Meredith Klein of Meredith & The Media spoke with Maneet Ahuja, an editor at large at Forbes.
Here is an excerpt:
- Everyone wants to be in Forbes—but there’s a bar to be in Forbes. Can you give us a little color? Does it need to be a household name? Can startups get on the list? Is there a million- dollar threshold that they need to cross to be considered? What are those prerequisites?
- It’s according to what vertical you’re looking at. When you’re pitching a journalist, if it’s for Iconoclast specifically, or say 30 Under 30, the bar is very different. Or if you’re talking to one of our tech reporters, they have different metrics that they’re looking at for Iconoclast. It’s literally the financial titans—the global financial titans. So if you’re trying to make the stage, you need to have some type of global presence and a market view on thought leadership. You have to be in line with the other level of speakers that we’ve had—like Josh Harris, Ray Dalio, Ken Griffin—and be able to speak about the markets and the geopolitical situation in a way that will resonate and not just drive headlines, but move the conversation forward.
- We have 30 Under 30. We have the 250 series, with America’s Greatest Historic Innovators, celebrating these different moments in time this year with innovators and self-made people. We have our Women’s Summit, our CMO Summit. There are so many different types of opportunities. If you do have a speaker, what is their unique point of view? What would make them newsworthy?
- We’re hyper-focused on one main stage, so there’s not as much room to play with. That just inherently makes the bar much higher: We’re looking for that exact perfect speaker, because we do not have as much space as, say, the Milken Institute Global Conference, which is an incredible global conference.
- There are a lot of different conversations happening at the same time, so you can get more granular. We, by design and nature, have to stay more macro. Most of the time, we’re lucky to get one bank CEO. So who’s the one bank CEO? Or we would have one to two celebrities, and maybe one to two athletes. So who really captures that cultural zeitgeist?
Read more here.
