The future is unwritten. It is also right around the corner, and, if, as science fiction author William Gibson noted, it is not evenly distributed, more and more young people around the world are reaching toward it to shape it, improve it, and make it more equitable. These “shapers of the future” work in many fields and endeavors, embracing every corner and intersection of health and medicine, science and technology, and business and entrepreneurship. They are people of ideas, framing the intellectual questions and concerns that will guide future thought. They are scholars, builders, designers, architects, artists, teachers, writers, musicians, and social and political leaders. While under the age of 40 (as of January 2022), the 200 shapers of the future that we will highlight in this series have already left their mark on the present, and we expect to see much more invention, innovation, creation, and interpretation from them in times to come.

Andrea Barrica grew up in Folsom, California, a first-generation American in a Filipino immigrant household that she describes as religious and conservative. That background perhaps makes one of her best-known achievements seem unlikely: she is the founder of O.school, a virtual clearinghouse based in San Francisco that provides sex education for women and the LGBTQ community. Its overarching concerns include how sex education can be freed from shame and offered without judgment and how sexual wellness can be promoted through accurate up-to-date information. Barrica attended Bard College at Simon’s Rock, an “early college” in Massachusetts from which she went on to attend Nanjing Normal University, in China, and the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a degree in linguistics at the age of 20. Early in her career, Barrica cofounded inDinero.com, an accounting and financial services organization, and worked as a venture capitalist funding technology start-ups. She is the author of SexTech Revolution: The Future of Sexual Wellness (2019).

Antiki Bose was born in Mumbai, India, and attended school there, earning a degree in mathematics and economics from Saint Xavier’s College. She then attended New York University’s Stern School of Business as a summer scholar in international business. In 2015, after working as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company and as an investment analyst for Sequoia Capital, she became the chief executive officer of Zilingo, a business-to-business market platform that is India’s first $1 billion start-up to be cofounded by a woman. Headquartered in Singapore, Zilingo is Southeast Asia’s largest fashion and lifestyle marketplace, giving buyers access to millions of products and merchants and providing analytic, logistical, and payment services. Bose is using her role to ensure gender equity at Zilingo, half of whose staff and management consists of women. Breaking barriers and undoing old assumptions, she is paving the way for more women to become entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Vitaly Dmitriyevich Buterin was born in Kolomna, a city in the administrative region of Moscow, Russia. His father, a computer scientist, took the family to Canada when Vitalik, as he was nicknamed, was six years old. Buterin excelled in school and joined an advanced class studying computer programming, mathematics, and science. He attended the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, but soon left to travel the world. He then wrote a white paper on what would become Ethereum. Touted as “the next Internet,” Ethereum is an open-access platform for financial services based on the cryptocurrency Ether (ETH), which is second only to Bitcoin in market share. This “world computer,” as Ethereum has been called, is a proof of concept that is meant to build on and improve such technologies as the blockchain and fulfill the libertarian ideal of a self-governing online community free from government regulation and corporate dominance. Buterin has become the public face of Ethereum, but he has resolutely resisted the project’s being identified with him, arguing that it should be independent of personalities. For his pioneering work, he was awarded an honorary degree in business and economics from the University of Basel, in Switzerland.

Born in County Tipperary, Ireland, Patrick Collison took a computer course at the University of Limerick while he was still in grade school and won a national prize for developing a new computer language when he was just 16. He attended MIT for a time and then returned to Ireland and founded a software company with his younger brother John. Seeking investment capital to develop the company, eventually called Auctomatic, the brothers relocated operations to Silicon Valley. They then sold the company, and Patrick worked as head of engineering for the new owners until he and John founded Stripe in 2010. Backed by Elon Musk and other investors, Stripe is a financial services company developing software that sellers can integrate into their websites to process orders and payments. It has proved so successful that each Collison brother is reportedly worth more than $2 billion. Patrick founded Stripe Press to publish innovative books in economics and technology, and he has been an avid evangelist for start-ups by young people, for which he was named a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship by U.S. President Barack Obama.

Vikash Das was born in Baleshwar, a city in the eastern Indian state of Odisha. With a master’s degree in software engineering, he held a high-paying job working for IBM in Bengaluru. A visit to his hometown in 2013 made him aware of the plight of “tribals,” rural people who lived in poverty and were endangered by both Naxalite guerrillas and government forces. He left his job and founded an entrepreneurial concern called Vat Vrikshya, the Sanskrit name of the revered banyan tree, which he describes as “a self-sustaining social enterprise that aims to impart positive change in tribal people’s lives by providing them assets of sustainable livelihood.” This is done largely by funding artisanal enterprises and providing a platform for sales, market connectivity, and business opportunities. He has been especially concerned with raising the economic status of tribal women and with funding schools for children. According to Das, “Entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship, besides education, are some of the keys to restore dignity, alleviate poverty, and create employment.”

