Women Who Became CEOs Under 30

Katrin’s Karepackage is one of the Canadian companies with female CEOs. Its CEO is Maike van Niekerk (right, with Dame Helen Mirren), who started the charity for cancer patients in 2014, a year after she graduated high school. According to Dalhousie University, where she studied nursing, she has won numerous awards as well as a Rhodes scholarship.

Kylie Jenner became a household name as a member of the Kardashians. Then, in 2015, when she was still a teenager, she started her own line of cosmetics. Vogue says that she’s not only CEO of Kylie Cosmetics but also chief marketing officer and chief creative officer. The company is so successful that Jenner is well on her way to become the world’s youngest self-made billionaire.

The reality TV personality also joins the ranks of the stars who made more money in business than in their day jobs.

Whitney Wolfe Herd was one of the co-founders of Tinder but after she left the dating app, she filed a lawsuit for sexual harassment. She then moved to Austin and in 2014, in her mid-twenties, she used the experience at Tinder to found a dating app giving women more control. Bumble now has over 30 million users, according to TechCrunch.

Journalism is one of those jobs that pay shockingly less than you think but it can also set you on your way to become a CEO by 30. According to Forbes, Rhonesha Byng is an award-winning journalist with an Emmy to her name. She’s also founder and CEO of Her Agenda, a digital media platform for millennial women. And she’s not even 30 yet.

Kate Kavanaugh was in her mid-twenties and reintroducing meat into her diet – she had been vegetarian for 15 years – when she co-founded Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe and became the company’s CEO. This was in Denver in 2015. According to Eater, Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe now has several locations where they sell more sustainably produced meat.

Emily Matson is one of the two founders and CEOs of Emi-Jay, a hair-accessories and apparel company. She started the company with her friend Julianne Goldmark when they were 14 years old. Today, as Glam Salad reports, the company generates millions of dollars a year.

Kendra Scott was 28 and heavily pregnant when she started designing jewellery and planning her business. Once her son was born, she took him along when she went door to door to boutiques in Austin to try and sell her jewellery. According to the BBC, the Kendra Scott company is now valued at over $1 billion. It turns out that Kendra Scott not only found a job that made her CEO before 30 but may be one of the best jobs for moms.

In 2012, Melanie Perkins co-founded online graphic design tool Canva in Sydney, one of the best places for tech start-ups. She was in her early twenties at the time. Today the company she heads is worth over $1 billion, according to Quartz.

According to Smart Business, Lani Lazzari was 11 when she started making skincare scrubs. When she turned 18, she could finally put Simple Sugars in her own name. The teenage CEO appeared on Shark Tank, got an investment from Mark Cuban and the business took off. She’s now considered one of the most successful entrepreneurs to have appeared on Shark Tank.

If you’re considering jobs that don’t require STEM, why not use Polly Rodriguez as your inspiration and become CEO of your own online company? According to an interview with Refinery29, she had no tech background when she started working in customer service at a dating app. Now she heads Unbound, an online female sexual wellness company which she co-founded in 2014, when she was in her mid-twenties.

Sara Blakely was in her late twenties when she started Spanx and became the company’s first CEO. According to Quartz, in 2012 she became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. One of her productivity hacks is to drive around for an hour before work so that she can think. Dreaming up new ideas that could make you a billionaire CEO too may just be one of the great reasons you should start getting to work early.

Julianne Goldmark co-founded Emi-Jay with Emily Matson when they were 14 and started making hair accessories on Julianne’s bedroom floor. According to Glam Salad, the girls’ big break came when hairstylist Chris MacMillan added one of their hair ties to Jennifer Aniston’s hairdo for a red-carpet event.

It may not have been quite in the league of the most expensive jewellery ever worn to the Oscars but that hair tie helped launch a multimillion-dollar business and turned two teenagers into CEOs.

As Entrepreneur says, Lauren Bush Lauren had a bit of a head start when she became founder and CEO of FEED, a very successful business that sells accessories to fund programs to combat hunger, in her early twenties. At the time she was dating the son of Ralph Lauren and later married him. She’s also the granddaughter of former US president George H.W. Bush.

There are many great careers for women in tech but the best has to be CEO. Jessica Mah is CEO of InDinero, a company that provides accounting software to small businesses and handles customer transactions worth more than $2 billion. As she says in an interview with The Muse, she co-founded the company during her junior year at Berkeley after finishing homework early one week.

Sarah Prevette was in her twenties when she founded Sprouter and became CEO of this social network for entrepreneurs. As she explained to Foundora, she wanted to create a platform and support network for start-up founders. After all, she had already launched another website and had first-hand experience of how hard starting a business could be.

Huda Kattan is proof that being a social media influencer is one of the jobs that could make you a millionaire. As Forbes explains, she started a beauty blog 2010, quickly built up a huge fan base and started making her own cosmetics. She was in her late twenties when she founded cosmetics company Huda Beauty with her sisters in 2013 and became CEO.

Juliette Brindak was 10 when she came up with the idea for Miss O and Friends, a social networking site for tween and teen girls. She started the company when she was 16 and built it into a multimillion-dollar empire. According to Teen Vogue, three years later the business was valued at $15 million. Brindak still managed to go to college while being CEO of her company.

Rachel Hollis started out as an intern at Miramax Films, moved to another production company and then, still in her twenties, started an event-planning company in her basement. As she told USA Today, she then started blogging and eventually started Chic Media, a creative agency. The company is now called The Hollis Co. and her husband Dave has taken over as CEO.

Alexa von Tobel was in her mid-twenties when she became CEO of her newly launched financial planning company. LearnVest is a website where you can find out about all the financial terms most Canadians don’t know, but should. According to Time, Von Tobel dropped out of Harvard Business School to start the successful company.

Elizabeth Holmes was only 19 when she founded Theranos, a medical tech company that was thought to have revolutionized blood testing, and became its CEO. As Business Insider reports, at one stage she was the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. However, it was found that the company’s blood tests weren’t accurate and it all came crashing down in spectacular fashion.