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Fourth Sage Hill Graduate Named to Elite Forbes '30 Under 30' List
Fourth Sage Hill Graduate Named to Elite Forbes '30 Under 30' List
In November, Forbes magazine published its “30 under 30” list, and for the fourth time, a Sage Hill graduate made the cut.
Culled from across the U.S. by a panel of Forbes readers and top business minds, this year’s list includes Lisa Conn (age 29, Law & Policy) a 2006 graduate of Sage Hill School.
The “30 under 30” is a “definitive search for the world’s most inspiring young innovators, bright rising stars and the leaders of tomorrow who are transforming the world.” In areas as diverse as social and mobile, finance, energy, and food and wine, the list includes today’s youngest entrepreneurs and game-changers who have the desire and ambition to reinvent the world.
Lisa Conn is joined in good company by three fellow alumni who have made the Forbes list in the last few years: Jeff Cruttenden (’05, Finance in 2016), Mark Ramadan (’04, Food & Wine in 2012) and Matthew Schlicht, who has made the list twice. (’06, Social & Mobile in 2012 and Games & Apps in 2013).
Lisa Conn wasn’t a political activist while at Sage Hill, but she was a doer. She said her first real management experience was as co-president of Sage Hill’s Mock Trial team. After Sage Hill, she went to New York University and later earned her MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. While a student there, she worked at MIT Media Lab as the program manager for The Electome, a data analytics project that studies trends in the election narrative among the candidates, the media and the public. She recently joined Facebook to lead the civic leadership team in its community partnerships program.
Jeff Cruttenden was already trading stocks while in high school, and he found he could “dive deep into math” at Sage Hill, building the foundation from which he went on to major in math at Lewis & Clark College. Now, he is the creator of a start-up mobile micro-investing platform called Acorns. The Acorns app rounds up credit card purchases to the next dollar, automatically channeling the excess payment into an investment portfolio. He started Acorns as an easy way for young people to begin building portfolios. He credits the advice and assistance of many Sage Hill classmates in the success of the endeavor.
At Sage Hill, Matthew Schlicht pursued a passion for technology and even helped create the school’s first custom website. His business partner, fellow Sage Hill classmate Mazy Kazerooni (who attended the school for only one year, during which time the two met and launched their business partnership in the Sage Hill library), are well known in the Silicon Valley. Within a short time after graduation, the social media wunderkinds grew rapper Lil Wayne's Facebook following to 30 million and parlayed that success into a music startup, Tracks.by. He is also the founder and editor of Chatbots Magazine and the CEO of Octane AI, which helps businesses and celebrities use Facebook Messenger to grow their audience.
Mark Ramadan was one of the School’s first 120 students, a member of the first four-year graduating class. He went on to attend Brown University, where he and his partner created Sir Kensington's Gourmet Scooping Ketchup out of their dorm rooms before fully launching in 2010. His products are currently sold in 1,000-plus retailers, including Whole Foods and Williams-Sonoma. Earlier in 2017, he and his partner sold the company to Unilever for $140 million.
“Sage Hill School has only been open since 2000, and having four students named to various Forbes 30 under 30 lists in the seven years the magazine has been publishing them is a testament to the innovative work we are doing here,” Head of School Patricia Merz said. “We are so proud of the range and scope of their work.”
Sage Hill’s President Gordon McNeill explained that the school culture is specifically designed to encourage students to find opportunities to engage and develop their passions.
“As a school founded by visionaries who saw infinite possibilities for the future, Sage Hill School is unbound by traditional limitations of ‘how things have always been done.’ Instead, we encourage our students to think outside the box and take ownership of their role in the school community,” he said. “We intentionally give our students time and space to identify community needs and create solutions through independent service initiatives and to initiate and lead their own clubs and organizations.”
Sage Hill School
Sage Hill School admits students of any race, color, national and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the School. The School does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship programs, and athletic and other School administered programs.