How I made Forbes 30 Under 30 (why I applied, getting rejected, my *honest* thoughts)

4 30 is posted everything's good either way it's okay everything's good either way oh my God congrats I'm shaking holy wait that's me you can't see now people know how old I am I didn't even get to announce it yet I I have a meeting in five minutes and I didn't even brush our teeth yet I did it [Music] good morning unique clothes I'm finally getting around to talking about this topic if you're new here hi I'm Chloe I post stories of my adulting diaries now living life in my 20s and yes your girl made it under the Forbes 30 under 30 list yeah I know it's been a couple months now I am back from Asia and my work trips from San Francisco from the new job and I think I'm slowly getting back into routine so Forbes how did all of this happen I thought about doing this the educational style where I literally tell you the process of how everything happened but you can find those videos on YouTube this video is about the entire Journey going through everything like the emotions what happened how I reacted the rejections I wish I could share all of this on a pod but it is not humanly possible to be a full-time product manager in Tech manage a YouTube channel and start a podcast so you'll just get the YouTube a fine version let's start from the beginning I think I was like 25 years old when I first learned about Forbes I was part of the social Tech VC club called modernist it's actually really cool people like this aren't in it I know it's a bunch of dudes but we're working on it tangent but related these clubs are kind of exclusive and there's like a membership fee and you need like a referral but I was too broke at the time so I got in because I volunteered my time working on all the events so just to clarify that's how I got in anyways we hosted this like woman of Forbes 30 under 30 panel I wasn't the main organizer I was just one of the coordinators checking people in and there was this woman on the panel who was like a founder of an AI startup she was like if I can get on Forbes you can too we need more women on Forbes and I really felt that but afterwards we had mingling networking and I was in this group she came up to the group so I turned around I put my hand out to her and I was like hi my name's Chloe and then she looked at me looked down looked up rolled her eyes and walked away I was dumbfounded she probably thought that I was a nobody and wasn't worth talking to so I got home I told my roommates and I was livid at the same time I was like I think I want to make it a goal of mine to get on Forum study under 30. and one of my roommates who was a software engineer at Google looked at me and said uh you know that's really hard to do right and I was like yeah that's the point but whatever I let it go but then the next day that same roommate came by my room and said hey I was thinking about what you said yesterday about Forbes just so you know it's like a really hard thing to do Chloe like you have to be special even I can't get on it the audacity Batman there were other red flags in the stranger that we had but immediately putting someone down for having a goal is a huge sign that this person just isn't it so I thought about this a lot and I was like is this goal worth stressing over for over the next four years I don't know but I was in my grind set mindset stage of life I really wanted to be a startup founder that was a dream but from my previous startup experience whenever I went to go to a business meeting to pitch an idea or a new technology the moment that I entered the meeting room I've already lost half the room I look incredibly young I sound young I just don't look like the ideal person that you'd find legit in Silicon Valley when you Google it people like me don't show up and I don't want to wait until like I'm 40 or something to be able to finally be old enough to start my own thing so something like a Forbes title in my intro would just alleviate some of the preconceived notions that these Boomer exec investors have and centers that just be like that it can go from oh this person's so young and inexperienced they're gonna fail to oh this person's young and talented they got four of 30. let me hear them out they're gonna be an investment I know it's not that simple but you get the idea because I am an inpatient person I don't want to wait another decade just to be taken seriously to do my own thing I wanted to look for places where being young is celebrated and for me the goal is not just like getting the Forbes title the goal is getting the title so that I can use it to improve my chances of doing the thing that I actually want to do the other half of the reason was just like simply out of spite because I mean I was pissed like there's these people that looked down at me for having a normal job and a normal life and that just wasn't enough for them to think that I might one day do something kind of cool so I looked into how one begins this process and apparently you need to get nominated by your company execs Forbes alumni or you can even nominate yourself but you got to be kind of goaded to just rely on that because Forbes is a magazine after all and they're looking for big names big Brands big headlines these nominations close around September every year for the us it's about like 20 000 candidates that get submitted so that's a four percent acceptance rate it's also like a cut update for your birthday like you gotta be 29 by the end of the year so I wouldn't qualify this year because I won't be 29 by the end of the year you know what I mean I was at Facebook in a time in a role that I really didn't like I was severely under leveled I just took the job to transition into product I grinded real hard to see if I can make the cut but it just wasn't at the velocity that I needed to to make the cut I also just knew too many co-workers who'd been at Facebook for like four to five years who got promoted once maybe twice and they still weren't able to get the career transition or change that they wanted so I knew nothing was going to happen to me