A native of the Brazilian city of Salvador, Monique Evelle earned a bachelor’s degree in political science and development from the Universidade Federal de Bahia in 2016 and went on to do graduate work at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos, in São Paolo, in 2019. She is the author of the book Empreendedorismo feminino (”Female Entrepreneurship”). With a background in journalism and advertising, she offers creative solutions to problems of business strategy. She is also one of the founders of Kumasi, an e-commerce site that sells products by entrepreneurs and artisans of African ancestry in Salvador. When she was only 20, the popular magazine Revista Claudia named her one of the most noteworthy women in Brazil under the age of 30. Evelle is a partner at the “cultural intelligence hub” Sharp and the founder of Desabafo Social, described as “a laboratory of social technologies applied to income generation, communication, and education,” with an eye to aiding “silenced minorities” in Brazil, including the Black and LGBTQ communities, with microloans and other services.

A native of Colombia, Jimena Flórez received a bachelor’s degree in business administration, finance, and international relations from the Universidad Externado de Colombia and then studied finance and environmental economics at the University of Wollongong, in Australia. While in Colombia, she developed a model of sustainable organic agriculture that she taught to more than 2,000 farmers, which formed the basis for her company, Chaak. Working with scientists at the Rutgers University Food Innovation Center in the United States, she created healthful nutrient-dense foods made of environmentally sustainable ingredients without sacrificing flavor. For example, Chaak’s brownies, made with cacao from the Colombian village of Tumaco, are rich in vitamins, fiber, protein, and minerals and contain no gluten, fat, or added sugar. Such foods are efficiently metabolized and are particularly valuable for children in the developing world who may not otherwise receive sufficient nutrition. “Every single company,” says Flórez, “should be creative enough to just make people healthier as well as work in social problems and contribute to build community equity.” In 2015 she was honored by U.S. President Barack Obama for her socially responsible entrepreneurship.

A native of France, Joséphine Goube studied at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), earning a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science in 2009 and a master’s degree in urban and regional studies the following year. In 2011 she earned a second master’s degree, in development and urban studies, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She then worked as an “evangelist” for a firm that worked to match tech workers with tech firms across Europe. Based in the United Kingdom, she has served, for the last five years, as chief executive officer of the social entrepreneurship firm Techfugees, which places refugees in technology training programs and jobs in the European Union. As Goube puts it, “Techfugees exists to empower the displaced with technology.”

Madelyn Jackson, a student at Holy Trinity High School in Chicago, where she was born, had an idea. Fortunately, an audience for that idea was on hand and eager to hear of it. Jackson’s idea was to enable nonverbal people with autism to “talk” by means of an app, an idea born out of seeing some of her fellow students with autism struggle to communicate. The audience was made up of the judges for the annual Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) Top Young Entrepreneurs competition, so hotly contested that it is frequently likened to the “business reality” game show Shark Tank. Bringing entrepreneurial education to underserved communities, NFTE recognized the quality of Jackson’s answer to its call to identify a social problem and then offer a solution, as she certainly did with her idea for a “personalized autism communication app,” or PACA. Jackson was one of three finalists for the national championship sponsored by NFTE in 2021, winning a $10,000 prize for developing the project.

Ngoc Nguyen took an interest in international business at an early age. After graduating from a high school for gifted children in Vung Tau, a port near Ho Chi Minh City, she attended Foreign Trade University, one of Vietnam’s premier institutions of higher learning, in Hanoi. In 2021 she enrolled at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she is pursuing a second bachelor’s degree in business analytics and technology. While in Vietnam, Nguyen was a business-to-business marketing executive for AIESEC, a global nonprofit that encourages the development of young leaders. She also worked as a trainer in an incubator to help young people from socially and economically disadvantaged communities develop social entrepreneurship projects. She intends to continue her work in social entrepreneurship after earning her degree.

