate of VCs, including Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital and Joe Lacob of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Ben Horowitz, whom Iguodala describes as a „total brainiac,“ has taken the NBA free agent under his wing, teaching him about portfolio management.

Iguodala has invested in the stocks of Facebook, Twitter, and Tesla, and he appeared at Tech Crunch Disrupt in September.

98. David Drummond

Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

Senior VP of corporate development, Alphabet

With Google’s restructuring into Alphabet, Drummond was pulled up to the top to oversee mergers and acquisitions for all of Alphabet’s ventures. He previously acted as Google’s first outside lawyer, working with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to secure Google’s earliest financing rounds. Drummond also still sits on the board of Uber.

97. Tony Xu

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, DoorDash

In March, the food-delivery startup DoorDash raised $127 million — but it did so in a down round, meaning the company raised money at a lower valuation than it previously held. The investment exemplifies the difficulty DoorDash and comparable startups in Silicon Valley are facing to secure funding as investors have grown wary of on-demand businesses. But Xu denies that the company just had a down round, holding on to the declaration that DoorDash is in good shape. The three-year-old startup is operating in 25 cities, has deals with major chains like Taco Bell, and recently expanded into alcohol delivery.

The company also has another edge in the food-delivery space, though: Unlike other meal-delivery services, DoorDash provides its own drivers, which makes it possible to order from restaurants that aren’t available on places like GrubHub, giving users more variety.

96. Manny Bamfo

Recharge

Cofounder and CEO, Recharge

If you have ever craved a quick nap while away from home, you will understand the allure of Recharge. The app allows anyone near a partnering hotel to get some privacy for extremely short hotel stays — think hours or even minutes. Bamfo came up with the concept after noticing that on-demand Lyft drivers had nowhere to rest between jobs. Investors like it too, and in June the company raised a $2.3 million seed round led by Binary Capital.

95. Tom Reilly

Cloudera

CEO, Cloudera

Cloudera, a software company launched in 2008 that aims to help businesses — more than 20,000, in fact — make sense of huge data sets, has raised more than $1 billion in private funding. Investors include Intel, Google Ventures, and MSD Capital.

The company has been considering an initial public offering for more than a year to maintain its dominance in the market, but Reilly said in April that Cloudera would enter the public market only „when we’ve reached the right scale, when the business is more predictable, when there’s greater visibility.“ They may have good reason to wait a while longer: Fidelity, another investor in the company, marked down the value of its Cloudera stake, along with stakes in several other startups, by 37% in March.

94. Nirav Tolia

Nextdoor

Cofounder and CEO, Nextdoor

Nextdoor, the private social-networking service for neighborhoods, became a tech unicorn last year after raising $110 million in funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion.

After establishing an active presence nationally in all 50 states, Tolia took Nextdoor international this year by expanding into the Netherlands. The social network is continuing to team up with local police departments to improve neighborhood crime response, but under Tolia it is also taking a firm stance against racial profiling.

93. Matthew Prince, Lee Holloway, Michelle Zatlyn

Anthony Harvey/Getty Images

Not Pictured: Holloway.

Cofounders, CloudFlare

CloudFlare handles 10% of the internet’s traffic, giving it a lot of quiet control over the web. In April, the startup became the first company to widely activate a technology that lets webpages and apps load as much as 15% faster, potentially shaving precious seconds off of your search time. It will take a year for the speed boost to come to full fruition, but it could usher in a new class of web applications when it does.

The company’s internet dominance has attracted the eyes of investors. In September the company raised $110 million in a round led by Fidelity and joined by Google Capital, Microsoft, Baidu, and Qualcomm Ventures.

92. Xavier Niel

Wikimedia Commons

Founder, 42

Niel, the French billionaire, launched a free coding school in the heart of Silicon Valley with a $100 million fund. In the next five years, the school, called 42, is expected to have 10,000 students. Niel started the program as a tuition-free college alternative primarily focused on teaching coding and entrepreneurial thinking. A high-school dropout, Niel founded the first 42 school in Paris in 2013. The US version has garnered support from Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield.

91. Ryan Hoover

Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Founder, Product Hunt

When investors want to find the next big thing to sweep Silicon Valley, they turn to Product Hunt, a community review website where users can upvote and downvote new tech products and companies. A feature on the site can make or break a startup’s future, and as the founder and face of the company, Hoover holds the power to determine what is and is not cool.

That power turned Product Hunt into a hot startup itself, and the tech darling has raised $7.1 million in funding to date. In the past year the company also partnered with the workplace chat app Slack to make it even easier to monitor and browse the site, and it launched Product Hunt Live, which allows people congregate online and learn about the tech world straight from startup founders.

90. Javier Soltero

Wikimedia Commons

Corporate VP of Outlook, Microsoft

Soltero has accomplished a lot in a very short time: His startup Acompli was purchased by Microsoft in late 2014. By January 2015, Acompli had been rebranded Outlook Mobile, and it went on to win acclaim as one of the best ways to handle your email and calendars on iPhone and Android devices. With that success under his belt, Soltero was named corporate vice president of Microsoft Outlook less than a year later, guiding development of the ubiquitous productivity software across PCs, tablets, phones, and beyond.

89. Marwan Fawaz

Nest

CEO, Nest

Fawaz joined Nest, which is part of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, after CEO Tony Fadell stepped down in June. As the new face of Nest, Fawaz is tasked with turning the company around after its tumultuous year, which included product issues and complaints about Fadell’s management. Previously, Fawaz repositioned the Motorola Home business as its president, streamlining products and services and leading the transaction process to sell the business unit to Arris for $2.35 billion in 2013.

88. Marco Zappacosta

Thumbtack Inc

Cofounder and CEO, Thumbtack

In September, Zappacosta’s startup Thumbtack, a platform that matches professionals like personal trainers or electricians with potential customers, raised $125 million, pushing its valuation to $1.3 billion and giving the startup unicorn status. As a competitor to Angie’s List or Yelp, Thumbtack is a startup that is helping usher in the era of freelance work. Jeb Bush visited the startup’s headquarters last July during his presidential run to take a look at the sharing economy while making his rounds in the San Francisco Bay Area.

87. Jess Lee

Jess Lee / Polyvore

Cofounder and CEO, Polyvore

Yahoo bought the social shopping site Polyvore last July reportedly for a price of about $200 million, saying the company’s expertise in community-driven experiences and retailer-supported commerce paired with Yahoo’s premium content showed „amazing potential.“ Lee said Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer had a part in shaping her career when she interviewed Lee for Google’s elite associate product manager program back in the early 2000s. Since it joined the Yahoo family, Polyvore expanded in February to include a new menswear category, an area that Pinterest is also aggressively going after.

86. Stacy Brown-Philpot

TaskRabbit

CEO, TaskRabbit

After Leah Busque stepped down from the role of TaskRabbit CEO for a second time, Brown-Philpot took over in April, becoming the first black female CEO in Silicon Valley. The former Google employee studied startups and played a lead role in global consumer operations before joining TaskRabbit in 2013. She took unpopular but necessary steps — including layoffs — to get the startup on track toward its goal of profitability this year.

85. Joe Lonsdale

TechCrunch, Flickr

Founding partner, 8VC

Once dubbed one of the „hottest VCs since Andreessen Horowitz,“ Formation 8 broke up in November, with its founding partners, including Lonsdale, the Palantir cofounder, all leaving to start their own firms. The turnaround for Lonsdale was fast. Four months later, he had already raised $300 million for his new firm, 8VC. He now sits on the board of several hot startups including Oscar, Hyperloop One, and Wish.

84. Talia Jane

Talia Jane/Twitter

Ex-employee, Yelp

Jane, a former Yelp employee, sparked conversations in Silicon Valley when she wrote an open letter to Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman claiming that some of his employees just couldn’t make ends meet; hours later, she was fired. Her missive noted that she made only $8.15 an hour after taxes, claiming she couldn’t afford groceries and that „bread is a luxury“ to her. Her letter not only went viral, but it also made tech companies confront whether they were paying a living wage in light of San Francisco’s dizzying rent prices.

83. Chris Wanstrath

Brian Ach/Getty Images

CEO, Github

Described as the „Facebook for code,“ Github’s rapidly growing software development network is made up of over 15 million users. With more than 38 million projects available on the site, Github has become one of the largest communities of software developers on the web. Last summer, Github raised $250 million in series B funding, bringing total funding to $350 million and raising its valuation to $2 billion.

As for the future? Wanstrath told Business Insider in October that he wanted to make it easier for anyone to become a developer, and to do that he wants to focus on improving Github’s service.

82. Larry Ellison, Mark Hurd, Safra Catz

Noah Berger/Reuters, Robert Galbraith/Reuters, and Justin Sullivan/Getty

CEO (Hurd and Catz), CTO and founder (Ellison), Oracle

In the first year since Ellison, the Oracle founder and chairman, stepped down as CEO — he moved to the role of chief technology officer and was succeeded by co-CEOs Hurd and Catz — the company has set off on a startup-buying spree. In its fifth and most recent acquisition of 2016, Oracle purchased Opower, a cloud-based energy-management company used by more than half of the world’s largest utility companies, for $532 million. Before that it bought another cloud-services company, Textura, for $663 million, expanding its offerings in the construction industry.

Though Oracle’s cloud business is still just a fraction of the company’s overall revenue, Ellison thinks it could lead Oracle to become the first cloud-computing business to reach $10 billion in revenue. Catz was the top-paid female executive in 2015, earning nearly $57 million.

81. Phil Fernandez

Marketo

CEO, Marketo

Marketo had been public for three years, but that never stopped the speculation that it was a ripe target for M&A. The rumors were finally put to an end in May after the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners bought Marketo’s remaining shares of common stock for $1.79 billion. Fernandez said the all-cash deal would „allow Marketo to continue to focus on customer success and to remain the independent category leader.“ Before Marketo, Fernandez was an executive at Epiphany and Red Brick Systems and helped launch a few successful initial public offerings.

80. Shervin Pishevar

Sherpa Capital

Cofounder and managing director, Sherpa Capital

Pishevar was the person who persuaded Elon Musk to release his plans for the Hyperloop super-fast transportation system to the public back in 2013, and he is now the chairman of Hyperloop One, a startup that is trying to make Musk’s vision real. Pishevar is best known for his early investment in Uber back when everyone thought the ride-hailing company was overhyped, and, well, we all know how that turned out. Between his investments as a VC and his personal angel investments, he has had a stake in a huge list of other startups, including Klout, Parse, TaskRabbit, Tumblr, Warby Parker, and Washio.

79. Tim Kentley-Klay and Jesse Levinson

Zoox

Cofounder (Kentley-Klay), cofounder and CTO (Levinson), Zoox

Zoox, a driverless taxi startup, has permission to test in California — it’s the only startup of its kind with a license to do so. The company recently closed a $200 million round, and it has reportedly been valued at $1 billion. Kentley-Klay and Levinson have stacked their staff with former Alphabet, Apple, and Tesla workers to build a technology that could rival Uber’s ride-hailing service, though the company tends to stay under the radar with its driver-free projects.

78. Ali Ghodsi

Databricks

Cofounder and CEO, Databricks

Databricks‘ data-crunching technology, Spark, allows for the real-time processing that powers new-wave technologies like self-driving cars and face-recognition tech. The concept fit the industry’s latest „big data“ trend: Companies are storing massive amounts of information and sifting through it to find business insights, and they are using all that data to offer their customers new programs and services. Ghodsi’s company really burst onto the scene last year when IBM announced plans to invest about $300 million over the next few years into the open-source version of Spark.

77. Dustin Moskovitz

Asana

Cofounder and CEO, Asana

For Moskovitz, one of Facebook’s earliest employees, worker experience and profitability trump company growth. And Asana boasts an employee experience like no other: Its 190 employees enjoy homemade gourmet food all day long made by a professionally trained chef. In March, Moskovitz raised $50 million to keep his enterprise collaboration alive. The funds came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; Y Combinator president Sam Altman; Groupon founder Andrew Mason; and Peter Thiel’s VC firm Founder’s Fund, among others.

76. Nick Weaver

Eero

Cofounder and CEO, Eero

Those pesky Wi-Fi dead spots and slow loading speeds in your home no longer need to be an issue thanks to Weaver’s mesh networking device. Eero, which finally launched early this year after a series of delays, uses multiple devices to blanket your entire home with a smooth Wi-Fi signal. It was worth the wait, though. Silicon Valley investors gave Weaver $90 million to build his concept, which according to our reviews, really does boost browsing speeds.

75. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

Brian Ach/Getty Images

Founder and CEO, Joyus; Founder, theBoardlist

After experiencing sexism at her first Silicon Valley job, Cassidy knew the state of diversity in the industry needed to change. So she created theBoardlist, which helps startups and private companies find women to serve as independent directors on boards. The list of potential female board members comes entirely from recommendations of hand-selected successful Valley entrepreneurs, and the company has already compiled a list of 1,000 qualified women endorsed by about 200 business professionals and is hosting information on about 60 open board seats.

74. Ali Rowghani

Joi Ito/Flickr

Managing partner, Y Combinator

Y Combinator CEO Sam Altman didn’t want a traditional late-stage venture capitalist to run the company’s VC fund, Continuity Fund, so he hired Rowghani, a former Twitter and Pixar executive. Rowghani leads growth investments in a lot of today’s hot startups — as long as they are Y Combinator alumni. The company’s investments in late-stage companies is a turning point for the accelerator, which used to be known only as the starting point for some of the biggest startups in tech.

73. Kris Gale and Vivek Garipalli

Clover Health

Cofounders, Clover Health

Clover Health, founded by Gale and Garipalli, has been on a funding tear, raising $260 million in the past year to revolutionize insurance. It received a record-breaking $4 million investment from First Round, a firm that on average invests $500,000 in its targets. What sets Clover apart from other insurance companies is its use of software on every level of care: It builds a team that maintains users‘ profiles and can dispatch nurses on home visits, after a surgery for example, to make sure patients are following through on their instructions and feeling better.

72. Divya Nag

Divya Nag/Website

Head of ResearchKit and CareKit, Apple

Before ResearchKit, Nag dropped out of Stanford, founded Stem Cell Theranostics, and built Stanford’s official medical innovation accelerator program. She joined Apple in 2014 and now leads the company’s charge into the health tech realm, specifically with its open-source developer toolbox that provides data storage and sharing. Medical personnel use the technology in hospitals as a way to monitor and keep tabs on their patients. Plus, researchers can use the data to study diseases and health trends.

