Most Influential 2021: Do Kwon

The son of a pharmaceutical and medical equipment distributor, Kwon grew up traveling the world. He was a “nerd,” as a teenager, but “not nerdy,” he said. He liked reading, especially theoretical works, but didn’t get to “The Fountainhead” or “Atlas Shrugged” until college, when he roomed with the president of the Ayn Rand Society. He’s smart. He takes cues from other Silicon Valley visionaries, and mostly wears black t-shirts. After five years at Stanford, he took a software engineering job at Microsoft. He quickly got bored.