A native of the Bay Area, Max Marmer, 21, is driven by working on the biggest problems he can find. After taking a gap year after high school Max dropped out of Stanford his Freshman year to co-found the Startup Genome Project, which aims to “crack the code of innovation” and turn entrepreneurship into a science. He began doing research on how to make entrepreneurship more scientific when he realized the high failure rate of startups was one of the biggest inhibitors to accelerating the global pace of innovation and economic growth. Together with researchers from UC Berkeley, Oxford, and Stanford, and entrepreneurial thought leaders like Steve Blank the Startup Genome team released two reports on what makes startups successful that have been downloaded more than 25,000 times and have been adopted globally by more than 50 different Universities, Incubators & Accelerators. More recently the Startup Genome team released the Startup Genome Compass, the first digital mentor for now more than 12,000 startups around the world. (Links: http://beta.startupgenome.cc, http://startupgenome.cc)

When Max isn’t riding the entrepreneurial roller coaster, he is working to advance his perception of the world in other ways, including studying philosophy, psychology, spirituality, and complex developmental systems and taking on more physical challenges like meditation, yoga and interval training.