When he was a teenager, Sizwe Nzima observed that older people in the poor Western Cape district of Cape Town, South Africa, spent a great deal of time waiting in line at clinics in order to receive necessary medications. He had the opportunity to make this observation, he related, because he himself had stood in line for four or five hours at a time to retrieve medications for his bedridden grandparents. To end this inefficiency and address the problem of medical deliveries to a growing elderly population with chronic health conditions, Nzima used prize money he had won as an entrepreneurship student to buy two bicycles and hire riders to deliver medications to customers across the townships for a small subscription fee. His firm, Iyeza Express (Iyeza means “It’s coming” in Xhosa), has since grown in both size and number of locations served, branching out from health logistics to delivering food and other products. Nzima has also worked to develop other companies, including a firm that trades recyclable materials for food and clothing. He describes his businesses as experiments in social development, serving community needs while generating much-needed jobs.

Miracle Olatunji earned her name because of her mother’s difficult pregnancy, which the baby was not expected to survive. Growing up in New Castle, Delaware, to Nigerian immigrant parents, she attended a charter high school in Wilmington, where she started a chapter of UNICEF, participated in the Diamond Challenge (a competition for young entrepreneurs), and founded OpportuniMe, an online clearinghouse linking high-school students to jobs, training and internship opportunities, and mentors. Olatunji is committed to learning new skills—both coding and voice-over acting have been among her extracurricular activities—while attending Northeastern University, in Boston, where she expects to graduate with a degree in business and finance in 2022. She interned as an analyst with Merrill Lynch in the summer of 2020. On top of those accomplishments, she also published her first book, Purpose: How to Live and Lead with Impact. Surprisingly, given her entrepreneurial and leadership skills, Olatunji has named self-doubt as her greatest challenge, adding, however, that “I believe that total self-confidence is not a destination, but a never-ending journey of stepping out of your comfort zone and accepting yourself for who you are—each and every day.”

Born in Tema, Ghana, Portia Nana Adjoa Plange fell in love with science as a young girl. She attended high school in nearby Okuapemman, then enrolled at the University of Ghana to study biomedical engineering. Students pursuing that field were encouraged to visit hospitals in Ghana, determine a needed material or good, and develop a prototype for it. With fellow student Caronica Adjoa Puni, Plange applied her skills in biomedical engineering to design a low-cost biodegradable sanitary pad. The product was designed, they explained, to mitigate what has been called “period poverty,” providing affordable sanitary supplies to young women in a country that also has had problems with sustainable waste disposal. Existing products do not biodegrade, while Plange and Puni’s prototype, made with locally available materials, does not enter the waste stream. Plange, who earned a B.S. in biomedical engineering, was awarded a two-year scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Ghana on the strength of her academic performance and the quality of her student invention. She was recently accepted into the doctoral program in biological engineering at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. “I love teaching and research,” she tells Britannica, “and hope to be a role model to inspire more women to pursue engineering.”

A native of Yogyakarta, a city on the Indonesian island of Java, Gigih Septianto took a B.S. in computer science at the Institut Teknologi Telkom in Bandung. With support from a start-up accelerator program in Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, Septianto founded an organization called WeCare.id. Its initial purpose was to provide a fundraising platform for city-based people in need of medical care who otherwise could not afford it. The organization, now based in Bandung as well as Jakarta, subsequently expanded its scope to include people who live in remote areas of the country where medical care is not readily available, providing funds for them to travel to hospitals. As the local office of the British Council notes, Septianto is one of an active generation of young people in their 20s and 30s who make up almost half of the social entrepreneur segment of Indonesia’s economy. As a regional leader for the Obama Foundation, Septianto coordinated the repurposing of WeCare.id’s office into a warehouse for food and medical supplies during the initial spread of COVID-19, delivering them to hospitals across the country. Septianto has received many honors for his work, including being named to the all-Asia Gen.T list in 2019.

In 2013, while majoring in neuroscience at Brown University, Greg Sewitz joined forces with his friend Gabi Lewis, a philosophy major who, upon adopting a paleo diet, had discovered that he could not find protein bars that suited him. The two developed a bar made in part from crickets, which contain far more protein by volume than beef, poultry, fish, or eggs, as well as needed minerals. Additionally, crickets, they discovered, are far more environmentally sustainable to raise than cattle or other widely used protein sources. Sewitz and Lewis added ingredients such as honey and almonds to make their cricket bars more palatable, and the bars proved to be a hit on campus. On graduating, the two moved to New York, founded a company called Exo, and turned to Kickstarter for funding. They met their target in only three days. Exo now sells its cricket bars online and at health food outlets under the slogan “Weird Is Good.” Given that nutritionists and food industry analysts predict that insects are likely to be an ever more prominent source of protein for consumers, the two entrepreneurs are well ahead of the curve. In 2019 Sewitz founded a second food company that makes Magic Spoon, which he describes as “a new high protein, low carb childlike cereal for grown-ups.”

