Top 10 Entrepreneurs Under 30

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to youth unemployment and underemployment and provides its members with access to tools, mentorship and resources that support each stage of a business's development and growth.
When recently asked to name the top entrepreneur under the age of 30 who deserved an award for the work they've done in the past year, YEC members had the following to say.
1. Dave Morin of Path
It's been inspiring to watch Dave and his talented team at Path take their app from something that no one was paying attention to to one of the top apps out there. Path revolutionized iOS design by releasing one of the most beautiful apps out there, and has been on a roll ever since. —Ben Lang, founder of EpicLaunch
2. Shane Snow of Contently
Shane Snow is absolutely the most impressive individual I know for his accomplishments in recent times. A TechStars NYC alum, Shane developed Contently with his team and recently raised $2 million in a Series A round. In addition to that, he's the top infographic artist, period. Shane is also the coolest journalist you'll ever meet, having written for Mashable, Fast Company and Wired.com. —Danny Wong, co-founder of Blank Label Group
3. Drew Houston of Dropbox
Drew Houston, CEO and co-founder of Dropbox, led the startup from a simple vision—making it easy to store and share files in the cloud—to a massive business success with millions of users and sales. I am so impressed with his focus on an exceptional user experience. Drew and his team created a product that betters productivity and data storage so much, it's hard to imagine the Web without it. —Doreen Bloch, CEO and founder of Poshly
4. Nick D'Aloisio of Summly
Nick D'Aloisio, he's creating a way to summarize the Web. Not only is he young, but he caught the world's attention through Om Malik's expose on his app. The app is a window into a much more powerful concept around how content has become digestible in tidbits—especially content lacking opinion. It could be quite fascinating to companies that manage tons and tons of content that needs to be indexed. —Brian Wong, CEO and founder of Kiip
5. Ben Silbermann of Pinterest
There is a reason why Pinterest is getting so much attention right now. It's a beautifully designed product that solves a problem that nobody knew the Web was facing. It's the co-founder's vision that made it the impressive application that it is today. —Logan Lenz, president and founder of Endagon
6. Ben Milne of Dwolla
Ben Milne is the CEO and co-founder of Des Moines-based Dwolla, a peer-to-peer payment platform disrupting the mobile payments industry. Milne and his team have quickly scaled the business and is now moving over $1 million per day. Dwolla recently raised a $5 million round of funding, led by New York-based Union Square Ventures and a solid supporting team. —Jeff Slobotski, founder of Silicon Prairie News
7. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest self-made billionaire in history and arguably the greatest entrepreneur of our time. Facebook wasn't created in the past year, but Zuckerberg has presided over its continued dominance of the social Web and the company's skyrocketing valuations. And he is only 27. —Emerson Spartz, CEO and founder of Spartz Media
8. Catherine Cook of myYearbook.com
While most people want to say Mark Zuckerberg, I'd give the award to his female counterpart, Catherine Cook. Not only was Catherine just 15 years old when she started myYearbook.com, but she managed to stay under the radar by operating outside of Silicon Valley—in Pennsylvania. The site was recently acquired for a reported $100 million...while Catherine was still attending college! —Matt Wilson, co-founder of Under30CEO.com
9. Brent Beshore of AdVentures
Being a great entrepreneur isn't just about profits. Brent Beshore leads AdVentures (which was no. 28 on last year's Inc. 500), so he's made his share of money, but what I respect is his entrepreneurship for his community. When his hometown—Joplin, Mo.—was destroyed by a tornado, Brent used his skills to raise over $1 million in four days to rebuild the city. We should all strive to use our success for good, as Brent does. —John Hall, CEO of Digital Talent Agents
10. Jeremy Johnson of 2tor
Jeremy Johnson is 27 and is already changing the face of higher education. His current project, 2tor, is a visionary startup that helps top-tier U.S. universities bring their degree programs online. Jeremy, along with co-founders John Katzman and Chip Paucek, is on a mission to transform education, and as the highest funded U.S. education tech startup, 2tor is bringing that vision alive. —Zach Cutler, CEO and founder of Cutler Group

The Marketer’s Guide To Pinterest [Infographic]

Pinterest, the visual social network that lets users “pin” images they like from around the web to virtual pin boards, is stacking up to be one of the fastest growing social sites of all time.  With more and more people joining Pinterest every day, it’s becoming impossible for marketers to ignore the Pinterest phenomenon.  But how can marketers get in on this?  A new infographic from MDG Advertising takes a deeper look.

