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To build a transformative new company, entrepreneurs need more than a big idea. The job often takes years of focus and grueling work. So when founders look to raise money to help grow their businesses, they traditionally look to venture capitalists with battle scars, longtime investors who’ve built their own companies and seen it all before.

A new crop of investors is poised to prove tradition wrong. Like the founders they support, these standout young venture capitalists move fast. They’ve earned coveted partner roles at big firms like Sequoia Capital, founded their own funds like Romulus Capital and founded key startup programs like Dorm Room Fund and StartX.

Take Y Combinator president Sam Altman, who says he still gets asked at age 29 what it feels like to be arguably the most powerful investor in Silicon Valley, with 10,000 candidate submissions each year. Altman’s sold a startup, Loopt, for $43.4 million; he’s already spent years investing in companies like Airbnb and Teespring under the guidance of industry stalwarts like YC cofounder Paul Graham. With that experience, Altman says he tries to think about his age as little as possible. Instead, he’s focused on putting his stamp on Graham’s old haunt, which has worked with more than 730 startups to date. His goal? To find more companies in difficult but world-changing industries like nuclear energy (where he’s just backed two). “We want to have an impact,” Altman tells Forbes. “It’s cool that you can make a list of the problems in the world and then fund companies to solve them.”

Altman’s not the only investor on this list looking for moonshots. There’s Ilya Golubivich, 29, who as managing partner of I2BF Global Ventures has backed companies launching satellites and looking to mine for precious minerals on asteroids. And there’s Google Google Ventures general partner Blake Byers, also 29, who uses his bioengineering Ph.D. to find companies like Rani Therapeutics, which hopes to turn injectable drugs into pill form.

About half the members of the list come from traditional bigger firms in VC that feature partners regularly on the Forbes Midas List of top investors, including Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Insight Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital and SV Angel. Chetan Puttagunta, 28, rose from associate to partner at NEA in just three years after playing a key role in bringing the firm companies like ElasticSearch, MongoDB and MuleSoft.

Others, like Nitesh Banta, 28, and Peter Boyce II, 24, join the list for founding ventures of their own. Banta and Boyce run Rough Draft Ventures, a firm that’s provided up to $25,000 to dozens of student entrepreneurs. They’re joined by First Round Capital’s CeCe Cheng, 28. Cheng serves as director of Dorm Room Fund, which she started as a peer-to-peer investing platform that’s backed 60 student startups so far.

One-third of the list’s 33 members (three joint entries swell this year’s ranks) are at the cusp of 30. But two members crack the list at just 22 years old: Alex Banayan of Alsop Louie Partners and Stephanie Weiner of Bain Capital Ventures, both of whom started investing in their teens. Weiner’s a founding member of Dorm Room Fund and started her own website in middle school. Banayan’s writing a book about a colorful career to date that’s led him to advise types from Department of Education officials to Lady Gaga .

The young investors of this list also represent the changing face of technology and investing as they prove success doesn’t depend on a white-male stereotype. While several Silicon Valley scions make the list on their investing merits, so too do a larger number of immigrant investors from India and Taiwan, Venezuela and Ukraine. And while VC still has a long way to go to reach gender equality. eight talented women investors fill out this year’s list.

See the full list and more insights at the 30 Under 30 Venture Capital page .

Special thanks to this year’s judges: Josh Kopelman. partner at First Round Capital; Chris Sacca, founder of Lowercase Capital, and Scott Sandell, general partner at New Enterprise Associates.

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