if I stayed at Facebook then I joined Tech talk because they were Mega hiring across Tech like they were offering top of Market comp I sold my soul and I dedicated My Blood Sweat and Tears to this company and I did everything in my job and more like all the culture things the offsides visibility stuff I made really good relations with all my execs one day I finally asked my director if he'd be willing to nominate me for Forbes and he said that he'd be down he just needs to check with the company process I went down this like prhr rabbit hole to get the company to endorse me for Forbes what I learned here was that companies actually pick a couple of candidates to submit Forbes because it looks really good on them so after a ton of back and forth with Tick Tock and being ghosted by them they said they couldn't endorse me and then I went back to my director who you know I spent all year serving basically and I asked if he'd be down to just nominate me as individual and guess what he ghosted me he ghosted his own team I ended up having to get other execs and mentors to nominate me and then I wrote my own application I wrote it like a CV it was very unromantic December rules around and surprise surprise I didn't get it I knew I didn't have like a compelling angle but I was I was still really crushed I remember browsing through the entire list that day and there were actually a good amount of people that I knew on this list half of them were totally legit but the other half were like completely whack don't get me wrong Forbes is statistically a hard list to get on there's a lot of baste and go to people on it but just a friendly reminder that this is also the same list that Elizabeth Holmes was on so you got the whole gamut anyways rejection sucks but I'll tell you how I dealt with it after a quick commercial break with the sponsor of today's video FastMail just hear me out think of all the websites 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history reclaim your privacy today and make email yours again with FastMail sign up as link down below to get 30 days free or 10 off your first year now back to my rejection at this point I already quit tiktok I joined Discord I was really happy to be at Discord but I distinctly remember the first book of onboarding and I thought to myself damn I'm so sick of this it's been six years of non-stop grinding and giving my entire identity and well-being to these companies that don't even care about me so I decided that's it I'm going to be a normal employee no more working weekends no more doing the post dinner shift I'm gonna start this YouTube channel for real I'm gonna build this content company and do cool with it and so I did I mean I still did my job and maybe some more but I didn't go volunteer for anything outside of my normal duties but to be honest being a PM at a baseline is just like a lot of work so kind of hard to avoid anyways I think August rolls around and I think I saw like a post about the Forbes deadline and I was like oh my god I've totally forgot about this did I do it this is my last year to do it and then I thought well maybe not because I don't know what's changed since last year then I had a one-on-one with my manager Rick who you met in my last video he just left the company I love Rick I think he's amazing he's also the same age as me so no knowing that companies usually endorse maybe two people from different parts of the company if I were in their shoes I would totally pick Rick over me so I went into this one-on-one and I was like hey I think you should go for 4 30 under 30. and he was like oh I was already on it I was like what yeah that's right I forgot that he was a startup founder before joining and then I told him about my secret dream of wanting to be on the Forbes list but I don't know how I feel about it and it's already kind of late and he was like you should go for it what do you have to lose I'll nominate you and just like that I spent the entire evening and the entire weekend working on my application once more the biggest question they ask you in the nomination form is why does this person belong on the Forbes 13 to 30 list be specific I basically had to write an entire personal statement but I'm not very good at embellishing but I was like screw it this is my last year I'm gonna just ask all my friends to help me so my marketing and my b-school friends reviewed my essay and like spruced it up a lot I got connected to other alumni who also reviewed my essay I reached out to the company to see if they'd be down to endorse me long story short I said no sometimes tech companies really just like do these kinds of things for VP level and above so yeah it makes sense but still it just doesn't feel great when I ask other Forbes people how they got on and they're like I don't know my company just put me up for it and I found out one day this process for me to get submitted as an individual was really hard it's a lot of work so more about the application it requires for you to be submitted under a certain category like Forbes chooses 30 categories in the world and chooses 30 people within every category so this is strategy here and you can pick which category you have better chances for I submitted myself for gaming because it made sense for my company oh what I learned about this process is you truly have to embellish you cannot be humble I got maybe six people to nominate me and I nominated myself because why not and then it was done life went on oh this is really soft I'm gonna watch The Last of Us with this but then on September 9th 2022 I got an email that was titled media inquiry from Forbes 30 under 30 list it said you've been identified as a potential Forbes candidate for this year's games list we'd like some more information so please fill out this form cool it should be easy but no I open up this Google form and there are like 20 short response questions it was just College apps all over again hi your Nicholas it is Friday September 30th in the late afternoon I think I'm finally done with this freaking form submission form I think I spent over 10 hours