THE
MISFITS
100
The 100 most interesting teenagers in the world.
Nominated by us. Approved by no one.
The premise
An honor roll for the kids the honor roll missed.
When we were 13, we were picking boogers. When you were 13, you were probably picking boogers. The kids on this list are not picking boogers. They are — in approximate order of decreasing reasonableness — hacking their Teslas, becoming the youngest Grandmasters in chess history, winning the Math Olympiad in Kyrgyzstan, building $1M sneaker operations out of their bedrooms, and beating the entire Korean StarCraft scene from a basement somewhere in Eastern Europe.
You can be class president, get the high SAT scores, take the six AP classes. Or you can be the kid who is the world's best at one extremely specific weird thing.
We're interested in the second kind.
Browse the list
First ten · receipts attachedThe other 90
Know a misfit?
Tell us.
We want the 13-year-old who runs a Discord economy out of her bedroom. The kid who got banned from three Roblox servers for being too good. The math kid whose teachers ran out of things to teach him. The kid who reverse-engineered the Berkeley parking app for fun.
The bar
- — Age 11 to 19
- — World-class at one specific, low-status thing
- — Currently being told by some adult that “this isn't going to lead anywhere”
For brands considering this
We want corporate sponsors.
We will probably reject yours.
That's the bit. The Ernst & Young consultancies of the world will be chomping at the bit to sponsor this — and we'll be turning most of them down, publicly, with style. Which only makes the few we accept more valuable.
If you sell something the misfits would actually use — a tool, a stipend, a piece of hardware, an introduction — get in touch. If you sell financial advisory services to high-net-worth families, we love you, we wish you nothing but speed and traffic, but no.
The event
Once a year.
Somewhere weird. No nametags.
The 100 kids fly in. The founders of the companies you've heard of are there too. No keynote speeches. No panel discussions about “the future of work.” Just adults who built something telling kids who are building something that what they're doing actually matters.
Then everyone exchanges numbers and we get out of the way.