A Forbes 30 Under 30 judge prioritizes "distance traveled"—your personal journey—over pedigree or experience. They also look for "build velocity," how fast you're iterating, because execution speed matters more than what you're building in a fast-changing world.
I would love to hear more about why you decided to be a judge and then how to stand out in a field of applicants for any Forbes Under 30 hopefuls that are listening. I said yes to being a judge mostly because I think in order to find new types of fund managers and do what we just talked about, like have other people break into venture, you have to have other perspectives. So when I was judging, I actually looked a lot at the distance traveled to get into the job that they were into. That was my lens that I came from first. And a lot of people might have sorted the spreadsheet by pedigree or years of ventures or what your deals were and all this sort of stuff. But for me, that journey is so indicative of where you're going to go the next 10 years that that's how you kind of pick those rising stars. And in venture, and, you know, internally we call it build velocity. How fast is a founder building? Because it doesn't matter what they're building, the world's going to change 10 times over, the product's going to change 10 times over.
Paige of Behind Genius driving an AI electric train in St. Louis (Intramotev Visit)
