A cofounder of a prior company I ran really wanted to be Forbes 30 under 30. She never got it, but got plenty of other random awards that didn’t matter. I never really understood it, because it was so clearly BS; it didn’t help with marketing or PR past like a week, and we had plenty of that from news stories and actual, real PR. And it wasn’t a real award; it’s not like there was something to be proud of there.

I eventually figured it out - it was a notch in her belt that she wanted so that she could point to it as proof of worth. She sought out those various “pay us $2000 and we’ll put you on the cover of our magazine” nonsense things too, due to what turned out to be feelings of inferiority and a need to feel like she was making progress, even if it wasn’t the right kind of progress.

Needless to say, those didn’t help us at all and were a waste of time and money. Focusing on customers and PR that got in front of them worked much better.

I saw a stat that if you look at Forbes' "... Under 30" list, collectively, they have been accused/charged/convicted of stealing/scamming more money than their companies have generated revenue.

And then I saw a tweet a while back, that I admittedly can no longer find, that if you were to filter for "Stanford" in that list, the ratio blows out to nearly 3:1 (ill-gotten gains:revenue).