Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s twin children Isha and Akash, and edtech startup Byju’s founder Byju Raveendran are among the Indians who have debuted on Fortune ’s ‘40 Under 40’ list of influential people around the globe.
Stating that the coronavirus pandemic has fundamentally altered the way people work and socialise, Fortune magazine said executives have moved quickly to support and empower employees while grappling with daunting challenges to the way their businesses operate.
“To reflect this wave of transformation, we decided that we needed to embrace change in this year’s 40 Under 40. We needed to go bigger — and search more widely,” it said.
This year’s list includes 40 influential people under 40 years of age in five categories — finance, technology, healthcare, government and politics, and media and entertainment.
In the technology list, Isha and Akash Ambani feature with Byju Raveendran.
“They say data is the new oil — and when it comes to Reliance Industries, India’s largest company, that’s literally the case,” Fortune said, adding the 47-year-old conglomerate amassed a fortune in petrochemicals before dominating the country’s mobile connectivity market with Jio, a low-cost wireless carrier which debuted in 2016.
Reliance is a family business. Mr. Akash joined the company in 2014 after receiving an economics degree from Brown University. Ms. Isha joined a year later, following stints at Yale, Stanford and McKinsey.
“As Jio board members, they helped seal the company’s recent megadeal with Facebook — $5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake — plus major follow-on investments from marquee tech titans like Google, Qualcomm, and Intel. The flurry of investments lent the business an eye-popping $65 billion private valuation,” it said.
The Ambani scions, it said, lead enviable lives, “attending private concerts featuring Beyonce, partying with buddies Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas, living it up in a 27-story residential skyscraping pleasure palace in Mumbai.”
“When the glam siblings are not basking in unfathomable luxury, they’re training — along with their younger brother, Anant, 25, a more recent addition to Jio’s board — to take on their father’s empire. A major proving ground will be e-commerce,” it said.
Recently, Mr. Akash and Ms. Isha helped launch JioMart, a venture that aims to challenge Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart for command of India’s massive and fast-growing online shopping market.
Regarding Mr. Biju, Fortune said he has shown the world that it really is possible to build a massively successful online education company.
“Byju’s, as the company is known, has become India’s biggest education technology company, helping millions of students prep and study for the most important exams of their lives while teaching them a thing or two about core topics like mathematics and science,” it said.
Since its founding in 2011, the red-hot education start-up has raised over $1 billion and is now worth more than $10 billion.
“Mr. Biju will need that cash as he aims to expand Byju’s into new countries like the United States and the United Kingdom,” Fortune said.
Though the education business tends to slow down in the summer, Mr. Biju has been keeping busy.
In August, Mr. Byju’s bought the education technology startup WhiteHat Jr for $300 million.
Manu Kumar Jain, managing director of Xiaomi India, also features on the list.
“Mr. Jain knew nothing about smartphones when Chinese giant Xiaomi tapped him in 2014 to build its India operations from the ground up. But he did know a thing or two about startups,” Fortune said.
The last company he founded, Jabong, was a fashion e-commerce player that was sold to Flipkart.
In his quest for knowledge at the start of his new gig, the executive regularly carried between 30 to 40 smartphones in his bag, testing out features and checking out competitors.
“His (literal) heavy lifting paid off: Under Mr. Jain, Xiaomi overtook Korean colossus Samsung to become the smartphone leader in India in just three years, bolstered by a strategy to act more like an Indian company,” it added.