71. Scott Dietzen

Steve Jennings/Getty Images

CEO, Pure Storage

Dietzen, who previously held the positions of president and CTO at the VMWare-acquired email startup Zimbra, oversaw the company’s initial public offering in October; it was one of the few companies to go public in the past year. The company debuted at $17 a share but has since lost more than a third of its value as investors have soured on tech.

70. Anne Wojcicki

Kimberly White/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, 23andMe

Two years after Wojcicki’s personal genetics company, 23andMe, was ordered by the Food and Drug Administration to halt operations for misrepresenting its testing reports as medical advice, the company relaunched last fall with $115 million in new funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion. It now offers a new $199 spit-and-submit test that provides users with 60-plus FDA-approved reports.

The more people know about their genetics, Wojcicki believes, the more informed their health and wellness decisions will be. And 80% of the company’s 1 million genotyped customers have agreed to share their data with 23andMe for potentially groundbreaking scientific and medical research. This spring, 23andMe reportedly opened a drug lab where it will test treatment ideas, potentially leading to future profit generation for the company.

69. Martin Roscheisen

Martin Roscheisen/Twitter

Cofounder, Diamond Foundry

After three years in hiding, the Santa Clara-based startup emerged claiming it had found a way to grow real diamonds in a lab. The breakthrough was enough to persuade 10 billionaires and members of Silicon Valley tech royalty to invest. Leonardo DiCaprio backs the venture as well. With this technology, Diamond Foundry hopes consumers will no longer have to question whether their diamonds were ethically produced.

68. Angela Ahrendts

Flickr via Fortune Live Media

Senior VP of retail and online stores, Apple

Since leaving her post as CEO of Burberry in 2014 to take over Apple’s retail and online operations, Ahrendts has reenvisioned what an Apple store could look like, positioning it as a contender in the luxury market. Under Ahrendts, the brand streamlined its inventory and added upscale, non-Apple products to its offerings, such as a futuristic speaker that retails for nearly $2,000.

Ahrendts aims to bridge the divide between Apple’s online and offline presence, adding features like a 24-hour meeting space, free Wi-Fi, and ornate decorations to stores, as debuted in San Francisco. Ahrendts hopes to make Apple stores a vital part of the communities they are located in, much in the way Apple products permeate modern life.

67. Dag Kittlaus

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Viv; Cofounder, Siri

Kittlaus decided that Siri „was only chapter one of a much bigger, longer story“ and recently unveiled Viv, an artificial intelligence company. The company is building what Kittlaus calls a „global brain,“ a new kind of voice-controlled virtual personal assistant that will be able to perform thousands of tasks. And it won’t just be stuck in a phone; it will be integrated into everything from fridges to cars. Viv has $30 million in funding and is the brainchild of Kittlaus, fellow Siri founder Adam Cheyer, and Siri software engineer Chris Brigham.

66. Dick Costolo

Getty / Steve Jennings

Cofounder and CEO, Chorus; partner, Index Ventures

Despite a public exit from Twitter last year, Costolo hasn’t left Silicon Valley. In January he announced plans to launch a fitness software startup with the goal of making fitness fun and social as well as shaking up how users motivate themselves to work out.

Costolo isn’t afraid to poke fun at Silicon Valley’s culture, either. He works as a consultant on the HBO show of the same name, expertly spoofing startup culture and the tech world. There might even be a fictitious version of Costolo on the show.

65. Mårten Mickos

HackerOne

CEO, HackerOne

Mickos was named CEO of HackerOne last year after holding CEO positions at the database company MySQL and the HP-acquired Eucalyptus Systems. Along the way, Mickos has become a sort of fatherly pied-piper figure to a generation of socially awkward teen hackers, many of them living in developing countries. He is guiding them to the light of hacking for good, and earning some money, instead of causing mischief.

The hot cybersecurity startup HackerOne’s investors include Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, and Adobe and Yahoo are among its customers. Companies like Uber use the startup to hunt bugs on their software. HackerOne has raised $34 million in venture-capital financing from firms like Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

64. Susan Wu, Laura I. Gómez, Erica Baker, Ellen Pao, Tracy Chou, Y-Vonne Hutchinson, Bethanye McKinney Blount, Freada Kapor Klein

Ashleigh Richelle/Project Include

Cofounders, Project Include

The nonprofit, started by eight successful women in Silicon Valley, is one of the biggest diversity initiatives in tech. Project Include asks tech companies to track their rates of inclusion to shed light on the industry’s slow diversification. Big players like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook know they lack in diversity, so the nonprofit wants to spark change — fast.

63. Todd McKinnon

Okta

Cofounder and CEO, Okta

McKinnon was a Salesforce engineer before founding Okta, now a seven-year-old cloud security startup valued at $1.2 billion. Okta, which connects and manages passwords and log-ins for services used by companies‘ employees, is reportedly toying with an initial public offering after hiring a Goldman Sachs banker in June. An Okta representative confirmed to Business Insider that the move was not for the purpose of an outright sale. Okta raised $75 million last September, bringing its total funding to about $230 million.

The competition in the cloud software space is fierce. This spring, Microsoft — an Okta customer, partner, and competitor — disinvited Okta from its coming tech conference because of „broad competition“ between the companies, only to change its mind a week later and reinvite the company.

62. Max Levchin

Affirm

Cofounder and CEO, Affirm

Levchin, the longtime Silicon valley bigwig known for founding PayPal, left Yahoo’s board after a three-year stint „due to other commitments“ — the main one being his startup Affirm, the alternative lending company. In April, Affirm raised $100 million in a series D round that it plans to use to increase its distribution capacity, grow its merchant clientele beyond the 700 retailers it now works with, and expand to products beyond point-of-sale financing.

61. Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp

Cofounders, CEO (Silbermann), chief creative officer (Sharp), Pinterest

Pinterest hit over 100 million active monthly users and a $11 billion valuation this past year, spurring Silbermann and Sharp to ramp up their e-commerce plans. Their new buyable pins allow users to purchase items directly from the site’s pins.

Though the company reportedly generated more than $100 million in revenue in 2015, Silbermann continues to reject rumors the company will go public and plans to focus on international expansion. In April, Pinterest announced that over half of its more than 100 million monthly active users were international.

60. Steve Huffman

CEO, Reddit

After founding Reddit, Huffman became its CEO after the social site’s users rebelled for infringements on free speech and interim CEO Ellen Pao resigned. Since taking over, Huffman enacted policies meant to stop Reddit’s abuse, like announcing that boards with content that incite violence or harm would be banned. Huffman’s other main focus has been turning on potential areas for monetization, like the site’s „I Am A…“ subreddit. In June, the startup announced it would automatically rewrite some links posted to help generate revenue from affiliates.

59. Rick Osterloh

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

Senior VP of hardware, Google

Osterloh, previously the Motorola president, stepped into a newly created Google position a few months ago after reportedly turning down the CEO gig at DocuSign, a startup valued at about $3 billion. He now runs Google’s new hardware division, where he is responsible for unifying its diverse handful of products including its flagship Nexus phones and Google Glass revamp. His appointment may signify a new direction for Google or perhaps just the need for someone to figure out what the company’s direction should be.

58. Ben Hindman

Mesosphere

Cofounder, Mesosphere

Last year, the cloud-computing startup Mesosphere, which valued itself at $1 billion, reportedly declined a $150 million acquisition bid by Microsoft. Microsoft and Mesosphere will continue their technology partnership, which integrates Mesosphere’s flagship Data Center Operating System product with the Microsoft Azure cloud. Hindman created the company while at UC Berkeley, and now companies like Twitter and Airbnb use the technology to write code once and run it anywhere, on any server infrastructure.

57. Venkata „Murthy“ Renduchintala

Intel

President of client and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses and systems architecture group, Intel

After Intel hired Renduchintala from Qualcomm, he became a major influence in repositioning Intel for the modern age. In November the company spent over $10 million in bonus payments alone to bring Renduchintala as president of the newly created group that oversees Intel’s largest revenue-generating businesses, including its PC and IoT chips. In April, CEO Brian Krzanich announced 12,000 layoffs and a $1.2 billion charge, and Renduchintala will be helping to decide what to cut. Renduchintala has been critical of Intel’s lack of product and customer focus, and he is the one leading the charge to make sure the company finds its way forward.

56. Joshua Reeves

Gusto

Cofounder and CEO, Gusto

The human-resources software startup Gusto — formerly known as ZenPayroll — continues to grow, capitalizing on the recent troubles at Zenefits, one of its closest competitors. To keep Gusto thriving, Reeves focuses on putting customers first and curating a select team, rather than on expanding quickly and raising huge rounds of financing. That said, Gusto has raised more than $161 million, earning a $1 billion valuation in December.

55. Patrick Brown

Impossible Foods

Cofounder and CEO, Impossible Foods

Founded by Brown, a former Stanford biochemistry professor, Impossible Foods has engineered a plant-based burger that could be the answer to reducing animal-product consumption, especially for self-identifying meat lovers. Bill Gates and UBS are among the investors who think it is the answer: Impossible Foods has raised $183 million for its food concepts. The burger — which contains wheat protein, potato protein, and coconut oil, among other ingredients — looks like a beef patty and cooks the way it would. Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt praised meatless meat products as a possible world-changing technology, but Alphabet and Impossible Foods never secured a deal that was in the works last summer. Instead, the company is launching its meatless burger in New York.

54. Chris Lehane

Larry Busacca/Getty Images

Head of global policy and public affairs, Airbnb

Airbnb isn’t welcomed to every city with open arms, and former political guru Lehane is the man to help the startup find its way forward. Last fall, Airbnb spent millions to defeat a San Francisco ballot initiative that could have put a cap on the amount for which homeowners could rent their homes. Lehane gave a victory speech after the verdict, boasting of Airbnb’s NRA-rivaling membership numbers and its ability to mobilize its network of hosts. Lehane’s „SF-11“ group showcased the company’s usefulness and solidified it as a force for political change.

53. Chris Urmson

Youtube

Director of self-driving car project, Google

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, teamed up with the Department of Transportation to bring driverless-car technology one step closer to reaching the consumer market. Together, Google and the DOT aggregate data, better understand traffic patterns and congestion areas, and thus help driverless cars better navigate cities. So far, Urmson’s driverless-car prototype knows how to dodge streakers and women in wheelchairs, but it isn’t quite foolproof yet. Earlier this year, the prototype had a literal run-in with a bus. Surely, more tests are yet to come for Urmson and Google.

52. Doug Evans

The OutCast Agency

Founder and CEO, Juicero

After years in stealth mode and roughly $120 million in funding, Juicero, the company behind the „Keurig for Juice,“ finally launched in March. The countertop cold-press juicer churns out 8 ounces of organic, nutrient-dense juices. A Juicero app lets users keep track of juice pack deliveries and nutritional information.

Evans has made it his mission to help people lead healthier lives, though Juicero’s steep $699 price tag could deter potential customers. For now, only residents of California can purchase the product, but the company’s site teases that it will soon be available nationwide.

51. Bozoma Saint John

Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

Head of global consumer marketing for Apple Music and iTunes, Apple

Saint John stole the show at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference — she got the audience to rap along to the Sugarhill Gang’s „Rapper’s Delight“ and was dubbed „the coolest person to ever go onstage at an Apple event“ by BuzzFeed. Saint John ended up at Apple by way of the company’s acquisition of Beats Music, and before that she built Pepsi’s music and entertainment marketing group. Her team at Apple revamped Apple Music with features, like lyrics, that excited WWDC’s entire crowd.

50. Susan Wojcicki

FilmMagic for YouTube

CEO, YouTube

Since becoming CEO of Google’s YouTube division in 2014, Wojcicki has made a slew of changes. Under her lead, YouTube has dived into virtual reality, live programming, and a $10-a-month ad-free subscription service that aims to monetize the platform’s audience more effectively.

YouTube is also rapidly bulking up its advertiser base, signing a $200 million contract with the ad-buying firm Magna Global and experimenting with custom video ads for small businesses. Wojcicki recently introduced an extension of the site’s Preferred product that lets brands automatically place their content by YouTube’s fastest rising and most popular videos.

49. Marissa Mayer

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

CEO, Yahoo

Yahoo is struggling: revenue is down, investors are unhappy, and the company is bleeding money into acquisitions that aren’t providing the rescue the company needs. In the midst of Yahoo’s plight, many place the blame on Mayer for failing to turn things around in the four years since she took over.

But Mayer isn’t going down without a fight. She has stayed firmly at the helm of the company, determined to either figure out how to get Yahoo out of the red or dismantle the ship.

48. Nat Friedman

Xamarin

Cofounder and CEO, Xamarin

Xamarin, an open-source development company, allows programmers to write mobile apps that work on any popular operating system (iOS, Android, Windows) and then host them on their cloud of choice. When Xamarin, founded by Friedman, was getting its start in 2011, Microsoft was still considered an adversary by most open-source developers.

But no longer: Microsoft has begun to embrace open source as never before, and it bought Xamarin for a reported $400 million to $500 million in February. Xamarin’s new mission is to encourage developers to use Microsoft’s cloud instead of competitors‘ as the company works to grow its cloud business.

47. Chris Cox

Stephen Lam/Reuters

Chief product officer, Facebook

The past year for Facebook has been all about video, and Cox is the man in charge of its product vision. The longtime Facebooker has led the full-blown charge into making video one of the top priorities both in your News Feed and for the company.

But his job isn’t all video. Cox is also behind the changes to the „Like“ button and also the new emoji reactions — don’t call them a „dislike button“ — that the company has seen this year. In June, Cox introduced more changes to the News Feed, including prioritizing friends‘ posts over those of publishers. Basically, whatever you see on Facebook is a result of Cox’s leadership over everything product at the social network.

46. Brian McClendon

Brian McClendon/Twitter

VP of advanced technologies, Uber

When Google announced its plans to create self-driving cars and a service to go with them, Uber turned to the former Google exec to head efforts against its automatic-car rival. Google Ventures (now known as GV) invested roughly $250 million in Uber in 2013, but the two companies‘ expanding ambitions mean they are increasingly eyeing each other’s turf. McClendon isn’t the only one who left Google for Uber: A LinkedIn search reveals that more than 300 Xooglers, or former Google employees, now work at Uber.

45. Chris Dixon

Noam Galai/Getty Images

Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Dixon’s wheelhouse in venture capital is the crazy brainiac ideas that might just be our future. Dixon led the firm’s recent investment in the self-driving car and AI startup Comma.ai. The venture capitalist has also invested in moonshots like Nootrobox, which manufactures purportedly brain-assisting add-ons called nootropics, and Dispatch, which is building a fleet of self-driving delivery vehicles. Plus, he is a staunch supporter of the products made by the companies he invests in: He drinks Soylent and eats nootropics pills daily.

