Top 10 Innovators to Know: OZY’s 100

She’s the face of the new Saudi Arabia. The thirtysomething entrepreneur and social media influencer runs the kingdom’s most promising investment hub, Falak. She’s also a guitarist, writer, amateur pilot, refugee advocate and national champion squash player. Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia still has a troubling human rights record and is struggling to diversify from oil. Al Dakheel, though, has emerged as a striking role model for change.

With Black women underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math fields, Williams struggled at times with her identity, and often found herself “code-switching” in a mostly white workplace as a quality engineer at NASA. Now she’s embraced a mission to build pathways for the next generation — through hip-hop. With Listen Up Education, the St. Louis native is using music to engage underprivileged kids in math and science, and is on a mission to become, in her words, “the Black female Bill Nye — where Fresh Prince and Bel-Air meet.”

After years of severe inflation and a foreign currency crisis, financial life is far from easy in Zimbabwe. But Collen Tapfumaneyi’s innovations could help lift the country from its economic troubles, and are fast spreading around the region. He started with Zimbabwe’s first alternative trading platform, then launched C-Trade, a first-for-Africa marriage of mobile, online and text message trading. Tapfumaneyi is taking his place among the continent’s innovators with his goal of facilitating a stock market revolution through do-it-yourself public stock offerings.

Banks are all owned by somebody. Why not you? Teri Williams bought up four — yes, four — banks and rolled them together to create America’s largest Black-owned bank. It’s one of only a few dozen Black-owned banks, out of 5,500 privately owned banks in the country. So how did she do it? Williams lays out the steps for aspiring bankers to join the ranks of owners.

South African mother Shannon McLaughlin became a household name in her country when she turned baby carriers into a successful business. But she raised her profile still further with a battle against retail giant Woolworths when it copied her design. She turned to social media and ultimately won her David and Goliath fight.

Investment expert Afsaneh Beschloss reached the upper echelon at the World Bank and JPMorgan Chase before starting her own firm. Still, the Iranian-born dynamo said on The Carlos Watson Show that she wishes she had actually worked a little less hard. “If I had done 20% less, it would have been equally good,” she says. “So that extra 20%, that really puts a lot of stress and takes away from love and family and other things that we love doing.”

For decades, Dan Ahrens has bet big on bad things — like casinos, booze and cigarettes — with great success. It’s almost the inverse of sustainable investing, a deadly honest assessment of human proclivities. His newest venture is the first listed, active American exchange-traded fund expressly focused on making your money grow via investing in cannabis equity securities. And it comes with a catchy name: YOLO. Previously a skeptic, Ahrens has witnessed the legal barriers to marijuana fall — and he sees an enormous market in need of smart financial instruments.