Born in Houston, Texas, into a family of entrepreneurs, Sydney Sherman graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in advertising. She earned an M.B.A. from Austin’s Acton School of Business in 2017 and then relocated to New York. While in college, Sherman had founded a dress company, Monty & Joie, dedicated to providing fair wages for women who live in extreme poverty. She also founded Admin Boutique, providing administrative assistant services to start-ups and nonprofits in the Austin area. After meeting artisans in 40 countries around the world, Sherman conceived of a company that she called The Etho, an online marketplace that connects ethically sourced products with critically aware consumers and provides living wages to the makers. A strong believer in advancing women in business and technology-based careers, Sherman mentors survivors of human trafficking who are seeking to start businesses. Combining her interests in fashion, social service, advertising, and commerce, she regularly speaks at conferences and other venues about environmental and wildlife conservation, ethical business, and other concerns.

When Benjamin Stern was in middle school in Melbourne, Florida, he realized that, as he put it, schools were using students to sell baked goods, wrapping paper, and other fundraising products without any financial return to those students. He took his savings and invested in high-quality coffee from a Seattle roaster and then sold it by subscription to neighbors. His venture earned a handsome profit, part of which he donated to the Wounded Warrior Project. In high school, at the age of 17, Stern founded Nohbo, a company that packages single-use soaps and other toiletries in a water-soluble material, thereby eliminating the need for conventional plastic packaging. The strategy, widely adopted in hotels, reduces plastic waste and the need to recycle and, as Stern said, helps turn around an industry “which has been quite destructive to the environment in the past.” With the backing of investors such as Mark Cuban, who featured Stern on his television show Shark Tank, Nohbo has grown into a nationwide concern.

Born in Tokyo and educated there and in Australia, Aki Sugiyama entered the world of high finance on leaving school, working as a currency trader and a software testing lead. In 2016 she met Lillian Rowlatt, a Canadian of British and Japanese descent living in the U.S., and discovered that they shared an interest in many things—not least, food. In 2018 the two founded Kokoro Care Packages (kokoro means “heart” in Japanese), which delivers selections of gourmet traditional foods from small-scale Japanese farmers and producers to customers around the world. Sugiyama handles sourcing and Japanese sales, while Rowlatt attends to the international side of the business. Each Kokoro package contains foods peculiar to a season or a region, educating diners in Japanese culinary traditions in a most inviting way, especially in a time of lockdown and quarantine. When she is not building the Kokoro brand, Sugiyama competes in bodybuilding competitions.

When he was attending University College Utrecht, in the Netherlands, Gert van Vugt studied social sciences. He then earned a master’s degree in sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science. On returning to his native Netherlands, however, van Vugt changed fields: inspired by the Lego toys of his youth, he founded Sustainer Homes in 2014, a company that produces modular buildings based on robotically produced sections. Initially these structures were made from repurposed shipping containers, but they are now made of wood. The wood, grown in Finland, is certified as sustainable, and the structures use only very small amounts of concrete, steel, or other manufactured (and polluting) materials. Besides being sustainably produced and so energy-efficient that they have almost no carbon footprint (van Vugt’s construction methods reduce the CO₂ emissions associated with building by 90 percent), the structures are comfortable and attractive. And, though they are made with robotic aid, they are adapted to suit each buyer. “The building process,” van Vugt explains, “is quick, transparent and predictably priced. This way, we aim to set a new standard in the building industry.”

Ryan Williams grew up in a working-class African American household in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He won a scholarship to Harvard College, where he took a particular interest in economics and business and supported himself by launching a real-estate investment fund through which he acquired, refurbished, and sold single-family homes. On graduation, he worked for Goldman Sachs and Blackstone before founding in 2014 a digital real-estate investment platform called Cadre, a “disruptive” entrant into the market that leverages technology to level a playing field that often puts minority buyers at a disadvantage. An alternative to real-estate investment trusts (REITs), Cadre allows small-scale investors to examine vetted properties. After encountering resistance in the real-estate industry, Williams was able to secure backing from venture capital and brokerage firms and from influential players in the market, including Mark Cuban, George Soros, and Peter Thiel. To date, Williams has resisted taking his company public, believing that it can remain a freestanding popular means for investors to earn profits in a crowded market.