The 2025 Forbes Under 30 Summit kicked off September 28th in Ohio for its third and biggest iteration yet. Across four days in Columbus, Forbes convenes the world’s top young leaders, founders and creators.
Ahead of this, I sat down with Zoya Hasan, a reporter on the Under 30 team at Forbes.
In your role as reporter, you oversee the production of the Forbes 30 Under 30 lists, co-author a weekly newsletter, write features on young entrepreneurs, money movers, and entertainers, as well as organize the iconic Forbes Under 30 Summit. That’s a huge scope. What does your typical workday look like?
Every day on the Under 30 team looks different. We plan for the Under 30 Summit for nine months, but during that time, we’re also creating the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, which also takes about eight to 10 months to put together. We start that process really early. We open nominations, and beyond that, we have reporters on every single category, including me, searching for people for the list. We do a lot of researching, seeing who’s being talked about in the news, going on Instagram, looking at who’s being followed, who has really strong engagement—and that goes for creators, entrepreneurs, and founders.
I have this one Instagram account that I’m going to shout out that I really love, called tradedvc. I get a lot of my leads, including a lot of my Under 30’s there.
But every day looks different. Some days we are working tirelessly on the Summit, finding speakers and seeing who’s relevant, who’s newsworthy, who can come and speak and be a big moment for the brand and the audience. Other days, we’re working on the list or creating spreadsheets, and some days we’re interviewing founders, whether that’s for stories, potential people who can be on the list, or just people that we think would be great to engage with the Forbes community.
How do you decide who makes it on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list?
There’s no one formula to make it on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list—we look at a lot of different factors. It also varies industry by industry.
I’ll use AI as an example. On the AI list, we’re looking at thousands of candidates—and every company is an AI company these days—so we’re looking at who actually is an AI company? We start there, and then we get into: 1) How much money have you brought in? 2) Is the money from investors? If so, how credible are your investors? We look at that and we give that a lot of weight.
If you’re bootstrapped, we’re looking at revenue—we’re looking at how much money you’re making, and if you’re not making that much right now, what is your potential scale? That really matters, and that’s where investors really play a big role. Because when you have credible investors, we know that they trust you, and we trust them. So we do really look at the potential to scale, and we try a few different metrics to assess that.
On the AI example, if they’re making the list, they are someone who is making big waves. They have big investors, big customers, and they are making money.
Forbes is all about the money. We are a business magazine, and we are looking for the next billionaires. We’re looking for the next Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg.
With a category like social impact, where the money isn’t going to be as much because it’s not an industry that’s getting funded as much as (like, tech), we’re looking at how we can quantify your impact. So, we’re still looking at that potential to scale. We’re still looking at the number, but the number looks different. And it doesn’t look like money. It looks like—how many people have you helped? Can we measure that? How many organizations are you working with? How many people are those organizations impacting?
The big thing with making the Forbes 30 Under 30 list is your scale and your impact, and the way to measure that is through numbers. I always encourage people when they ask me how to get on the list or how to increase their chances—pitch me like I’m your investor.
Give me specifics, give me numbers. This is a business deal in many ways because we are a business magazine.
What percentage of Forbes 30 Under 30 listers are pitched and accepted versus you directly finding them, sourcing them, or being recommended from investors?
I don’t have the exact number, but I will say the majority of the people who end up making the list are people we found on our own.
That’s not to say that those same people haven’t also been nominated by others, they might be, but I would say the majority of people who end up making the list are those we found on our own, through our own reporting, through reaching out to investors, to institutions, colleges, universities and accelerators. We do a lot of that outreach, and we encourage all of our Forbes reporters working on the list to do that outreach. Most people that end up making it, make it through there.
What’s the best way to pitch you or become a trusted source for you?
Reaching out via email or reaching out to me personally is always the best way. But when I get a really formal email that feels like a really proper pitch, I usually ignore it.
What about a formal, proper email turns you off?
It seems like you just mass emailed a bunch of people the same thing. My inbox is like a black hole, so what catches my eye is when someone reaches out to me personally, or is like, “Hey, Zoya, I would love to get coffee or meet up. I have this idea for you.”
Adding a little bit of personalization helps. Another way to catch my attention is offering me an exclusive. Put exclusive in the subject line, and I will most likely read it, because we at Forbes love exclusives.
And most of the stories we write have to be exclusives. We’re not writing what everybody else is writing. That’s a big part of the Forbes 30 Under 30 team, we want to break news.
Do you consider social media personal? Do you accept pitches via social media?
Yes, I like connecting with people on Instagram—although I do hate when people DM me on the weekend.
LinkedIn is great too. I definitely respond there, and I know other reporters at Forbes do too. But yes, social media is totally okay to reach out.