44. Garrett Camp

Flickr/Joi

Cofounder, Uber; cofounder, StumbleUpon; founder, Expa

Though he has shifted his focus to other projects, Camp is a multibillionaire thanks to his stake in the ubiquitous ride-hailing service Uber; his net worth is now at $6.2 billion.

This year, Camp launched the startup incubator Expa Labs, which has raised $100 million and will focus on providing a more hands-on experience to smaller cohorts of budding tech companies. Last August, he also bought back a controlling stake in StumbleUpon, the content-discovery website he cofounded as a graduate student in 2001 that learns what users like and recommends related sites to them.

43. Peter Szulczewski

Peter Szulczewski/Facebook

Cofounder and CEO, Wish

Szulczewski has big plans for his e-commerce company. In 2015 he reportedly rejected multibillion-dollar acquisition inquiries from Amazon and Alibaba, and he projects Wish to sell $2 billion worth of goods this year. The company, which sells directly from merchants to consumers, spends big bucks on advertising, including an annual $100 million on Facebook ad space. Now people are wondering whether Wish could be the next Walmart of the online era.

42. Jimmy Iovine and Eddy Cue

Angela Weiss/Getty Images

Cofounder, Beats Electronics; senior VP of internet software and services, Apple

Watch out, Spotify: Apple’s coming for you. After launching last June, with Apple executives Iovine and Cue leading the charge, Apple Music garnered 6.5 million paid subscribers in the first month after the free-trial period ended. A year later, that number had grown to 15 million paid subscribers.

Though the service still has a ways to go to catch up with Spotify’s 30 million paid subscribers, the rapid growth bodes well for the tech company. Apple launched the service as a direct challenge to Spotify’s prominence in streaming, and so far it is putting forth a good fight.

41. Ev Williams

Christopher Michel/Flickr

Cofounder and CEO, Medium; founder, Obvious Ventures

Medium — the blogging platform used by tens of millions of people from budding writers to Valley mainstays to President Barack Obama — spent the year carving out some impressive real estate in the publishing sphere. This spring, the company created by Twitter cofounder and former CEO Ev Williams announced a $50 million round of funding, which followed a $57 million round in September.

In a post about the funding, the round’s leading investor, Spark Capital, wrote that the „publishing tool, network, and ecosystem“ was „solely focused on being the best place to read and write interesting stuff.“

40. Andrew Dreskin

Ticketfly

Cofounder and CEO, Ticketfly

Pandora acquired the ticketing company Ticketfly for $450 million last year. Though Ticketfly is small compared with the ticketing giant Ticketmaster, the company is known for handling ticket sales for performances at smaller venues and the marketing and analytics for the venues it serves. Pandora plans to use the recent acquisition to build „the most effective marketplace for connecting music makers and fans.“

39. George Hotz

Comma.ai

Founder, Comma.ai

Hotz is best known for his previous life as a hacker — he cracked the original iPhone in 2007 when he was 17, and he went on to break into the PlayStation 3 in 2010. Since then he has built a self-driving car from the comfort of his own garage and created Comma.ai — a kit that lets customers turn „dumb“ cars into self-driving versions — based on that technology. It caught the attention of Andreessen Horowitz, which invested $3 million in the startup.

38. Adam Bain

Handout/Getty Images

Chief operating officer, Twitter

Before he became Twitter’s COO, Bain was on the short list to be the company’s CEO. The past year has seen stalling user growth and disappointing financial performance (Twitter stock hit an all-time low in May), but Bain has kept the money machine pumping against all odds.

37. Greg Clark

Courtesy of Blue Coat

CEO, Symantec

Blue Coat, a security systems company, was on track to become the largest initial public offering in tech this year after the IPO market all but dried up. The company stopped short of going public, however, when Symantec offered to purchase it for about $4.65 billion in cash. Clark, the CEO at Blue Coat, then became Symantec’s CEO.

36. Orion Hindawi

Courtesy of Tanium

Cofounder and CEO, Tanium

Hindawi attributes Tanium’s success to its focus on building a quality product before fixating on growth. Now the hot security startup claims to be cash-flow positive and growing at more than 250% a year. After raising $52 million, the company raised another $120 million a mere five months later. In that time, Tanium’s valuation doubled to $3.5 billion. The most impressive part? The company spends no money on sales and marketing, but rather it gets all its customers through word of mouth in the IT community.

35. Mike Cagney, Dan Macklin, Ian Brady, James Finnigan

SoFi ; LinkedIn

Cofounders, SoFi

The lending and wealth-management startup SoFi received a $1 billion funding round led by SoftBank last year that was the biggest financing round ever in the fintech industry. Since then, Cagney has been pursuing a $30 billion valuation and building up SoFi as a competitor with brick-and-mortar banks and online lending services. He also told Business Insider that the startup was considering an expansion into the world of life insurance.

34. Sheryl Sandberg

Allison Shelley/Getty Images

Chief operating officer, Facebook

As UC Berkeley’s graduation speaker, Sandberg delivered a moving address about the death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, in May 2015. Her comments about resilience in the face of loss show that she is a force to be reckoned with, professionally and otherwise. For the past year, she has been a single parent to her two children while still leading Facebook as its chief operating officer. Outside that, she also backs Globality, a startup with the mission to advance the global economy by allowing more businesses to export products. Still, she says, „being a mother is the most important — and most humbling — job I’ve ever had.“

33. Patrick and John Collison

Stripe

Cofounders, Stripe

There’s no slowing down the mobile-payment company Stripe. In July 2015 it received funding from a group of investors that included Visa and American Express. The $100 million round brought Stripe’s valuation to $5 billion.

Stripe also launched two new products: Relay allows businesses to sell products on other apps, and Atlas helps international companies start businesses in the US. In March, Collison was among a group of American business leaders who joined President Barack Obama on a trip to Cuba, one of the countries Stripe launched in this year, to try to bridge the gap between the two countries.

32. Diane Bryant

Intel

Senior VP and general manager, Data Center Group, Intel

In the midst of a declining PC market, Bryant keeps Intel alive as head of the company’s most profitable and fastest-growing unit, its Data Center Group. The unit creates chips that power internet services like autonomous cars, smart grids, and drones, and last year it generated $16 billion in revenue, or about 30% of Intel’s total sales. The company’s new focus on the Internet of Things puts Bryant at the forefront of Intel’s potential for innovation.

31. Keith Block

Salesforce

Chief operating officer, Salesforce

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff loves what former Oracle sales star Block is doing for the company’s enterprise sales, so much so that he bought the COO a $41,000 watch. Block signed a record number of deals last quarter — 600 for at least $1 million each — and he secured a nine-figure contract with an unnamed company he described as „one of the world’s most respected companies.“ In May, Salesforce announced that the US Department of Health and Human Services signed a $100 million „blanket“ contract with Salesforce that also included a whopping $503 million budget just for related consulting services.

30. Rob Mee

Pivotal

CEO, Pivotal

Pivotal recently caught the attention of Ford, which led to a $253 million investment round for the software-building and consulting startup that counts BMW, Twitter, and Best Buy as customers. Microsoft also participated in the round, which was Mee’s first as the newly appointed CEO. Together, Pivotal and Microsoft create an industry stronghold: They share 100 customers in the Fortune 500. Partnerships with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s cloud computing services make Pivotal an easy-to-use service, even for legacy companies like Home Depot.

29. Regina Dugan

Facebook

Head of Building 8, Facebook

This year, Dugan left her position as head of Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects Group for Facebook, where she was hired to spearhead the company’s new Building 8 initiative. The social network tasked Dugan and her team with creating hardware that will expand its product development efforts. It will be interesting to see where Dugan, who advocates rapid prototyping, takes Building 8.

28. Nathan Blecharczyk, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia

Airbnb

Cofounders, Airbnb

Airbnb became one of the most valuable startups in the world in December after securing a massive $1.5 billion funding round, raising its valuation to $25.5 billion. But that’s not enough for the billionaire founders‘ ambitious international expansion plan; they are now seeking a new round of funding that would raise Airbnb’s valuation to $30 billion, triple what it was just two years ago. The room-renting company has listings in 191 countries and projects that 129 million nights will be booked by year’s end.

There is just one thing stopping Airbnb from further growth: government roadblocks. In early June, for instance, the city of San Francisco backed Airbnb into a corner, requiring that the company list only properties that are registered with the city. Airbnb has sued the city to protect its renters who rely on their Airbnb income.

27. David Sacks

David Sacks

CEO, Zenefits

After launching in 2013, the insurance startup Zenefits grew to 1,600 employees in two years. Soon after, Zenefits fell off track for its $100 million sales target, intracompany communication spiraled out of control, and its sales licensing procedures came under question. CEO Parker Conrad suddenly left, and Sacks, the COO, took over the top spot. He has made rapid and decisive changes to get the company back on track, including cutting jobs, asking employees who weren’t committed to take a buyout, and cutting the value of the company by more than $2 billion as part of a deal with investors to avoid lawsuits.

26. Chuck Robbins

Cisco

CEO, Cisco

Upon his appointment as CEO, Robbins reorganized Cisco’s leadership and restructured its engineering unit in a move to build closer relationships with the company’s legendary lead engineers, who used to report to John Chambers, now the executive chairman. Robbins also brought in new hires to head the areas of Cisco he plans to focus and expand upon, like networking, cloud computing, security, and IOT and applications. As Microsoft challenges Cisco with its new networking software, it is as important as ever that Cisco’s engineers focus on the company’s own networking software, Nexus 9000.

25. Palmer Luckey and Brendan Iribe

Wikimedia Commons and Brian Ach/Getty

Cofounders, CEO (Iribe), Oculus VR

It’s finally here! Four years after launching and two years after the $2 billion acquisition by Facebook, Oculus finally unleashed the Oculus Rift, its long-awaited virtual reality headset, to eager customers.

The product comes with a steep $600 price tag, but that didn’t deter consumers from champing at the bit for it. Preorders opened in January and sold out almost immediately, leaving the company struggling to keep up. The headset also launched in retail stores this May, giving customers another chance to try to score one.

24. Chamath Palihapitiya

Owen Thomas, Business Insider

Founder, Social Capital

Outspoken Silicon Valley investor Palihapitiya didn’t tread lightly this year. He decried the gender gap in tech, shared which startups he thought were „mostly crap,“ and publicly criticized Apple CEO Tim Cook. Through his more than $1 billion investment fund Social Capital, Palihapitiya is righteous in his conviction that today’s generation has the opportunity to put „a massive dent in human suffering and make trillions of dollars in return.“

The company he is most excited to put his money behind? Amazon, which he thinks could be a $3 trillion behemoth a decade from now. „We think this is the most incredible company being built today in the world,“ he said at an investment conference in May. Also this spring, the multimillionaire and part-owner of the Golden State Warriors launched a hedge fund, the impact of which remains to be seen.

23. Bill Gurley

Steve Jennings/Getty Images

General partner, Benchmark Capital

The thriving tech industry of the past few years hasn’t been quite as fruitful in 2016, with startups struggling to procure funding and a notable lack of initial public offerings. But many investors ignored the choppy waters — until Gurley stepped in.

In April, the prominent Benchmark Capital venture capitalist released a seminal piece about the tech bubble on his personal blog, predicting the end of the unicorn boom and finally getting fellow VCs to take note of the slowdown. Even more recently, Gurley again warned against late-stage investments, reminding lenders that they are companies‘ last resorts — not exactly the best way to kick off a business relationship.

22. John Zimmer and Logan Green

Stephen Lam/Reuters

Cofounders, Lyft

Lyft cofounders Green and Zimmer are looking toward the future of transportation after raising $1 billion in the company’s latest funding round in January, more than doubling its valuation to $5.5 billion from $2.5 billion in 2015.

The ride-hailing app announced in May that it was testing a service allowing passengers to schedule Lyft rides up to 24 hours in advance; the company’s chief rival, Uber, announced a similar service only a few weeks later. In January, Lyft signed a partnership with General Motors, along with a $500 million investment, that aims to pursue the development of self-driving cars.

21. Jeff Lawson

Flickr/Twilio

Founder, CEO, and chairman, Twilio

When the cloud software company Twilio filed for an initial public offering, it broke Silicon Valley’s 2016 tech startup drought. Originally expected to be valued at $12 to $14 a share, it exceeded expectations by pricing at $15 a share and has been on a tear since. A developer favorite — Lawson says 700,000 developers have used the software to date — Twilio integrates communications systems into existing apps like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The behind-the-scenes software cuts costs and boosts efficiency for big tech ventures, allowing them to expand faster than if they had to build communications technologies on their own.

20. Chris Sacca

Alison Buck/Getty

Founder, Lowercase Capital

Sacca, the founder of the Silicon Valley VC firm Lowercase Capital, became a billionaire thanks to his company’s 4% stake in Uber, which most recently clinched a valuation of nearly $68 billion. Sacca was also an early-stage investor in Twitter, Instagram, and Kickstarter, establishing a reputation for spotting the hottest startups before they become household names.

But alas, he can‘t spot them all. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Sacca revealed that he declined to invest in Snapchat — an app he now uses daily. The cowboy-shirt-wearing investor starred in a few episodes of the investing show „Shark Tank“ last season, where he frequently locked horns with fellow billionaire, show regular, and longtime friend Mark Cuban.

19. Stewart Butterfield

Kimberly White/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Slack

People just can’t get enough of the workplace messaging app Slack. At the end of March, the three-year-old company had its largest round of funding to date. Slack raised $200 million, bringing its estimated value to $3.8 billion. It is one of the fastest-growing business apps of all time, and most of that growth is organic. The company has done some TV spots and billboard campaigns, but it mostly relies on growth through word of mouth. It hired its first sales chief only in May after years of scaling on its own.

18. Sam Altman

Getty Images

Founding partner and president, Y Combinator

Since taking over as president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator in early 2014, Altman has transformed the incubator into a more robust company, adding a research lab and late-stage growth fund. Acceptance into Y Combinator, which is known for producing elite Silicon Valley companies like Dropbox and Airbnb, serves as a sure-fire entrance into the competitive startup world.

Under Altman’s leadership, the company committed $10 million to YC Research, a lab separate from YC‘s startup program focused on developing technology for the greater good that will eventually be available to anyone — free. Y Combinator also raised $700 million to further invest in select maturing startups it believes will succeed long term.

Altman’s newest plan is to grow Y Combinator from 200 companies a year to 2,000, thanks to the YC Fellowship program.