revising my responses and um I think we're in a good place so we're gonna review it one last time all right y'all this is really silly but one of the requirements is to send a headshot and I could not for the life of me determine which one I wanted so it was between this one and this one and I think we're gonna go with this one we're Min maxing the character counts we're gonna hit submit I'm scared ready to submit ah response has been recorded holy cow I'm so nervous you'll forget about it by the time December I know those things like who's your dream Mentor what's the biggest myth about your generation what's something you didn't learn in college that would have been really helpful for the real world this application is reviewed by media people and then passed along to I think four judges that were previous alumni of your category these are the judges for my year but I didn't know that at the time so I really had to keep in mind who the audience would be which is like previous gaming Forbes alumni then on the morning of Tuesday November 29 2022 I woke up to a Discord DM from a mod from like the hunter Thief server because we were chatting about like Discord stuff he was like yo congrats on Fords and I'm like what and then I called Kevin over and looked at the website and lo and behold there I was but yeah it was wild they literally like don't tell you until the morning of by the way this is a headphones holder from grovemade thank you Groove made for sending this over to me that day I was bombarded by tons of texts of people congratulating me I was super busy too Kevin and I were hosting Kevin's parents so we had to take care of them as well and it wasn't until like 10 pm until I finally called my own parents to tell them what's up but yeah it was Madness but it's also full of joy but what happens after you get on the list so when I first got it I got invited to like a bunch of events and conferences like there was one event in New York for our class but it immediately sold out there was also a holiday party that I rsvp'd for but ended up not going because I didn't know anyone there and I was nervous there are Global conferences that you get invited to like in Dubai or Botswana but it's really expensive oh dude I forgot I bought the karaoke machine but yeah there's also I don't know how to like talk about this but yeah you also get added to a bunch of WhatsApp groups like Forbes and 30 under 30 gaming and film and acting and Tech and like crypto VC there's also Los Angeles New York I'm dating like there's so many I remember trying to go to the holiday party and I texted another like Forbes person I was like hey are you gonna go and he was like oh shoot I didn't make the RSVP but I'm gonna go to another party do you want to come and I'm like yeah because I don't know anyone at the Forbes holiday parties I was like I only know this one guy and so I go and it was a holiday party with a bunch of Gaming people mostly from Riot it was really fun the community is so nice I'm just really glad I got to meet all those people that night anyways I'm trying to set up karaoke at home because I love singing and I hate going outside I'm going to share some honest thoughts about Forbes I told myself that getting this honor would be awesome but if I didn't get it it doesn't mean that anything I've done changes it's just an award that validates or recognizes what I've done that's the only difference and I also get to meet cool people from it so do I think I deserve to be on this list I mean I'm literally at the bottom of the page I'm in a gaming category I don't even think I'm a gamer so there's that but yeah I just feel like I used to look at people in the Forbes list like they were some sort of different breed of people like you had to be ultra special to be on it and I wish I were them there was a lot of Envy there okay real quick I got some new speakers because I like music and I've not bought myself some speakers and this is what it looks like it's the audio engine A2 Plus it's the audio engine A2 Plus forget it but anyways Forbes people and my thoughts on them I was talking about how I was like really envious of people but I always remember this one time when I was on a call with a Forbes 30 or 30 Alum who was trying to pitch me to join their company and the call was going for like over an hour it's a really long call for some reason it was like an interview basically and then they're talking to me and then all of a sudden I hear a blop and then a flush I realize that this person just took a bad dump in the middle of my interview I just thought damn 4 30 or 30 everyone anyways that's a story I hope you enjoyed hearing all of the nitty-gritty details I need to eat some lunch I got some delivery from doordash got Thai food in the end I'm super grateful to be on the list if you're trying to go for the list this year I hope this breakdown was helpful and if you don't make it honestly this is just a title it's all it is I hope it doesn't change all the good work that you're putting out every single day in your life if you like this video check me out on Instagram Tick Tock twitch Discord I don't know there's so many other platforms that I'm on thank you to all the uniqlists who've been supporting me y'all are extraordinary these are the twitch subs and the Discord Subs I appreciate you so much that's all I got for now and I'll see you next time bye I was submitted through gaming oh is this the right color I got some new speakers I didn't know it'd be opening like this I'm losing my voice I am losing my voice dude dude I think small places are strictly worse than places that are like fall 2000

Channel: Chloe Shih

Views: 47,404

Keywords: work life, work vlog, forbes, forbes 30 under 30, women in leadership, adulting diaries, work day in my life, product manager, working in tech, working 9 to 5, how to make forbes 30 under 30, how to get forbes 30 under 30, forbes 30 under 30 application, asian vlogger, lifestyle, career chat, career growth, career advice, asian lifestyle vlogger

Id: msCEejhe22o

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023