Here is the full list:
Source: fortune.com
| Serial Number | Finance | Technology | Healthcare | Government and Politics | Media and Entertainment |
| 1 | Adam White | Adam Mosseri | Abasi Ene-Obong | Alicia Garza | Andrew Berry |
| 2 | Adelina Grozdanova | Anthony Casalena | Adar Poonawalla | Amanda Litman | Benjamin Clymer |
| 3 | Adena Hefets | Byju Raveendran | Afton Vechery | Bhaskar Sunkara | Beyonce Knowles-Carter |
| 4 | Akshay Naheta | Carmela Troncoso | Alexis C. Komor | Briahna Joy Gray | Bowen Yang |
| 5 | Amy Hong | Cindy Mi | Ambar Bhattacharyya | Charlotte Clymer | Brian Stelter |
| 6 | Anna Mason | Elizabeth Hamon Reid | Amber Bynum | Chlöe Swarbrick | Carolina Garcia |
| 7 | Bill Pang | Erin Thomas | Amir Barsoum | Conor Lamb | Charli D’Amelio |
| 8 | Cameron Peake | Falon Fatemi | André Blackman | Dan Crenshaw | Dan Levy |
| 9 | Catherine Coley | God-is Rivera | Andrew Dudum | Daniel Barash | David Rogier |
| 10 | Céline Dufétel | Henry Schuck | Artem Petakov | Deepa Subramaniam | Emily Meade |
| 11 | Chris Grose | Isha Ambani and Akash Ambani | Christos Kyratsous | Elise Stefanik | Emily Ramshaw |
| 12 | Cristina Junqueira | Janine Pelosi | Dhaval Shah and Dharmil Sheth | Isra Hirsi | Erica Anderson |
| 13 | Diana Avila | Jill Hazelbaker | Helen Adeosun | Jalisa Washington-Price | Fadia Kader |
| 14 | Diogo Mónica | Juergen Mueller | Jackie Jones | Jamal Raad | Greta Gerwig |
| 15 | Eric Wu | Kristin Schaefer | Jason Kelly | Jason Kander | Haley Sacks |
| 16 | Guillaume Pousaz | Kudzi Chikumbu | Julia Cheek | Joe Kennedy III | Huda Kattan |
| 17 | Jonathan Levin | Leah Belsky | Kartik Ramamoorthi | Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett | Issa Rae |
| 18 | Josh Reeves | Lindsey Finch | Kate Rosenbluth | Jose Antonio Vargas | Lewis Hamilton |
| 19 | Keia Cole | Liu Yachao | Kate Ryder | Josie Duffy Rice | Marcus Rashford |
| 20 | Kyle Corcoran | Lucas Joppa | Kiah Williams | Kat Skiles | Mari Andrew |
| 21 | Margaret Anadu | Manu Kumar Jain | Lauren R. Powell | Kate Bedingfield | Matthew A. Cherry |
| 22 | Michele Romanow | Marissa Giustina | Lily Peng | Kate Johansen | Max Cutler |
| 23 | Nik Storonsky | Max Schrems | Lily Sarafan | Kayleigh McEnany | Michael R. Jackson |
| 24 | Nima Ghamsari | Melanie Perkins | Luhan Yang | Kristin Smith | Michael Sebastian |
| 25 | Nir Bar Dea | Michael Seibel | Ma Chun’e | Lauren Underwood | Michaela Coel |
| 26 | Olugbenga Agboola | Obi Ozor | Michael Kapps | Lina Hidalgo | Mona Chalabi |
| 27 | Paul Shoukry | Peter Szulczewski | Nicole Gaudelli | Lis Smith | Naz Aletaha |
| 28 | Rebecca Mann | Rashida Hodge | Padideh Kamali-Zare | Matt Gaetz | Nick Tran |
| 29 | Rick Yang | Rebecca Elizabeth Lipon Weekly | Paul and Michael Dabrowski | Melissa Kilby | Patrick Mahomes |
| 30 | Sara Wechter | Steve Huffman | Prem Tumkosit | Michael Grosack | Phoebe Waller-Bridge |
| 31 | Sarah Cannon | Steve Martocci | Racquel Bracken | Monica Klein and Elana Leopold | Robin Arzón |
| 32 | Sebastian Siemiatkowski | Su Hua | Raven Baxter | Nicole Galloway | Ronan Farrow |
| 33 | Shivani Siroya | Susy Schöneberg | Rebekah Jones | Pearl Gabel | Ryan Coogler |
| 34 | Sunayna Tuteja | Ted Mabrey | Sean Duffy | Ron Steslow | Ryan Wyatt |
| 35 | Suneera Madhani | Tony Xu | Suelin Chen | Sanna Marin | Scooter Braun |
| 36 | Val Yap | Trang-Thien Tran | Syra Madad | Sarah Huckabee Sanders | Stacy-Marie Ishmael |
| 37 | William Heard | Vanessa Guthrie | Trevor Bedford | Svante Myrick | Taylor Lorenz |
| 38 | Yang Bing | Will Cathcart | Will Ahmed | Symone Sanders | Telfar Clemens |
| 39 | Yoni Assia | Wu Tian | Yonatan Adiri | Tasnim Motala | Trevor Noah |
| 40 | Zach Perret | Ya Xu | Zachariah Reitano | Yuh-Line Niou | Zendaya |