17. Kyle Vogt

Twitter

Founder and CEO, Cruise

As tech companies and traditional car manufacturers vie for prevalence in the auto space, it feels like a race to see who will build the first mainstream self-driving car. And Vogt might be onto something big. His startup, Cruise, is developing technology that can retroactively transform any car into an autonomous one. His idea is so huge, in fact, that Vogt sold the startup to General Motors for more than $1 billion in March, making him the automaker’s point person in Silicon Valley.

16. Reed Hastings

Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Netflix

Netflix and its fearless leader Hastings have continued to dominate, impress, and delight this year. The ubiquitous entertainment-streaming service was one of the biggest risers in the tech industry in 2015 as evidenced by its 95-spot jump on this year’s Fortune 500 list. With a plan for aggressive global expansion in motion and more than 600 hours of original content being added to its library throughout this year, Netflix expects to burn through another $1 billion in cash in 2016 to carry its growth efforts.

Netflix reached 81 million subscribers in April, but analysts estimate that the company will lose about 480,000 subscribers this year because of gradual price hikes, which are still estimated to pull in about $520 million in extra revenue.

15. Diane Greene

Google

Founder, Bebop; senior VP of cloud businesses, Google

Since Google’s parent company, Alphabet, bought Bebop for $380 million last year, Greene has been making waves at the Silicon Valley giant. Eight months ago, she was appointed head of the company’s cloud efforts. She upended Google for Work, hiring sales and support personnel, creating a Global Alliance program, and building industry-specific units for clients. By collaborating with Google’s customers, Greene and her team leverage data and tools from Google and other companies, transforming the way the cloud is used.

14. Peter Thiel

Torch Communications

Partner, Founders Fund; chairman, Palantir; founder, Thiel Fellowship; investor

Love him or hate him, Thiel is a force to be reckoned with in Silicon Valley. In May, it came out that the billionaire VC was the secret benefactor funding Hulk Hogan’s sex-tape lawsuit against Gawker — apparently as revenge for Gawker’s coverage of Thiel in the past. The staunch libertarian and longtime Republican supporter is also serving as one of Donald Trump’s California delegates.

But beyond all the drama, Thiel remains one of tech’s savviest investors through his Founders Fund, and Palantir, the big-data company he cofounded, continues to grow. Recently, it offered to buy back stock from current employees at a higher share price than many investors value the company at — provided that the employees agree not to discuss Palantir with outsiders and media.

13. Meg Whitman

Andrew Burton/Getty Images

President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise; chairwoman of HP Inc.

After years of sliding profits, troublesome acquisitions, and thousands of layoffs, Whitman decided to take drastic measures help boost Hewlett Packard back to its former glory. So she split the IT giant into two leaner, more focused ventures. Hewlett Packard Enterprise took charge of selling hardware, such as servers, while HP Inc. remained in control of printers and PCs.

Then in May, Whitman divided the company even further, spinning off HPE’s business enterprise services and merging with Computer Sciences in hopes of — once again — becoming a serious competitor in the information technology space. In addition to overseeing the entire undertaking, Whitman serves as HPE’s CEO and is on the board of all three new companies.

12. Dan Schulman

Business Insider

President and CEO, PayPal

After a 13-year marriage, PayPal and eBay parted ways in 2015 to form two separate companies. Schulman has been CEO of the former ever since. Under Schulman, the PayPal-owned Venmo has become the year’s most dominant peer-to-peer payment app, with 173 million active users in 2015. In April he announced that the company had its best quarterly earnings ever, despite an ongoing Federal Trade Commission investigation of the operation on suspicion of possible „deceptive or unfair practices.“

11. Sundar Pichai

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

CEO, Google

After Google restructured last year and formed Alphabet to oversee its growing cache of companies, Pichai took the reins as CEO of the new standalone subsidiary Google, which includes the company’s search, YouTube, and Android businesses.

Pichai is focusing heavily on artificial intelligence, unveiling several new applications at the Google I/O event in May, including a messaging app that uses „messaging bots“ to draft responses for users to make messaging easier and faster. Pichai has become one of the highest-paid CEOs in the tech world, making over $100 million in 2015.

10. Brian Slingerland, Scott Dylla, and Daniel Reiner

Stemcentrx

Cofounders, Stemcentrx

Previously a Goldman Sachs vice president and a senior scientist at OncoMed Pharmaceuticals, respectively, Slingerland and Dylla publicly launched Stemcentrx in September (after seven years in stealth mode) along with Reiner, a serial investor and former telecom executive. Their mission: to end cancer by targeting cancer-specific stem cells.

Less than a year later, the pharma giant AbbVie bought the biotech startup for $10.2 billion, when the company was valued at $5 billion, in one of the largest tech acquisitions ever. AbbVie showed special interest in Stemcentrx’s lung-cancer-fighting drug Rova-T, which could grow the company’s oncology business. AbbVie hopes to bring the drug to market by 2018.

9. David Marcus

Brian Ach/Getty Images

VP of messaging products, Facebook

It has been nearly two years since Marcus left his cushy job as president of PayPal to join the Facebook team as vice president of messaging products, a move he has called a „once-in-a-generation opportunity.“ Under his rule, Facebook’s Messenger has grown into a beast of its own, with 900 million monthly active users as of April.

This year Marcus built out Messenger’s AI capabilities to include Spotify song sharing, Uber and Lyft ride hailing, food ordering, and flight tracking. And with the recent unveiling of chat bots for businesses, Messenger aims to make sure you never have to deal with human customer service again.

8. Marc Benioff

Kimberly White/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Salesforce

It might not be a shiny, consumer-facing product, but the cloud computing software company Salesforce is crushing it and remains one of the hottest tech companies in the world. Helmed by Benioff, the $50 billion business boasts a 22% compound annual growth rate and is expected to rake in more than $8 billion in revenue this year.

Benioff has become a model CEO not just for financial success but also for social involvement, standing up for gender equality, workplace diversity, and LGBT rights. He has openly criticized legislation that could be used to discriminate against LGBT workers and publicly pledged to guarantee equal pay for men and women.

7. Tim Cook

Stephen Lam/Getty Images

CEO, Apple

In the past 12 months, Cook guided the tech giant through the launch of Apple Music, which garnered 6.5 million paid subscribers in the first month after the service’s free-trial period; released the Apple TV 4, which can run third-party apps and access Siri; and introduced the iPad Pro, the company’s largest tablet, boldly declaring the end of PCs with it.

Under Cook, Apple also recently invested $1 billion into Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-hailing service that is blowing Uber out of the water in China. The deal was Apple’s first major investment since it bought Beats Electronics in 2014.

6. Jack Dorsey

Kimberly White/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Twitter and Square

As CEO of both Square and Twitter, Dorsey has his fingerprints all over Silicon Valley. In November he took the mobile payment company Square public, opening at $9 a share, lower than the $11 to $13 originally proposed. Though some outlets called it a flop, many entrepreneurs would kill for the company’s $3 billion market capitalization and $1.3 billion in revenue.

And after returning to Twitter as interim CEO last July (and officially appointed CEO in October), Dorsey has spent the past year turning the struggling social network around by solidifying its mission and making product adjustments, including plans to incorporate more live video and crack down on the hateful abuse many users complain about.

5. Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner

Kimberly White/Getty Images ; Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Cofounder and executive chairman (Hoffman), CEO (Weiner), LinkedIn

In March, Weiner gave his $14 million stock bonus back to LinkedIn employees after the company’s stock tumbled 40% following the company’s tepid February earnings report. Weiner hoped the move would help reinvigorate employees and improve morale.

By June, the company’s stock-price woes had become moot. The tech world shook after Weiner and cofounder Hoffman oversaw the professional social network’s sale to Microsoft for a stunning $26.2 billion in cash. The deal marked Microsoft’s largest acquisition ever, with the software giant paying a 50% premium to close the deal. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella plans to eventually sync LinkedIn’s network with Microsoft Office, ideally bolstering the overall user experience on both sides.

4. Elon Musk

VCG/Getty Images

CEO, Tesla; CEO and CTO, SpaceX; chairman, Solar City

Musk continues to be one of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs — and preeminent multitaskers. Musk has his eyes set on dominating land and space through Tesla Motors and SpaceX, two of the hottest and most progressive companies of our generation. In April, Musk unveiled Tesla’s mass-market Model 3, racking up 375,000 preorders in one month. The company is reportedly struggling to meet demand.

In June, Musk made a highly criticized all-stock offer for Tesla to acquire the floundering solar-energy company SolarCity; Musk owns 22% of the company and serves as its chairman. And if that weren’t enough, he also envisioned a futuristic transporation system called the Hyperloop that would take people from LA to San Francisco in less than an hour. One company building a system based on that idea has now secured $80 million in series B financing in May and has begun testing its technology.

3. Travis Kalanick

Uber

Cofounder and CEO, Uber

Worth $68 billion, the ride-hailing service Uber, helmed by Kalanick, holds steady in its place as the most valuable private tech company in the world. Under Kalanick’s leadership, the startup also raised the largest round of venture capital ever, bringing in $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund in June.

Uber continues to expand and innovate, particularly through new services, such as UberEats, which brings meals to New York City customers, and UberRush, which helps businesses make deliveries. Kalanick leads the charge as Uber expands and conquers new markets, even as it faces fierce competition in China.

2. Larry Page

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Alphabet

Once just a search engine, Google has grown so tremendously that its cofounders felt it was time to restructure the company. In a letter last summer, Page announced the creation of Alphabet, a holding company that oversees Google and numerous other subsidiaries. As Alphabet’s CEO, Page can focus on acquiring new technologies, fostering „moonshot“ projects, and developing talent — his first move was promoting Google’s Sundar Pichai from senior vice president to CEO.

In June, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Page had personally acquired two companies working on creating a flying car, an investment unaffiliated with Alphabet.

1. Mark Zuckerberg

Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Cofounder and CEO, Facebook

It has been a big year for Zuckerberg. At Facebook’s annual F8 developers conference in April, he laid out a 10-year road map for Facebook, detailing short-term plans to ramp up video, search, and apps, such as Instagram and WhatsApp, in the next five years. The company’s long-term focus will include bigger projects like drones, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.

Zuckerberg also became a dad last fall, prompting him to pledge to give away 99% of his $50 billion fortune throughout his lifetime. He will do so primarily through a new organization he cofounded with his wife, Priscilla Chan, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is aimed at making long-term investments in causes and organizations that will improve health, education, and equality.

http://www.businessinsider.de/silicon-valley-100-2016-6?op=1

China’s booming fintech sector

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The fast and furious growth of the country’s Internet finance industry will inevitably slow. Companies need to begin positioning themselves for sustainable success.

Download the full report here: Disruption-and-connection-cracking-the-myths-of-China-internet-finance-innovation

China’s Internet finance industry has boomed in recent years. The country leads the world when it comes to total users and market size; financial-technology (or fintech) start-ups are mushrooming, as are company valuations; capital markets are aggressively pursuing the Internet finance industry; and consumer behavior is altering dramatically. By the end of 2015, the market size of the country’s Internet finance sector was more than 12 trillion renminbi ($1.8 trillion), dominated by the payments sector (exhibit).

Four factors are driving this rapid growth. First, China has an open, supportive regulatory environment. In fact, in 2013 the People’s Bank of China explicitly expressed support for tech companies to promote Internet finance. Second, China has a highly developed e-commerce sector, with more than 30 percent of the Chinese population already using Internet payment systems. Third, there is enormous latent demand for inclusive finance. Due to historical protection and strict regulation, traditional players are moving slowly to meet underserved customer segments, opening the door to disruptors. And finally, the strong profitability of traditional banks has underwritten a strong trial-and-effort culture, facilitating aggressive investments in innovative digital services.

The Internet finance sector’s torrid growth will inevitably slow. This will present challenges and opportunities for companies, especially as more mature regulations are imposed and a degree of consolidation takes place. As outlined in our new report Disruption and connection: Cracking the myths of China Internet finance intervention, surviving and thriving in this changing environment requires companies to take steps now. That means understanding not just the trends likely to shape the sector but also the kind of companies that have evolved in recent years.

China’s three types of fintech players

Numerous players from various industries have rushed to stake a claim to China’s Internet finance sector. We’ve identified three distinct types of companies that are taking the lead, each with distinctive value propositions:

Internet attackers, or ‘barbarians from the outside.’ China has a uniquely competitive digital landscape dominated by a few digital companies that have established comprehensive multilicensed financial ecosystems. They differ from each other by core businesses or target groups. As one of the largest e-commerce companies globally, for example, Alibaba used its e-commerce business as a foundation of its financial empire, first entering into the payments sector before expanding into financing and wealth management, with an emphasis on hundreds of millions of individual and small- to medium-enterprise (SME) customers. Tencent took another route, expanding beyond the powerful social nature of its WeChat platform to build a consumer-oriented financial network that taps into its huge user base. These entrepreneurial attackers form the largest group and the most prolifically and wildly innovative, offering local products and expanding aggressively by taking full advantage of the customer insights at their disposal.
Traditional financial institutions. Incumbent financial institutions are accelerating their push into the Internet finance sector. They don’t want to just witness this wave—they want to ride it. Yet strict regulations and relatively conservative mind-sets mean they are typically followers rather than leaders, at least compared with Internet attackers. That said, institutions such as Ping An Insurance Group are strategically entering the sector through subsidiaries including Lufax, Pinganfang, and Ping An Puhui. In addition, large commercial banks are acting: for example, China Construction Bank and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China are now building their own e-commerce platforms. Others will inevitably follow. Traditional players also have several strengths that should not be underestimated: a legacy of strategic partnerships, comprehensive product offerings, professional risk-management expertise, and physical branches.
Nonfinance companies. Although small in number, companies with no experience in either finance or the Internet are joining the sector. Examples include retail companies Gome and Suning, and real-estate group Wanda Group, which are marrying extensive offline resources such as customer leads with data mining to design new financial products. In doing so, they threaten to undermine banks’ control over key business customers.

Six emerging fintech trends

In the near future, we believe China’s Internet finance players will enter a “warring stage” that results in consolidation. Regulations will be updated to account for new companies and products, and growth will become more orderly. In next five years, we see the enormous potential of six developing trends being gradually unleashed. Players should act quickly and firmly, strengthening skills and capabilities to take advantage of fintech’s global emergence.

