Meet the Five Indian-origin Persons in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 List

By Little India Desk | August 19, 2017

Fortune’s 2017 ‘40 Under 40’, an annual ranking list of influential young people under 40, who the magazine calls “disruptors, innovators, rebels and artists” inspiring others, came out on August 17. The list, which features 39-year-old French President Emmanuel Marcon at the top position, includes five persons of Indian origin.

Here are the five who made it to the magazine’s rankings.

Photo Credit: IANS

1.  Leo Varadkar

Ranked number five on the list, Ireland’s Prime Minister Leo Varadkar is credited with a lot of firsts. A son of a Hindu immigrant doctor from Mumbai, Varadkar, 38, is Ireland’s youngest leader in centuries. He is also the first openly gay head of the state — a milestone in the staunchly Catholic country. His coming out when he was the Minister for Health in 2015 was the key factor behind a law legalising gay marriage in Ireland. Climate change, Europe’s migrant crisis, terrorism threat and commitment to NATO are the key issues that he has spoken about.

Photo Credit: Twitter

2. Divya Nag

Ranked 25th on the list is 26-year-old Divya Nag who oversees Apple’s ambitious ResearchKit and CareKit programmes that encourages developers to build health-related apps. Nag joined Apple at the age of 23, after having founded research startup Stem Cell Theranostics in 2011 and StartXMed, a non profit medical entrepreneurship program.

She had dropped out of Stanford to manage her research. Apple’s vision is to transform clinical trials from isolated events at hospitals to ongoing studies that capture vital signs from omnipresent sensors.  Nag is no less ambitious. She is quoted by Fortune as saying: “I want to put people in charge of their health. It’s not about living with a specific disease or condition. It’s about living. Full stop.”

She had also been invited to speak along with Barack Obama for Women in Entrepreneurship.

Photo Credit: Outcome Website

3. Rishi Shah and Shradha Agarwal

Rishi Shah, who founded health-tech firm Outcome over 10 years ago, and president Shradha Agarwal, both 32, raised over $500 million at a valuation of more than $5 billion earlier this year. Their company provides educational resources to patients and clinicians and has installed touch screens and tablets that can deliver meditation apps, information and advertising to patients in more than 40,000 doctor’s offices. Shah grew up in Chicago and dropped out of college. They both founded the company when they were students at Northwestern University. Fortune magazine put them on rank 38 on the list.

4. Leila Janah

Leila Janah, 31, daughter of Indian immigrants, grew up in Los Angeles, and founded Samasource. The anti-poverty non-profit business, which is going to pull in $15 million as revenue this year, has workers in Kenya, Uganda and India working as remote freelancers for tech sector. This boosts their average wage from less than $2.50 a day to over $8. Janah has also founded a skin care line called LXMI, which employs women in Uganda. The philosophy she lives by is that the underprivileged need work, not charity. Her upcoming book will be detailing this philosophy in the fight against global poverty. She had told the New York Times about her success: “The biggest reason for success in entrepreneurship is not brilliance. It’s not creative genius. It’s the simple ability to not quit when things are really bad.”