Last month, Forbes unveiled its annual “30 under 30” list of America’s most important young entrepreneurs, and three graduates of the Carroll School made the cut along with four other Boston College alums.
Forbes compiles the list each year, culling the winners from thousands of nominees under 30 years old and choosing 30 of them for each of 20 categories. This year’s notables are “innovators shaking up some of the world’s stodgiest industries,” the magazine said in announcing the 2019 results.
Three of the BC grads are co-founders of SyncOnSet Technologies, a software tool used by production teams for thousands of TV shows and movies each year. All three are class of ’11: Jeff Impey, whose Carroll School concentrations were finance and marketing; psychology major Alexander LoVerde; and computer science major Brett Beaulieu-Jones. They were among 30 winners in the Hollywood and Entertainment category.
Also named by Forbes, in the Food and Drink category, was Blake Tomnitz ’12, who studied management and leadership at the Carroll School. He is co-founder of Five Boroughs Brewing Co., which refurbished a 15,000-square-foot plant in Brooklyn to serve as a brewing facility and taproom for craft-beer aficionados.
Sam Gross ’13 made the Forbes list’s Media category, as part of the leadership trio at Stacker, a data journalism startup. Gross, who concentrated in finance at the Carroll School, is Stacker’s vice president of research, managing data analytics as well as research. The company’s team of experts comb public and other data sets to produce digestible news and analysis. (See, for example, “35 quirky tax facts for this tax season.”)
Other BC alums were cited in other categories. Lauren Blodgett ’11, who majored in political science and German, is now an attorney representing refugees and recently launched The Brave House, a Brooklyn–based nonprofit for young immigrant girls. Frances Schwiep, who studied economics and applied math, is a principal of New York–based Two Sigma Ventures. The investment fund has used artificial intelligence and similar technologies to bolster its trading strategies.
—William Bole