Mobile payment and wealth management

Payment is the most mature sector in Internet finance, but growth in the payments industry is far from slowing. Consumer engagement and affinity are increasing, and online-to-offline mobile payment via smartphones has become a new battlefield where companies are already starting to compete fiercely for market share. Traditional financial institutions, in cooperation with mobile-hardware manufacturers, are also starting to adopt near-field communication payment. At the same time, China’s capital market is opening up. As they accumulate more wealth, Chinese consumers are hunting for higher investment returns—meaning that all investment products, except savings, are expected to maintain rapid growth. That provides opportunities for Internet-based wealth-management businesses.

Online consumer and SME finance

As China’s economy seeks to evolve from investment led to consumer led, demand for financial services among Chinese households will only increase. Younger Chinese consumers are early adopters and keen drivers of innovation, more open to online personal-finance products, and have both a higher propensity to spend and a higher tolerance for financial risk. Indeed, as more advanced application of data enables quick and remote decision making, the full range of conventional consumer-financing products—such as credit cards and consumer loans—can be offered online, further broadening the industry’s potential scope. In addition, there remains a large gap between the needs of SMEs and traditional banking products. SMEs in China contribute a significant share of GDP and employment (nearly 80 percent and 60 percent respectively), yet their development has been beset by a shortage of funds. As the country’s economy slows, banks are becoming more reluctant to address this issue—presenting a huge opportunity for the highly efficient, low-cost fintech sector.

B2B Internet finance

In the next five years, companies will still contribute the majority of banking revenue in China—and the long business-to-business value chain will generate both opportunities and innovation. Chinese companies are shifting from simply borrowing to having more complicated needs, such as transaction banking and asset management. In transaction banking, Internet finance can provide time-effective supply-chain financing solutions and digitized cash-management systems to support high-quality management of corporate finance and capital for large companies. In asset management, Internet finance can better address increasingly complex customer needs by providing quick, customized, and differentiated product matching, especially when high-quality assets are difficult to find. Internet channels are also well suited to marketing and customer expansion.

Financial cloud and infrastructure

Unlike the traditional model, where financial institutions operate their own data and IT centers, cloud-based services allow customers to be served remotely based on demand, paying for that usage. Cost effectiveness is a major advantage, with the cloud allowing customers to easily access information with minimal up-front and overhead spending. It also allows customers to retain flexible infrastructure that can be quickly scaled up or down. That’s especially important for small players who need to rapidly build IT capabilities to serve explosively growing user bases and fluctuating volumes. Many IT companies such as Alibaba, Huawei, and IBM are already providing cloud solutions and platforms. We believe cloud-enabled innovation in the Internet finance sector will only increase.

Big data application

Big data allows financial institutions to collect and analyze customer data, providing more tailored products and services through a personalized marketing experience. In risk management, big data allows players to use advanced statistical models to better understand the correlation between factors and risks, based on both internal and external data. Combining this with cloud services facilitates real-time credit investigation and decision making at a low cost. Financial institutions that master these data-driven advantages will enjoy increased operational efficiency and business performance. It’s perhaps no wonder that there’s a huge unmet need forbig data analytics in China—and more and more companies are emerging to serve financial institutions unable build this capability in-house.

Disruptive technology

Blockchain and related disruptive technologies have drawn close attention in the financial industry. Blockchain, the technological base of Bitcoin, is characterized as being safe, transparent, and unmodifiable—however, blockchain has much greater potential than digital currencyalone. It enables point-to-point transactions without a clearing intermediary, substantially reducing transaction time and cost. Further, if combined with smart contracts, blockchain makes it possible to automatically issue digital securities and trade financial derivatives. More broadly, the insurance sector will also provide new opportunities for the application of blockchain.

All of this isn’t to suggest there aren’t nonexposed risks, uncertainties, and challenges associated with China’s booming Internet finance industry. These include consumer irrationality, product defects, and even fraudulent activity, and require careful maneuvering. Players also should cautiously deal with the implicit credit risk and liquidity risk, and be aware that regulators are determined to strengthen the management of Internet finance.

Yet we believe China’s fintech sector will inevitably embrace fiercer competition and further industry integration, with true winners emerging through selection and elimination as they navigate the developing trends we have identified. No matter which element of the Internet finance industry they are in, and whatever their business models are, players must keep evolving to survive and realize a sustainable stake in the sector’s future growth.

http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/whats-next-for-chinas-booming-fintech-sector

How generation Z females could be the answer to tech’s gender diversity problem

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At the Milken Institute Global Conference in May, moderator Rick Smith controversially asked five successful female entrepreneurs how they convinced male VCs to invest in female-oriented businesses. The ladies were candid.Alexandra Wilkis Wilson, co-founder of Gilt and GLAMSQUAD, admitted it is harder; the panelists — including Jessica Alba of Honest Company andSusan Feldman of One Kings Lane — agreed.

It’s no secret that the tech industry is very much a man’s world. Recent U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission figures show 80 percent of executives in high-tech are male, and just 20 percent are female. In the Bay Area in 2015, just 8 percent of Series A startup funding went to female-led businesses, down from 30 percent in 2014.

While the biggest names in tech strive to close the gender gap and build more inclusive working environments, the pool of talent on offer is predominantly male. The truth is, while retention is an issue, there are simply fewer women opting for a career in tech.

But new initiatives and an uptick of Gen Z girls opting for sciences in top-tier universities paints a very different future. What are these young women doing that previous generations have not? And what does this all mean for Silicon Valley’s boys’ club?

What’s holding back females in tech

According to Ariane Hegewisch, a study director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, females make the decision to steer clear of sciences at a young age. CNET reported at Indiana University, 97 percent of new female students opt for subjects outside of science and computing. “It doesn’t occur to them as a career path,” said Maureen Bliggers, assistant dean for diversity and education at Indiana’s School of Informatics.

The proportion of female students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) university courses has traditionally been very low, and, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, it is getting worse. 2014 figures show just 18 percent of computer science bachelor degrees and 19 percent of engineering degrees held by women. In subjects such as biology and social sciences, we start to see the tables turn, with a larger proportion of females.

While the number of women in sciences is growing, they are still vastly outnumbered by males. Statistics suggest that this dwindling ratio of women in tech may be a case of nurture over nature. In May, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealedbetter performance from girls over boys in a test of technology and engineering literacy administered to 21,500 students. In the eighth grade age range, 45 percent of females were scored as proficient, compared to 42 percent of boys, showing the capacity of young girls to succeed in the sciences. Capability is not the issue; rather, it seems that external factors play a bigger role in dissuading women from opting for science-related careers.

Young females are skilled and capable, yet still a disparity exists.

In 2013, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) pointed to social and environmental factors that prevent a larger proportion of femalesfrom entering STEM courses. The study claims negative stereotypes regarding youngfemales’ abilities can lower aspirations and recommends a “growth mindset” to encourage more girls to participate and achieve in these subjects.

Forbes contributor Gene Marks claims the “real reason most women don’t go into tech” is that from early on they simply “aren’t as interested in technology-related work as men.” Marks proposes that the tech industry shift its focus from changing the current working culture to creating better educational opportunities for the young.

Bridging the STEM graduate gender gap

The National Association of Colleges and Employers reported that, in 2016, STEM graduates will be the most highly sought after, earning the largest starting salaries. For a generationthat grew up in the shadow of the Great Recession, this is an attractive prospect. And while STEM courses continue to be male dominated, as a new age group of girls enters colleges nationwide, in the top schools this is finally showing signs of change.

Between 2009 and 2013, UC Berkeley almost doubled its percentage of female computer science majors in the College of Letters and Science, up to 21 percent. In 2014, for the first time on record, UC Berkeley reported a greater number of females than males in its introductory computer science course. Redesigning its “Symbolic Programming” course as “Beauty and the Joy of Computing,” Berkeley emphasized the impact computing has in the world, and worked to tone down elements that may put females off. Stanford University was also able to boost female computer science enrollment from 12.5 percent in 2008 to 21 percent in 2013, through efforts to make the program more widely inclusive.

There are a great number of organizations that aim to get young girls into computer science and engineering.

Harvey Mudd College has become a pioneer for women in STEM studies. In 2013, for the first time ever, more than half the engineering majors and 47 percent of its computer science majors were female. University president Maria Klawe has played a large role in transforming the college, hiring a greater number of female faculty, employing a more personalized recruitment process and offering compulsory introductory computer science classes, pitching the advantages of this study in various fields.

Little by little, these efforts are beginning to spread. Just last year, Georgia Tech — which in 1952 had no undergraduate women — celebrated the highest proportion of female students, making up 41 percent of the new student body. The university attributed its new increasingly diverse freshman enrollment to “a more personal and tailored outreach.”

These initiatives help to break the barriers to STEM study for many young adults. As the number of women studying these subjects grows, this creates a strengthened workforce and a new generation of role models.

In 2014, Fortune’s list of Most Powerful Women featured a great number of successful women from the tech industry, including IBM’s Ginni Rometty, who studied computer science and electrical engineering; GM’s Mary Barra, who also studied electrical engineering; DuPont’s Ellen Kullman, who studied mechanical engineering, and many more. Fortune recognized that three of the top five women were engineers, but acknowledged that still only one in seven engineers are female. College enrollment efforts go some way to growing this proportion; however, better opportunities from a younger age are also key to this.

Tech-driven initiatives for the young

The National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) has reported that younger girls in the K-12 education stages are taking many high-level mathematics and science courses at similar rates to male students. There also is a greater percentage of young girls taking subjects such as advanced biology, pre-calculus/analysis and algebra II. A gap in physics and engineering, however, still persists, and this is typically worse in low-income and minority groups.

Many initiatives aim to solve this, helping girls develop an interest in activities such as coding from a young age. They are experiencing positive traction. In 2013, Code.org’s Hour of Code campaign, designed to help young girls interested in computer science, successfully attracted 15 million students in a week; more than half were girls.

Other programs, such as the international nonprofit organization Girls In Tech, run hackathons and coding bootcamps, and help connect women with tech jobs across the globe. There are a great number of organizations that aim to get young girls into computer science and engineering; for example, Girls Who Code, Engineering Girl and Black Girls Code, the recipient of TechCrunch’s first Include Grant of $50,000.

Initiatives to spur this movement are not limited to educators or nonprofits — the tech world is also getting involved. Most recently, Oracle invested a further $3 million to the U.S. government initiative Let Girls Learn, after pledging to provide $200 million in support of the sciences this April. The initiative aims to help teenage girls across the globe get more out of their early education, and the investment will go to helping develop STEM performance in young girls.

Google has also invested $50 million into its program Made With Code, which aims to teach girls how to code. The tech giant acknowledged that most girls decide very early on whether they will choose a tech career, and is working to provide resources to let young females explore this opportunity.

Others in the tech industry are actively seekingfemales, offering training opportunities to learn new skills. Peer-to-peer e-commerce platform Etsy was able to grow its number of female engineers by 500 percent by investing in training junior members; 80 percent of its customers are female, and Etsy aims to create a new generation of qualified females to better match its clientele.

We have seen that young females are skilled and capable, yet still a disparity exists. However, by targeting the younger generation, educators and tech companies are creating a new workforce of successful tech executives that will help change the perception of the industry. These new role models will quash stereotypes and encourage others to consider tech career opportunities from a younger age. This means a shake-up for the Valley, where successful women, no longer a minority, will play a much larger role in advancing the industry.

How generation Z females could be the answer to tech’s gender diversity problem

Facebook Is Not a Technology Company

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At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent milestone, insisted that this “tech sweep” is unprecedented, even during the dot-com boom. Back in 2011, for example, Exxon and Shell held two of the top spots, and Apple was the only tech company in the top five. In 2006, Microsoft held the only slot—the others were in energy, banking, and manufacture. But things have changed. “Your new tech overlords,” Bloomberg christened the five.

But what makes a company a technology company, anyway? In their discussion of overlords, Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide and Rani Molla explain that “Non-tech titans like Exxon and GE have slipped a bit” in top valuations. Think about that claim for a minute, and reflect on its absurdity: Exxon uses enormous machinery to extract the remains of living creatures from geological antiquity from deep beneath the earth. Then it uses other enormous machinery to refine and distribute that material globally. For its part, GE makes almost everything—from light bulbs to medical imaging devices to wind turbines to locomotives to jet engines.

Isn’t it strange to call Facebook, a company that makes websites and mobile apps a “technology” company, but to deny that moniker to firms that make diesel trains, oil-drilling platforms, and airplane engines?

Part of the problem has to do with the private language of finance. Markets segment companies by industry, and analysts track specific sectors and subsectors. Exxon is an energy industry stock, while GE straddles energy, transportation, public utility, healthcare, and finance. The “technology” in the technology sector is really synecdoche for “computer technology.” Companies in that sector deal in software, semiconductors, hardware manufacturing, peripherals, data processing services, digital advertising, and so forth.

“Technology” has become so overused … that the term has lost all meaning.

For the NASDAQ exchange, where most so-called technology companies are traded, those industries are based on the Industry Classification Benchmark (ICB), a classification system developed by the London Stock Exchange’s FTSE Group. The ICB breaks the market down into 10 industries, each of which is broken down further into supersectors, sectors, and subsectors. The ICB technology industry counts “Internet” as a subsector of “Software & Computer Services,” for example. Companies are assigned to sectors and subsectors based on the (largest) source of their revenue (thus, GE is considered an energy company).

A company like Microsoft fits squarely into Technology, Software & Computer Services, because that’s where the majority of its revenue derives. Likewise, Apple is a traditional ICB “technology” company, in the sense that it makes most of its money from selling computer hardware. But the other companies in Bloomberg’s Monday top five are technology companies in a mostly vestigial way.

Almost all of Google’s and Facebook’s revenue, for example, comes from advertising; by that measure, there’s an argument that those firms are really Media industry companies, with a focus on Broadcasting and Entertainment. Of course, Alphabet is a lot like GE, or at least it aspires to be, with its investments in automotive (Self-Driving Car Project), health care (Calico), consumer goods (Nest), utilities (Fiber). But the vast majority of its revenue comes from Google’s ad business.

Amazon generates a lot of revenue from its Amazon Web Services (AWS) business—perhaps as much as $10 billion this year. It also derives revenue from manufacturing and selling computer hardware, like the Fire and Kindle. But thevast majority of Amazon’s revenue comes from international sales of consumer goods. Amazon is sort of a tech company, but really it’s a retailer.

A day later, at the close of the markets Tuesday, August 2, the tech sweep was already history. Exxon Mobil had pushed Facebook out of position five, topping the, uh, online broadcast media company’s $352 billion market cap by $8 billion, or 2 percent. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway also closed Tuesday at $354 billion in total value. Among Berkshire Hathaway’s top revenue drivers are insurance, manufacturing, and the obscure but ubiquitous McClane Company, which provides supply-chain management and logistics services for the grocery industry. It brought in $28 billion in revenue last year, or about $10 billion more than Facebook. Johnson & Johnson, which sells consumer and industrial health products from Actifed to Zyrtec, wasn’t far behind, with a $345 billion market capitalization at the close of business Tuesday.

