Talented South Asians on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List

Posted on: May 4, 2016 by: Deshvidesh

Talented South Asians on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Lis

Every year, Forbes magazine announces its 30 Under 30 list of young entrepreneurs who surprise the world with their ingenuity and excellence. In 2016, its fifth year of running the list, the business magazine named 600 of the “brightest young entrepreneurs, breakout talents, and change agents in 20 different sectors.”Of these 600, a significant number of men and women of South Asian descent made their way to the top, in fields that include Finance, Entertaintment, Retail and E-Commerce, Venture Capital, Media, and Science, among others.

In this issue of Desh-Videsh, South Florida’s own Bicky Khosla interviewed, Anisha Singh, an attorney who made the list. Read more about what Singh’s accomplishments in the article following this feature.

Here’s a look at some of the young entrepreneurs who made this year’s list.

FINANCE

Nila Das, 27
After working as a mortgage trader at RBC, Nila is now designated as the Vice-President of Citigroup. She runs the bank’s secondary trading in agency collatoralised mortgage obligations, overseeing billions of dollars in volume each day.

Vikas Patel, 29
Vikas is a Senior Analyst at Millennium Management, L.L.C. where he manages the big real estate investment trust book for the $32 million hedge fund.

HOLLYWOOD & ENTERTAINMENT

Lilly Singh, 27
Comedian-writer Lilly Singh is a well-known name in the Hollywood circuit. Famously known as ‘Superwoman’, she is both a rapper and a stand-up comedian.

RETAIL & ECOMMERCE

Satish Kanwar, 29

Director of Product at Shopify, Kanwar has been instrumental in gaining partnerships with Facebook and Pinterest’s ‘Buy’ buttons.

VENTURE CAPITAL

Vishal Lugani, 26
Vishal worked his way up the ladder from an Analyst to Senior Analyst at Greycroft Partners.

Amit Mukherjee, 27
Mukherjee is a Senior Associate at New Enterprise Associates, where he leads diligence for over $500 million of invested capital.

EDUCATION
Aneesh Sohoni, 27
Aneesh is a Project Director at The New Teachers Project. He supports school districts at on college and career-ready standards.

Consumer Tech
Ritesh Agarwal, 22,
Founder and chief executive of OYO Rooms and one of the youngest people at his company. An Indian, Mr. Agarwal skipped college and undertook a program for teens with business ideas, funded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.

MEDIA
Nisha Chittal, 27Manager of Social Media & Community, MSNBC, she was instrumental in the relaunch of the website.

Ashish Patel, 29

Ashish is a Senior Vice-President of Social Media at NowThis Media.

SCIENCE
Arnav Chhabra, 24
This young man is a PhD student at MIT currently working on building “liver on a chip” – a model that may soon replace the dependency on animals for disease research.

Neeraj Barry and Gagan Biyani, 28

Neeraj Berry and Gagan Biyani, both 28, are cofounders of Sprig, a mobile app that lets you search healthy meals for delivery. Founded in April 2013, the company raised $45 million two years later led by Greylock Partners and Social Capital, according to Forbes. Mr. Biyani also cofounded Udemy, a marketplace for online learning. He graduated from Cal-Berkeley in 2008.

Healthcare

Ruchit Nagar, 22
Ruchit Nagar, founder of Khushi Baby, a company that makes necklaces that can be scanned by healthcare workers to find the owner’s medical record. The device is currently undergoing trials in 96 locations in northern India.

Sajith Wickramasekara, 24
Sajith Wickramasekara is the cofounder of Benchling, a digital lab notebook that helps researchers contextualize and collaborate on genome engineering data.

Law and Policy

Dipayan Ghosh, 27 Dipayan Ghosh is a privacy and public policy adviser at Facebook Inc. and previously served as a White House advisor on technology and economic policy. He has a PhD from Cornell in electrical engineering and studied at Berkeley’s School of Information and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.

Anisha Singh, 28

Anisha Singh is campaign manager at the Center for American Progress, a prominent progressive NGO. She’s a UVA Law graduate and active in advancing Muslim and Sikh rights.

Social Entrepreneurs

Anoop Jain, 29Anoop Jain is founding director of Sanitation and Health Rights in India. The organization builds toilets that collect human waste, and use the methane released from the excrement to power generators that filter water.

Sharad Sagar, 24

Sharad Sagar is founder of Dexterity Global, a system of educational platforms that serves undergraduate and high school students in Southeast Asia. Mr. Sagar, who is from India, was named among Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Next Century Innovators. The idea behind Dexterity Global is to ensure the upcoming generation is connected.

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