Elizabeth Holmes
Academy of Achievement
At age 19, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of college. Ten years later, she was the youngest woman in the world to become a self-made billionaire. She had entered Stanford University as a chemical engineering major, but after asking herself, "What is the greatest change I could make in the world?" she set out to create a new technology that would process medical tests faster at lower cost. She left school in 2003 and’Äîwith the money her parents had saved for her education’Äîstarted a company to develop her patents. That company, Theranos, is now valued at $9 billion, with Holmes herself retaining more than 50 percent ownership. Rather than physically shipping vials of blood to a centralized location for testing, Theranos draws a few drops into a cartridge that is loaded into a compact device for analysis. Results are sent wirelessly to a secure database, reducing the errors and delays that occur with human handling. Up to 30 tests can be performed on a single sample, and the results are