Every industry uses computers, software, and internet services. If that’s what “technology” means, then every company is in the technology business—a useless distinction. But it’s more likely that “technology” has become so overused, and so carelessly associated with Silicon Valley-style computer software and hardware startups, that the term has lost all meaning. Perhaps finance has exacerbated the problem by insisting on the generic industrial term “technology” as a synonym for computing.

There are companies that are firmly planted in the computing sector. Microsoft and Apple are two. Intel is another—it makes computer parts for other computer makers. But it’s also time to recognize that some companies—Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook among them—aren’t primarily in the computing business anyway. And that’s no slight, either. The most interesting thing about companies like Alphabet, Amazon, and Facebook is that they are not (computing) technology companies. Instead, they are using computing infrastructure to build new—and enormous—businesses in other sectors. If anything, that’s a fair take on what “technology” might mean as a generic term: manipulating one set of basic materials to realize goals that exceed those materials.

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/facebook-is-not-a-technology-company/494183

What Millennials Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Success

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Millennials are made for entrepreneurship. They are the generation that can teach us about dreaming big, doing good, and making their own rules.

Opinions about the Millennial workforce are easy to come by, and they range from bright predictions about their role in the future of franchises to the key to motivating them and even a list of reasons to stop „hating“ on this diverse group.

Though Millennials are often criticized by preceding generations for their attitudes in the workplace, whether those perceptions are accurate or not is debatable. For example, one study by IBM found that Millennials have largely similar values and attitudes about work as older generations, with existing disparities attributable to age differences.

However, there are qualities that make this generation uniquely suited for success as entrepreneurs. Here are 10 traits that give Millennials an edge in starting a business.

1. They aren’t willing to wait.

The Deloitte 2016 Millennial survey found that 25 percent of Millennials would have no hesitation in leaving their current employer in the next 12 months, and 44 percent didn’t expect to remain with their current employer after two years. This suggests that Millennials are not willing to stick around with an organization that isn’t fulfilling their desires, which is often the impetus for starting a business.

2. They have a strong sense of „why not.“

This generation has seen debilitating recessions and „too big to fail“ entities go bust. Entering the workforce in unstable economic times – or attempting to do so and not finding work – has given them a level of fearlessness about striking out on their own.

3. They are idealistic.

They don’t believe a business should exist solely to make money, but should contribute something meaningful to the world. They judge a company not by its profitability but by higher-minded ideals such as the quality of its products and services, employee satisfaction, customer service, even environmental impact. This sense of mission can help motivate entrepreneurs to persevere through the ups and downs of running a business.

4. They are immersed in the digital world.

As this generation has grown up, technology has constantly been evolving around them. As a result, they are not only familiar with the possibilities and opportunities of the online world, but it is ingrained into their lives, unlike any previous era. Using online platforms to forge connections with others or to pursue new ideas is as routine as breathing.

5. They are true to their personal values.

They are willing to stand up for what they believe in. In fact, approximately half of those surveyed by Deloitte say they have refused to do work that went against their personal value or ethics. This strong moral compass and sense of integrity is helpful when building their own business brands.

6. They are waiting longer to marry and start a family.

Only 26 percent of Millennials are married, compared to 36 percent of Generation Xers and 48 percent of baby boomers when they were in the same age range. This means that Millennials are willing and able to devote the time that starting a business requires.

7. They expect control over their careers.

More than 77 percent of Millennials feel their career paths are in their own hands. That means they take responsibility for forging their path instead of feeling that they don’t have control over their professional destinies, a critical mindset for entrepreneurs.

8. They place a premium on relationships.

Business owners know the importance of building relationships with others, from customers to vendors to the wider community. Millennials place a similar value on interpersonal relationships – just check out the number of people they are connected to on social media.

9. They are easily bored.

Growing up online has exposed them to a world of ideas and interests that’s instantly available at their fingertips – literally. As a result, they are prone to follow their passions and have little tolerance for mind-numbing boredom on the job. They insist that work be both stimulating and inspiring. The challenge and excitement of entrepreneurialism that allows them to pursue their interests can be a lure.

10. They are determined to succeed.

In the same way, they’ve witnessed today’s celebrities start out as homegrown YouTube sensations or college dropouts becoming Internet billionaires; they have a sense that anything is possible. They are willing to dream big and leverage their knowledge and passion for turning those dreams into reality.

http://www.inc.com/diane-gottsman/what-entrepreneurial-millennials-can-teach-us-about-success.html

How to Develop and Retain Millennial Leaders

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It’s happened: Millennials (by most definitions, those born between 1980 and the late 1990s) are now the largest generation in the U.S. workforce. And they’re no longer the generation waiting in the wings to become leaders—they’re already increasingly entering senior and managerial positions.

The New Guard: How to Develop and Retain Millennial Leaders

Along with this influx of young managers comes a shift in the role of manager itself. Managers are no longer only focused on making sure work gets done, but also on how and why it gets done. They are expected to be detail-oriented and strategic, to build culture and ensure productivity. And their position is also pivotal for employee engagement: A recent Gallup poll found that managers accounted for 70% of variance in employee engagement.The good news? This new generation appears up for the challenge. But companies must also find ways to develop and retain these new managers. Recent data released in the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey points to evidence that companies will have to make significant changes in how they develop this generation to meet the challenges that managers will face in the future.

Millennials are a dynamic generation. They are less likely than their predecessors to remain in one organization for a long period of time. They are looking for more flexible work hours, and look for organizations whose culture reflects caring towards both employees and the world around them. They aren’t afraid to leave a job if they feel their skills are not utilized or their principles are not matched.

Preventing this exodus of potential leaders has become a business-critical challenge for organizations. According to the Deloitte survey, of the Millennials likely to leave their organizations in the next two years, 71 percent are unhappy with how their leadership skills are being developed.

Getting talent development right will be crucial both for retaining this generation of managersand flipping the switch on engagement for the rest of your workforce. Here are the major shifts that need to take place:

1) Deliberately devote more time to developing leadership skills.

Deloitte found that the most loyal Millennials experience high levels of support and/or training for pursuing and managing leadership roles. Take a look at the volume of opportunities available for young managers to develop their leadership skills. Are there programs in place? Are young managers encouraged to pursue these opportunities? Is there explicit encouragement to experiment with new skills once they return from these programs? Setting aside the time and resources for leadership development shows a commitment to young managers and is likely to get commitment in return.

2) Leadership development programs should reflect the preferences of the generation: more collaborative, team-based, and decentralized.

The Millennial preference for creative, inclusive cultures over authoritarian ones extend from their work days to professional development opportunities themselves. Some development programs rely on the knowledge of a leadership “guru” speaking at the front of the room and passing on knowledge to a captive audience. This generation’s preferences, however, suggest that a program can be designed where participants experience more collaborative problem-solving and autonomy to decide how and what they need to learn. Even those programs that don’t portend to be spouting knowledge from one single person into the awaiting minds of managers may need to shift in the direction of more flexible and collaborative.

3) Weave mentorship into the fabric of your culture and your development programs.

An oldie but a goodie, mentorship still makes a difference. Not only will Millennial managers need mentorship to learn the skills and political know-how that long years of tenure used to ensure, but they’ll also be more likely to stay with the organization. According to Deloitte, respondents who planned to stay with their companies for more than five years were twice as likely to have a mentor. Programs and cultures that make mentorship a deliberate and important component have a better chance of retaining this new generation of managers.

4) Social impact activities can become team building opportunities and arenas to practice leadership skills.

Why not combine the Millennial desire to join businesses that understand their impact with their need to develop skills that will help them as leaders? Embed a volunteer experience or an activity that gives back to the community in some way into your company’s strategy to develop young leaders. Not only will you show a commitment to your community (something that this generation looks for), but you will also provide a concrete learning experience for participants to look back on as leaders.

5) Develop skills for dialogue to enable Millennial managers to enact the work culture they seek.

In terms of employee engagement, good communication from managers is essential. Leaders in talent development are already honing in on communication skills as one of the most importantdevelopment opportunities for managers of the future. The role of translator and psychologist that middle managers often need to play are well served by a capacity for communicating well with employees. Skills for dialogue – active listening, powerful questioning, and personal engagement – can be developed via collaborative learning experiences and encouraged around the workplace. If dialogue becomes the norm, Millennial managers will start to build the culture they seek and contribute to their organizations in a very meaningful way.Millennial managers are poised to fill the leadership gap left in the wake of waves of baby boomer retirements, and the impending challenge is to both retain and develop these fresh leaders. Organizations will need to make adjustments for this generation or risk losing talent that no longer accepts the principle of long-held tenure or hierarchical advancement. As this generation ages, we may see just how different leadership looks. For now, it’s crucial to provide the right opportunities and climate for that new style to grow.

The New Guard: How to Develop and Retain Millennial Leaders

The Top 100 Brands for Millennials

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Millennials make up a crucial group of consumers. Ad agency Moosylvania asked over 3,500 millennials — defined as 20 to 35-year-olds — to select their favorite brands over the past three years. Great Questions, LLC helped rank the winning brands. These brands are the ones that came out on top. Some are surprising — others, not so much. A common theme for successful brands? Engaging with millennial consumers via social media.

100. Audi

Robert Libetti/ Business Insider

Headquarters: Ingolstadt, Germany

Place on last poll: Not applicable (*Note: Moosylvania’s previous poll from spring 2015 only contained the top 50 brands for millennials.)

Why it’s hot: Audi used a mobile app to connect with its users during the 2015 Audi Cup, allowing users to be parts of the experience.

99. Subaru

Subaru

Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Subaru’s Winterfest integrated an entire winter culture to go with the brand. It gave Subaru owners perks such as free snowboarding clinics — and more. This helped the brand develop a different kind of image — one with the outdoors and adventure — which can be appealing to millennials.

98. Nestle

REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Headquarters: Vevey, Switzerland

Place last poll: 34

Why it’s hot: Nestle’s Nescafe created „social art“ in Croatia by placing its red mugs all over the city. This, Moosylvania says, appealed to millennials. Nestle also manufactures many popular candies.

97. Johnson & Johnson

Flickr/ Ikhlasul Amal

Headquarters: New Brunswick, New Jersey

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: The „ACUVUE 1-DAY Contest“ allowed users to meet with popular celebrities and receive a brief mentorship. This has helped the brand cater to millennials, and not just be known as a producer of baby powder.

96. DC Shoes

Instagram/DC Shoes

Headquarters: Huntington Beach California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: DC Shoes is about cultivating a skateboarding lifestyle. Additionally, the brand engaged its audience by with its #TraseYours campaign, wherein the Talenthouse community of artists were able to design shoes for chances to win cash prizes. Better yet, the winning design had the chance of being produced by DC Shoes.

95. Carter’s

Instagram/Carters

Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: The Carter’s website proves that the brand has nailed ecommerce. In fact, the brand has mastered social media. Therefore, Moosylvania found that it’s very appealing to millennial parents who want to share photos of their babies (wearing Carter’s apparel, no less) with its hashtag #lovecarters. Carter’s features those photos of adorable tykes on its website, too.

94. Calvin Klein

Calvin Klein Facebook

Headquarters: New York, NY

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Calvin Klein utilizes popular celebrities for its campaign. It also is savvy when it comes to the social sharing culture — its #MyCalvins campaign has successfully capitalized on that.

93. Axe

Axe

Headquarters: Unilever N.V. Rotterdam, Netherlands

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Axe’s #KissForPeace campaign — and its corresponding ad — were right in line with Axe’s signature tone. It also engaged Axe’s consumers with the nonprofit organization, Peace One Day, and millennials love when a company supports a cause.

92. Subway

Flickr/Bubby

Headquarters: Milford, Connecticut

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Subway has long reigned supreme when it healthy fast food, but recently, Chipotle has dethroned the chain. The chain lost a lot of clout when Jared Fogle, the brand’s former spokesperson, was associated with child pornography.

91. Jeep

Thomson Reuters

JEEP GRAND CHEROKEE AT NEW YORK AUTOMOBILE SHOW.

Headquarters: Auburn Hills, MI

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Jeep engaged with its consumers with its Endless Jeep Summer campaign, wherein Jeep owners submitted videos to Vine and Instagram.

90. Anthropologie

Anthropologie

Headquarters: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Anthropologie is Urban Outfitter’s finely curated and refined sister brand, so it makes sense that the brand chose to engage with its consumers via Pinterest, the social channel that’s all about curation, with its #PintoWin contest.

89. Publix

brownpau/flickr

Headquarters: Lakeland, Florida

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Publix’s app has simplified shopping. An easier shopping experience is more crucial than ever, given the rise of grocery delivery services.

88. General Mills

bpende / Flickr

Headquarters: Minneapolis, MN

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: General Mills‘ Fiber One brand has been nailing its marketing, with its funny ads, and its socially-driven contest like #FiberOneCheesecake, which gave users the opportunity to win cheesecake for an entire year.

87. ESPN

Michelle McLoughlin/Reuters

Headquarters: Bristol, Connecticut

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: ESPN’s Fantasy Football app engaged consumers and helped the network bring a popular past time into the next generation.

86. ACER

Amazon

Headquarters: Taipei, Taiwain

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Acer’s tablets work in tandem with billboards, which allows consumers to interact with brands on a whole new level.

85. Wendy’s

Burger Business

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

Place on last poll: 47

Why it’s hot: One of Wendy’s recent marketing campaigns was ultra-focused on millennials, with the young „Red“ character in commercials and new items like pretzel cheeseburgers. Wendy’s has always emphasized being fresher than competitors, making every burger to-order and not freezing beef. In the era of Chipotle, this message resonates with millennials.

84. Trader Joe’s

Christian Storm/Business Insider

Headquarters: Monrovia, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Millennials love Trader Joe’s. Organic food, unique products, and low prices make it a hot destination for millennials. It also boasts its own unique personality — be it the Hawaiian shirts or the pun-laden signs around the stores.

83. J. Crew

J. Crew

Headquarters: New York, NY

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Times have been tough for preppy mainstay J. Crew, as it appeared to stray from its roots with odd selections. But a fall collection and the spring/summer 2016 lineup looked generally promising. The brand continues to connect with millennial women, largely in part due to its Creative Director, Jenna Lyons. J. Crew’s „Very Personal Styling“ also appeals to millennials, as does its somewhat-affordable wedding apparel.

