Young and Smart

Meet the 7 impressive Dallasites on Forbes' coveted 30 Under 30 list

Amber Venz Box is one of the many Dallasites who show up on Forbes 30 Under 30 list for 2017.

Perhaps Forbes took a little inspiration from last year's CultureMap Top Texans Under 30 program, because a few of our winners show up on the business site's vaunted 30 Under 30 list.

Now in its sixth year honoring "the brightest young entrepreneurs, innovators, and game-changers" — and boasting an acceptance rate of less than 4 percent, statistically making the list "harder to get into than Harvard" — 30 Under 30 actually encompasses 600 finalists in 20 categories. Twenty-two of this year's recipients are Texas-based.

And a large chunk of those remarkable youngsters hail from Dallas. From software titans to wine revolutionaries to the woman who's changing how we shop, here are the Dallas honorees who are gaining global attention.

Kendrick Worrell: Energy
Did you found a company by age 28? Worrell did, and Accelerate Resources combines his expertise in both retrieving natural resources and raising capital, drilling primarily in the Permian Basin with funding from Pine Brook Partners.

Michael Kennedy: Food and drink
If you've ever wondered what the varietals that make up a wine blend would taste like on their own, Kennedy has the answer. He founded Component Wine to "rescue" the varietals that go into some of Napa Valley's most respected blends, then ages and bottles them to sell on their own. But oenophiles be warned: Bottles can cost upward of $100.

Chase Feiger: Manufacturing and industry
When Google Ventures wants to invest in your idea, you might be on to something. The collaborative software that Feiger's company, Parsable, makes is used by industrial companies and teams, helping their businesses run more smoothly thanks to easier communication and project tracking.

Gaurab Chakrabarti and Sean Hunt: Manufacturing and industry
Not only is it possible to make hydrogen peroxide from plants (who knew?), that food-grade peroxide can then be used in pools, spas, hot tubs, and for cleaning. Chakrabarti and Hunt founded Solugen in 2016, and starting churning out PeroxyZen, the first of its kind.

Sean O'Brien: Marketing and advertising
College seniors are very into mobile messaging, but while at the University of Notre Dame, O'Brien and his Swyft co-founder, Evan Wray, were into building their own mobile messaging system (originally called TextPride). Three years later the company was acquired for $27 million by Monotype Imaging, and now Swyft runs as an independent subsidiary.

Amber Venz Box: Retail and e-commerce
First came RewardStyle, where social media "influencers" could earn money off their content, and now LikeToKnow.It, allowing Instagram users to move directly from the app to e-commerce sites where they can purchase clothes they saw on their faves' feeds. It's the only ready-to-shop consumer service on Instagram.

Movers and shakers from Houston and Austin also populate the list, including Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe, Verts Mediterranean Grill founder Dominik Stein, IntuiTap co-founder Jessica Traver, and four-time Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Simone Biles.

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Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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