‘Pin It to Win It: A Marketer’s Guide to Pinterest’ breaks down the “who, why, and how of Pinterest.”  The infographic starts out by taking a look at the people who pin.  The breakdown is currently 87 percent female to 13 percent male, with most pinners being between the ages of 25 and 54.
So, as a marketer, why should you be on Pinterest?  The infographic explains, plainly, that you should be on the site because it’s making history.  “According to comScore, Pinterest hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in January, making it the fastest standalone site in history to cross the 10 million mark.”  They also provide convincing statistics on how Pinterest is driving traffic, and list some big brands that are already on Pinterest.
Once you’re convinced, the infographic sheds some light on how you can make Pinterest work for your brand with some helpful tips, including adding ‘Pin It’ buttons to your site content, pumping up the quality of pinable content on your site, and more.
Check out the infographic and let us know what you think in the comments below.  Is your company on Pinterest yet?  If not, do you plan to be?

Pinterest – An In Depth Look at the Stats

There’s no big surprise to social media fans that Pinterest is blowing up.  It’s recently become a site that has traffic in the top 100 sites on the web, and rumors have it valued around $200m.  That’s a lot for a company that doesn’t have much revenue.  But just how engaged are the users that use the service?  The folks over at RJMetrics put together a rigorous report to find out.
RJMetrics simply did some scraping to analyze a series of users by looking at their “Pin” boards over time, and see how they’d engaged.  They found some pretty incredible statistics, including the following.

• Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history.
• Pins link to a tremendously large universe of sites.  Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it only represents about 3% of pins.
• Over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the tremendous virality at work in the Pinterest community.  To contrast, a study done at a similar time in Twitter’s history showed that only about 1.4% of tweets were retweets.
• The quality of the average new user (as defined by their level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high but declining.  Users who have joined in recent months are 2-3x less active during their first month than the users that came before them.

There’s a lot more in the report, including a breakdown of the various sources of pins and the breakdown of how many people actually use the pinmarklet versus just repin other’s content.  There’s also a detailed cohort analysis which looks at various groups of users that joined the site and their behavior over the first twelve months of use of the site.  They find that the earlier users are the power users, but that most cohorts have stayed engaged on the site.
Head over and take a look at the report and let us know what you think.
Image: pedrosek via Shutterstock

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Joins Pinterest

Facebook’s co-founder and CEO has joined the hottest new social network on the block, Pinterest.
Mark Zuckerberg’s profile, located at www.pinterest.com/zuck, isn’t very lively. He is following more than 100 other users, but has posted very little content himself. The Pinterest profile is linked to his Facebook profile.
While it’s too early to say Pinterest poses a threat to Facebook in any way, the simple content sharing site can easily be called the hottest startup of 2012. The site reached 10 million unique visitors extremely fast; it has more than 2 million members (connected through Facebook), and it’s already used by more than 100 brands.
At the very least, Zuckerberg must be curious to see what this little site has been doing to become so successful. Facebook has never been too shy of adopting successful concepts seen on other services; for example, its Subscribe button, launched in September 2011, is an obvious nod to Twitter’s Follow.

A History of the Business of Social Media

Social media has come a long way since it's humble beginnings over 30 years ago. This infographic gives us a short history of the many innovative companies that have helped shape the environment that we so heavily rely on to communicate and also takes a look at some of the business deals behind them. What's next? You decide.