82. Gucci

Thomson Reuters

File photo of a woman holding an umbrella as she walks past a company logo of a Gucci boutique outside a shopping mall in central Guangzhou

Headquarters: Florence, Italy

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Gucci engaged with millennial consumers with a campaign surrounding its classic loafer. The campaign included quizzes, a Pinterest board, and a #Gucci1953HorsebitLoafter hashtag, cementing the luxury brand as a participant in the social community with its own voice.

81. Costco

Thomson Reuters

Shopping carts at Costco in Fairfax, Virginia

Headquarters: Issaquah, Washington

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Now that Costco has partnered with Google, it can serve cash-strapped millennials in urban cities who want to buy things in bulk, but perhaps don’t have the transportation to do so. It already boasts many great deals.

80. Rue 21

Instagram/Rue 21

Headquarters: Warrendale, Pennsylvania

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: The brand has figured out a way to pull in shoppers. When rue21 launched its new ecommerce site, it held a „Shop & Win“ contest. The contest involved a social sharing aspect as well as the promise of winning clothing.

79. Puma

Puma Facebook

Headquarters: Herzogenaurach, Germany

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: While Puma lags in comparison to competitors Nike and Adidas, it still has managed to engage a young audience — especially with its „Dance Dictionary“ feature. Fortunately, Rihanna’s involvement with the brand is helping it tremendously.

78. Playstation

Sony

Headquarters: San Mateo, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Playstation has managed to take gaming to the next level with its Infamous: Second Son game — it features a character with the power to shock others, and yes, players can get shocked.

77. Nordstrom

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Nordstrom is the department store that’s managing to defy the odds. It recently announced plan to expand its lower-priced concept, Nordstrom Rack. Nordstrom managed to capture and hold onto a young audience by adding Reddit to its social media roster.

76. Nissan

Newspress

Headquarters: Yokohama, Kanagawa Perfecture, Japan

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Nissan’s „Open The Briefcase“ campaign last year cemented it as a car company that’s fully engaged with its consumers, as it was orchestrated via mobile devices.

75. Dodge

REUTERS/Rebecca Cook

Headquarters: Auburn Hills, Michigan

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: When Dodge partnered with „Anchorman“ to produce an ad featuring the comically legendary Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell), it cemented itself as a brand that communicated on the same level as many pop-culturally savvy millennials.

74. Toshiba

Thomson Reuters

Pedestrians walk past a logo of Toshiba Corp outside an electronics retailer in Tokyo

Headquarters: Minato, Tokyo, Japan

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Toshiba partnered up with Intel and San Francisco ad agency Peira & O’Dell for its „Beauty Inside“ campaign — a piece of branded content that featured six episodes about a character named Alex, who woke up as a different person everyday (including both celebrities…and regular people).

73. Sephora

Thomson Reuters

People walk out of the Sephora store on the Champs Elysees Avenue in Paris

Headquarters: Paris, France

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Sephora is the premiere destination for all things beauty. Its points and rewards system encourages brand loyalty; consumers keep coming back to obtain points to earn new products. Sephora’s app, Beauty Insider, features „Beauty Boards,“ which allow shoppers to show off their best new looks. It also serves an inspiration board, in the same vein as Pinterest.

72. Netflix

Thomson Reuters

The Netflix logo is shown in this illustration photograph in Encinitas, California

Headquarters: Los Gatos, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: There’s a reason people say „Netflix and chill“ and not „cable and chill!“ Netflix’s original series such as „Orange Is The New Black“ and „Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt“ have turned it into a very influential vehicle in pop culture. It also partnered with popular site Gawker for a documentary club, wherein viewers were able to discuss a weekly program with other people.

71. JCPenney

YouTube

Headquarters: Plano, Texas

Place on last poll: 18

Why it’s hot: JCPenney has been working to execute a turnaround by focusing on engaging consumers, like with its interactive charity game during the Oscars. JCPenney recently starting incorporating Sephora units into its larger stores.

70. Banana Republic

Banana Republic

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Banana Republic partnered with the funny Instagram account #HotDudesReading — promoting First Book, a literacy program for children (and millennials love things with a good cause). Recently, Banana Republic has faced some troubles with fashion missteps and slipping sales.

69. Valve

Flickr/tux404

Headquarters: Bellevue, Washington

Place last poll: 24

Why it’s hot: The video-game development company rose to prominence with its Half-Life franchise in 1998. The brand has a huge following on Facebook and frequently posts giveaways. Steam has also become the premiere gaming platform for many people.

68. Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut on Facebook

Headquarters: Wichita, Kansas

Place last year: 21

Why it’s hot: Pizza Hut tested out movie-projector boxes in Hong Kong, proving that the brand is always looking to innovate. Pizza Huts wacky pizzas, like its Hot Dog Stuffed Crust Pizza, certainly set sparks of intrigue (and maybe disgust) flying throughout social media and the Internet.

67. Marvel

Marvel

Headquarters: New York, NY

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Marvel is obviously a huge power force in pop culture — its „Avengers“ movies (amongst others) are smash hits, grossing billions of dollars worldwide. Marvel knows its movies generate tremendous hype, so it kept its „Avengers: Age of Ultron“ trailer ‚locked‘ until fans tweeted enough. Moosylvania notes that Marvel received an outrageous amount of tweets — an average of 8,100 tweets a minute worldwide — so it was obviously a successful campaign.

66. Michael Kors

Facebook

Michael Kors rose to popularity because of its handbags.

Headquarters: New York, New York

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Michael Kors bags and watches are very popular with millennials, although a recent rise in ubiquity (along with rapid expansion) has threatened the brand’s level of luxury. It may be too popular for its own good. Still, Moosylvania praises the brand for its memorable 2013 campaign, #WhatsInYourKors, which cemented the brand’s social voice.

65. Facebook

REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen on stage during a town hall with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California September 27, 2015.

Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Facebook is a primary vehicle for millennial communication. The „Look Back“ campaign and the recent „memories“ feature cater to millennials‘ love for nostalgia — and better yet, they’re both focused on social sharing.

64. Bath & Body Works

Headquarters: Reynoldsburg, Ohio

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Bath & Body works was an icon in the late ’90s and early aughts (and a mainstay for holiday gifts). Bath & Body Works capitalized on millennials‘ love for nostalgia by throwing back to its iconic older fragrances, such as Cucumber Melon and Juniper Breeze with its #FlashbackFragrance campaign.

63. Barnes & Noble

Flickr / Rowan University Publications

Headquarters: New York, NY

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Yes, these kids still read! And Barnes & Noble knows that. Barnes & Noble also capitalized on social media with its #BNGiftTip campaign, which helped consumers figure out what sort of items to buy for presents via the Internet.

62. AT&T

Daniel Goodman / Business Insider.com

Headquarters: Dallas, Texas

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: AT&T had its own mini-series on Snapchat called „Snapperhero“ — and millennials love Snapchat. AT&T has encouraged its users to submit their own content for the campaign, too. Ultimately, all of it was shared on various social networks. AT&T proved it could communicate on the same level that millennials communicate on. AT&T also remains a popular phone service.

61. Verizon

Flickr/scobleizer

Headquarters: New York, New York

Place on last poll: 27

Why it’s hot: Verizon is continuing to dominate the mobile space. The company also recently purchased AOL, showing it is interested in producing more content. The company has recently endeared millennials by making its data plan cheaper. The brand also had a campaign that encouraged young people to create mobile apps.

60. Mountain Dew

Honest Slogans

Headquarters: Purchase, New York

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Mountain Dew has capitalized on the way many millennials communicate — via Snapchat. It announced its new flavors via the social media service. The brand also told a live story via Snapchat when it launched its new Kickstar beverage, causing Fast Company to sing its praises. „Mountain Dew is a brand that is constantly engaging with young consumers,“ the website wrote.

59. Kroger

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Breakfast cereal is shown for sale at a Ralphs grocery store in Del Mar, California, March 6, 2013.

Headquarters: Cincinnati, Ohio

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Kroger’s loyalty cards track what shoppers buy — so that Kroger’s shoppers don’t just receive random rewards, but rather, rewards that cater to their specific shopping needs. Kroger has been taking many steps to advance its in-store (and delivery) technology.

58. Kraft

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Kraft macaroni and cheese products are seen on the shelf at a grocery store in Washington, May 3, 2012.

Headquarters: Northfield, Illinois

Place on last poll: 40

Why it’s hot: Kraft scored big points with millennials this year when it announced that starting in 2016, its original Macaroni & Cheese will get its color from natural spices like paprika instead of from artificial additives Yellow 5 and Yellow 6. Kraft’s latest ads have also appealed to millennials, Moosylvania explains, since they look more like GIFs — something millennials love.

57. Gamestop

REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

Headquarters: Grapevine, Texas

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: GameStop knows how to cater to its customers. It uses mobile data to help it figure out which games to stock in particular regions. GameStop has avoided the fate of becoming the next ill-fated Blockbuster, by stocking more than just games, featuring downloadable content, and making GameStop not just a store, but a social destination for game-loving shoppers.

56. Chipotle

Flickr/ Collin Messer

Headquarters: Denver, Colorado

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: It’s no secret — millennials are obsessed with fast casual behemoth Chipotle. Its focus on eliminating GMOs and sustainable ingredients has helped it unseat Subway as the ultimate healthy place to eat. The company is also quirky — Moosylvania points to its haiku contest, wherein consumers could write love haikus to their beloved burritos for the chances to win prizes.

55. Chick-fil-A

Hollis Johnson

Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia

Place on last poll:

Why it’s hot: Chick-fil-A has a cult following, no doubt. Its zealots showed their devotion when they had the opportunity to dress like cows to win free food. Chick-fil-A remains a favorite destination for millennials because the food is fresh…and good.

54. Whole Foods

Mallory Schlossberg/Business Insider

Headquarters: Austin, Texas

Place on last poll:

Why it’s hot: Whole Foods is known for selling fresh, organic food, and for suggesting healthy recipes to consumers. It has engaged consumers on its social networks by encouraging them to share their own food photos.

53. Ebay

Thomson Reuters

An eBay sign is seen at an office building in San Jose, California

Headquarters: San Jose, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Even though reselling clothes is becoming the hottest new thing in retail — and many startups are aiming to disrupt the space — eBay remains the primary place for reselling items on the Internet. eBay has also showed off its cultural colors when it suggested that artists use the hashtag #eBayArtforAll to share their own personal inspirations.

52. Asus

REUTERS/Pichi Chuang

Asus Padfone 2 tablet

Headquarters: Taipei, Taiwan

Place on last poll: 50

Why it’s hot: This Taiwanese company is a huge PC vendor. The brand is making headlines for its inexpensive Android smartphone and ZenWatch. The brand also plays on popular memes (for example, birds with arms), and has optimized its Internet friendly content, including games and videos. But as more consumers turn to Android, Asus could be challenged.

51. Taco Bell

Taco Bell Online

Headquarters: Irvine, California

Place on last poll: Taco Bell

Why it’s hot: Taco Bell remains wildly popular. It’s #breakfastdefects campaign helped the brand create its own unique, Internet-friendly culture surrounding its breakfast lineup. Taco Bell also rewards fans by giving away free food with occasional contests.

50. Dr. Pepper

By andreasivarsson on Flickr

Headquarters: Plano, Texas

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Dr. Pepper not only has a cult following, but it also has taken steps to lure in millennial consumers. It partnered with Spike TV’s popular show, „Lip Sync Battle“ to set up a lip sync booth in Times Square. Some people were selected to have their videos air on the television show.

49. Dove

Dove

Headquarters: Rotterdam, Netherlands

Place last year: 26

Why it’s hot: Dove, which is owned by Unilever, has been succeeding with its „real beauty“ campaigns, which emphasizes natural looks over the typically airbrushed ads, resonate well with millennials. The brand’s „Self Esteem“ Snapchat campaign, in which girls could Snapchat their insecurities and receive a positive response, highlighted the brand’s ethos.

48. HTC

Antonio Villas-Boas/Tech Insider

Headquarters: Xindian District, New Taipei, Taiwan

Place on last poll:

Why it’s hot: HTC made its consumers stars in Times Square — the company encouraged consumers to share their most gorgeous photos for a chance to be shared on a massive billboard in the iconic New York City enclave.

47. Hershey’s

Hershey’s

Headquarters: Hershey, Pennsylvania

Plac last poll: 37

Why it’s hot: Hershey’s has dropped artificial colorings from its chocolate. „We are committed to making our products using ingredients that are simple and easy-to-understand, like fresh milk from local farms, roasted California almonds, cocoa beans and sugar – ingredients you recognize, know and trust,“ the company said in a news release.

46. BMW

BMW

Headquarters: Munich, Germany

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: BMW served as an official sponsor of the United States Olympics team in 2014, and the automobile company sponsored social campaigns with incentives for consumers, like its #BMWborntoslide campaign, wherein consumers who photographed themselves sliding could a win a trip to Utah to ride in a real bobsled.

45. Ralph Lauren

Ralph Lauren

Headquarters: New York, New York

Place on last poll: 30

Why it’s hot: Ralph Lauren’s brand is available at thousands of stores worldwide. The brand has become more active on social media and hired Sports Illustrated cover model Hannah Davis to model its resort collection. The brand also encouraged consumers to be a part of its „Project Warehouse“ campaign last year, which Moosylvania says created an emotional connection between the brand and its consumers.

44. Kellogg’s

Wikimedia Commons

Headquarters: Battle Creek, Michigan

Place on last poll: 39

Why it’s hot: Cereal sales might be declining, but the company has mastered digital campaigns, which certainly appeals to millennials.

43. Coach

REUTERS/Fred Prouser

Headquarters: New York, NY

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Coach’s social media activity and campaigns have made the luxury brand accessible to younger shoppers who don’t have as much money. But, Coach’s ubiquity and accessibility have hurt the brand’s reputation as a luxury retailer, so the brand has been focusing on toning down its promotions to help it become more exclusive again.

42. Honda

Newspress

Headquarters: Hamamatsu, Japan

Place on last poll: 31

Why it’s hot: Honda’s fuel-efficient, compact cars appeal to millennials. But most importantly, the company’s YouTube campaigns for Honda Fit excited millennials. Honda has partnered with major companies such as iHeartRadio, Live Nation, and REVOLT for its YouTube channel.

41. Chevrolet

Chevrolet

Headquarters: Detroit, Michigan

Place on last poll: 23

Why it’s hot: Chevy’s compact, Trax SUV is a hit with urban millennials. The brand’s emoji-themed campaigns also appeal to millennials, who communicate that way.

