TRISHA BANTIGUE

Age: 27 • Cofounder and CEO, Queenly

As a teenager fleeing an abusive home, the Philippines-born Bantigue did whatever she could to earn money, including working at McDonald’s, modeling and entering beauty pageants for the prize money. “Pageants helped me get my degree, and they changed my life,” she says. After graduating from UC Berkeley, she took jobs at Facebook, Google and Uber before cofounding Queenly, an online marketplace for users to resell formalwear, in 2017. “These gowns sometimes cost as much as a car, and it’s crazy because you wear a gown only one time.” The Y Combinator grad has already raised $7 million from VCs including Andreessen Horowitz.