40. Best Buy

Flickr/Kevin McShane

Headquarters: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Place on last poll: 28

Why it’s hot: Best Buy has been successfully growing sales and revenue through its television business. Executives at Best Buy have made it clear that 4K Ultra High Definition televisions are the future of the business. Last year, the brand appealed to consumers during the holiday season by encouraging them to post what they wanted online with a #hintingseason hashtag.

39. Macy’s

Kena Betancur/Getty

People enter the Macy’s store at the Newport Mall on November 27, 2014 in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Headquarters: Cincinnati, Ohio

Place on last poll: 16

Why it’s hot: Millennials are spending less money on clothes, which is bad news for Macy’s. In order to attract younger shoppers, the brand has been investing in trendier clothing lines and other categories like home goods and cosmetics. But Macy’s has been also focusing on its social campaign, like its #MacysLoveMoms. For every photo memory or tweet shared, the company donated $3 to a charity.

38. Express

Facebook/Express

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Express rewards shoppers by not just using their store credit cards, but by getting involved with Express in other ways, too — like retweeting its tweets and singing up for its text message alerts. For every 2,500 points, shoppers earn $10. This helps Express ensure customer loyalty.

37. Aeropostale

Headquarters: New York, New York

Place on last poll: 46

Why it’s hot: Despite falling out of favor with the teen set, Aeropostale still maintains some loyalty with the 20-somethings who wore it in high school. The brand’s status, however, is falling fast as young people increasingly move away from logos. The brand has appealed to millennials by incorporating YouTube personality Bethany Mota into its marketing and fashion plans. (The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May.)

36. Hewlett-Packard

Lisa Eadicicco

Headquarters: Palo Alto, California

Place on last poll: 35

Why it’s hot: Young consumers love Hewlett-Packard’s relatively inexpensive laptops. Still, they remained threatened by Apple’s dominance in the industry.

35. Gap

Hollis Johnson/Business Insider

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Although Gap’s „Dress Normal“ campaign generally misfired, it succeeded on some points. Moosylvania points to tis „Play Your Stripes“ game in collaboration with Blood Orange, where people could ‚play‘ the stripes on their clothes to create music.

34. Frito Lay

Hollis Johnson

Headquarters: Plano, Texas

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Lay’s won big with its Do Us A Flavor contest. People who shared their digitally designed flavors online were eligible to win bags of their designed chips — and some even got to have their flavors nationally produced. (Business Insider went ahead and tested some of these wacky flavors).

33. Toyota

Toyota

Headquarters: Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, Japan

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Toyota has teamed up with YouTube stars like Rhett & Link for campaigns, proving it knows how to cater to its audiences. Moosylvania also highlights its 2014 #CarsThatFeel campaign, which incorporated LED lights into Priuses for the 2014 Vivid Light Festival in Sydney Harbor. The cars had ‚personalities‘ and ‚feelings‘ and interacted with people, which is certainly intriguing.

32. McDonald’s

Foodbeast

Headquarters: Oak Brook, Illinois

Place on last poll: 17

Why it’s hot: The brand has been introducing more fresh ingredients and customizable burgers to compete with fast casual brands. It’s #PayWithLovin campaign also appealed to millennials. The company is also launching a new salad mix that is more colorful, perhaps to appeal to health-conscious millennials.

31. H&M

Flickr/Mike Mozart

Headquarters: Stockholm, Sweden

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: H&M knows what its consumers want. Moosylvania points to the racy campaign where shoppers could choose how David Beckham would appear in one of its ads — with or without clothes (he was wearing briefs, of course!). H&M has also managed to lure many sartorially minded shoppers with its high-profile collaborations.

30. Under Armour

Facebook/Under Armour

Headquarters: Baltimore, Maryland

Place on last poll: 45

Why it’s hot: Under Armour has exploded in popularity in recent years thanks to signing famous athletes like Stephen Curry and smart marketing of its performance-wear. The brand is rapidly catching up to competitors Lululemon and Nike, especially as it incorporates more technologically-focused apparel into its lineup.

29. Levi’s

@levis on Instagram

Headquarters: San Francisco, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Levi’s has benefited from young consumers‘ tendency to wear denim and casual clothing to work. But now, many millennials are abandoning denim entirely, choosing to wear athletic attire instead. To combat this problem, Levi’s has been designing jeans that are stretchy and more form-fitting in nature, to put them in line with athleisure-style apparel.

28. Dell

Lisa Eadicicco

Headquarters: Round Rock, Texas

Place last poll: 15

Why it’s hot: Dell is another company benefiting from millennials‘ reliance on technology. The company’s laptop and desktop computers are especially popular with the young set. But most crucially, Moosylvania explains that Dell really appealed to millennials by sending YouTube celebrities Smosh on a road trip, chronicling it all with a Dell Venue 8 Tablet.

27. Vans

Flickr/_Nicole90_

Headquarters: Cypress, California

Place on last poll: 25

Why it’s hot: Vans started out selling skater shoes, but has since gone mainstream. The company has benefited from athletic footwear becoming more fashionable than dress shoes.

26. Hollister

Mike Mozart/Flickr

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Hollister signifies a beachy lifestyle. The company owned that attitude by renting a beach house in California in summer 2014, tapping top artists to perform. The brand had stylists give consumers advice online, too. The brand proved that it was in touch with its consumers favorite celebrities while also engaging in a conversation with its shoppers.

25. Victoria’s Secret

Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images

Headquarters: Columbus, Ohio

Place on last poll: 38

Why it’s hot: Victoria’s Secret is the undisputed leader of the lingerie market, controlling 61.8% of the market share, according to IBIS World. The company’s marketing strategy, which includes its famous Angels, is seen as one of the best in the business.

24. Kohl’s

hattiesburgmemory/Flickr

Headquarters: Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Kohl’s rewards program ensures customer loyalty without needing a store credit card. In fact, customers can earn points by doing the simplest activity such as pinning images on Pinterest. Kohl’s lower prices can also lure millennials.

22. Hot Topic

flickr / camknows

Headquarters: Industry, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Hot Topic is more than just a destination for clothing for millennials — it’s become an entire lifestyle, with its focus on the music industry and pop culture. The store even sponsors shows.

23. Old Navy

AP Photo/Ed Betz

Shoppers wait in line to pay at an Old Navy store in Deer Park, N.Y.

Headquarters: San Francisco

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Old Navy’s digital campaigns have been massive hits — Moosylvania points to its 2014 Christmastime Vine campaign, but the company’s „#Unlimited“ viral video, which has over 12 million views on YouTube. The company has also delivered quirky spots starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Old Navy understands how to market content to the Internet generation, though sales have been slipping lately.

21. Disney

Jennie Park Photography/Flickr

Headquarters: Burbank, California

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: Moosylvania points out Disney’s unique campaign „Disney Side,“ wherein shoppers would walk by a billboard a the Westfield Sunrise Center in Massapequa and see iconic Disney characters. This was a huge social media hit.

20. LG Corporation

REUTERS/Gustau Nacarino

A model holds a curved G Flex smartphone by LG Electronics during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona February 24, 2014.

Headquarters: Busan, South Korea

Place on last poll: 48

Why it’s hot: LG’s funny #MomConfessions campaign proved the LG knew how to cater to millennials — through humor and social media.

19. Ford

REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

The new Ford Vignale is presented during a media preview day at the Frankfurt Motor Show (IAA) September 10, 2013.

Headquarters: Dearborn, Michigan

Place on last poll: 19

Why it’s hot: Ford is repositioning its brand to seem more luxury and compete with auto-makers like BMW and Mercedes with the launch of the new Vignale brand. The new line of compact sedans could resonate with millennials, who prefer smaller cars then their parents‘. Ford has also embraced social media with Instagram contests.

18. Converse

Converse on Facebook

Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts

Place on last poll: 20

Why it’s hot: Converse has seen sales boom as more millennials wear sneakers to work and other occasions. Athletic apparel and footwear is set to outperform the industry for the next five years, according to Morgan Stanley. Converse’s „Made By You“ campaign allowed consumers to show off their unique attributes and lives — using Converse as a vehicle for it all.

17. American Eagle

American Eagle on Facebook

Headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Place on last poll: N/A

Why it’s hot: American Eagle has managed to avoid the fate of many of its competitors by not falling victim to the low sale prices utilized by many fast fashion stalwarts. Most crucially, American Eagle has won the heart of millennial females with Aerie, its lingerie subset, which proudly boasts Photoshop-free ads. Since nixing Photoshop, sales have soared.

16. Starbucks

Flickr/bargainmoose

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Place on last poll: 22

Why it’s hot: Starbucks has been expanding its menu to include more food options such as sandwiches and salads — and even wine at some locations. It has also added drive-thrus to many locations. Additionally, it allows consumers to have a say in its products — like when it had consumers vote on new frappuccino flavors in the summer, granting the winning beverage a lower price, Moosylvania notes.

15. Pepsi

Thomson Reuters

Cases of Pepsi are displayed for sale in Carlsbad

Headquarters: Purchase, New York

Place on last poll: 10

Why it’s hot: PepsiCo has introduced a beverage sweetened with natural sweetener Stevia called Pepsi True. The company says the new product „will continue to provide consumers with the crisp, refreshing zero-calorie cola taste they expect from Pepsi.“ It also removed artificial ingredient aspartame from Diet Pepsi. The brand’s 2014 YouTube hit, „Unbelievable,“ was a smash with viewers, garnering over 7 million hits.

14. Jordan

Flickr/neilp17

Headquarters: Beaverton, Oregon

Place on last poll: 9

Why it’s hot: Many of Nike’s Jordan brand sneakers are prominent on the billion-dollar reselling market. A growing culture of so-called sneakerheads buy collectible footwear on eBay, Craigslist, and other sites. Jordan’s „We Are Jordan“ campaign had an interactive element, too.

13. Adidas

XMODE/Adidas centaur

Headquarters: Herzogenaurach, Germany

Place on last poll: 14

Why it’s hot: Adidas is going to start offering customized shoes to appeal to millennials. It also is working to reduce the time between when products are designed and when they hit shelves. Still, the brand continues to lose market share to Nike.

12. Forever 21

REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

Women shop for clothes in clothing retail store Forever 21 in New York.

Headquarters: Los Angeles, California

Place on last poll: 36

Why it’s hot: Forever 21 offers fast fashion at unbeatable prices and has expanded tremendously in two decades.

10. Coca-Cola

Donald Bowers/Getty Images

Headquarters: Atlanta, Georgia

Place on last poll: 8

Why it’s hot: Coca-Cola remains the clear leader in the soda market. The brand also scored high points for its „Share a Coke“ campaign, which featured common names on Coke bottles. Now, with its „Tweet a Coke“ campaign, people can send Cokes to others. Still, Coca-Cola’s partnership with Keurig for the Keurig Kold failed to resonate with consumers.

11. Nintendo

YouTube/cobanermani456

Headquarters: Kyoto, Japan

Place on last poll: 13

Why it’s hot: Many millennials feel nostalgic toward Nintendo because they played its games as kids. This has led to brand loyalty in adulthood. 2015 was also the 30th anniversary of Super Mario, and the brand encouraged users to participate in a campaign called „Let’s Super Mario,“ allowing users to submit their own Mario-related content — all of which would be shared on a site where many could see it.

9. Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart

Headquarters: Bentonville, Arkansas

Place on last poll: 5

Why it’s hot: Wal-Mart gave its workers a raise this year and has pledged to adopt more humane standards for the meat it sells. It also opened smaller format stores that resonate with millennials more than supercenters. Its „Neighborhood Market“ grocery concepts could rival those of Whole Foods, and its app helps consumers find savings throughout the store.

8. Google

Headquarters: Menlo Park, California

Place on last poll: 12

Why it’s hot: Google’s smartphone apps have become essential for many millennials. Its Gmail program is also extremely popular. Google continues to find ways to be a part of users‘ everyday lives.

7. Amazon

REUTERS/Phil Noble

Headquarters: Seattle, Washington

Place on last poll: 11

Why it’s hot: This year, the company started offering one-hour delivery for members of its Prime service and expanded its grocery delivery business to New York City. The company also announced a new gadget called the Dash Button, which will make it easier for consumers to order household items, such as detergent, when they are running low. Amazon has also connected with Twitter.

6. Target

Associated Press

A Target employee hands bags to a customer at the register at a Target store in Colma, Calif.

Headquarters: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Place on last poll: 6

Why it’s hot: Target invented the idea of „cheap chic“ two decades ago. Today, the company is revamping its grocery selections for millennials. Target has also worked to cement itself as the premiere destination for back-to-school college goods.

5. Microsoft

Microsoft

Nick Parker, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s OEM Division, and Felicia Guity, general manager in Microsoft’s OEM Division

Headquarters: Redmond, Washington

Place on last poll: 7

Why it’s hot: Cloud computing, mobile apps, and holographic computing are driving Microsoft to record profits. The brand recently did a demo showing how personal computers could become holographic. Its Microsoft Band even features Uber and Facebook apps — two very popular apps. Microsoft has also been using LinkedIn to comunicate with its consumers.

4. Sony

REUTERS/Toru Hanai

Sony Mobile Communications Inc President and CEO Hiroki Totoki poses with Sony’s new Xperia Z4 smartphone after a news conference in Tokyo April 20, 2015.

Headquarters: Minato, Tokyo

Place last poll: 4

Why it’s hot: Sony’s Playstation, gaming, photo, and music businesses are booming. Sony is aggressively investing in these areas. The company also has popular smartphones. Sony also utilized a concept called One Stadium Live for the 2014 World Cup, creating a single platform for all World Cup-related social media.

3. Samsung

Flickr/Kārlis Dambrāns

Headquarters: San Jose, California

Place last poll: 3

Why it’s hot: Samsung’s Galaxy phones and tablets are extremely popular with millennials. The brand’s latest Galaxy S6 smartphone received rave reviews.

2. Nike

Nike on Instagram

Headquarters: Beaverton, Oregon

Place on last poll: 1

Why it’s hot: When it comes to active wear — and apparel in general — Nike is the go-to brand. Data also shows that millennials believe exercise is essential for health, while their parents only focused on their diets. Nike has focused on incorporating top-tier technology into its clothing.

1. Apple

Business Insider / Matt Johnston

Headquarters: Cupertino, California

Place on last poll: 2

Why it’s hot: Apple has a fanatical following, and many of its customers are millennials. The company’s iPhones, iPads, and Macbooks are wildly popular. Last year, Apple made headlines with its new watch.

http://www.businessinsider.de/top-100-millennial-brands-ranking-2015-5?op=1