World's Youngest CEO: Suhas Gopinath from India

In 2000, when most fourteen-year-olds were worrying about board exams, Suhas Gopinath of Bengaluru was registering a company. Ten years later, Globals Inc. — born in a cyber cafe — had become a multinational IT services firm with offices across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, and Gopinath had become famous as the world's youngest CEO.

The origin story is the stuff of Bangalore legend. Gopinath, born November 4, 1986, had no computer at home and a monthly pocket money of Rs 15 — not enough for daily cyber-cafe hours. So he struck a deal with the cafe owner: he would mind the shop in the afternoons in exchange for free browsing time. It was, he later joked, his first business deal. Self-taught from books on building websites, he launched his own portal, Coolhindustan.com, at 14, freelanced for clients abroad, and then incorporated Globals the same year — in the United States, since Indian law would not let a minor register a company. He took over as CEO at 17.

The honors followed quickly. In 2005 he was the youngest of 175 recipients of Karnataka's Rajyotsava Award. In December 2007, the European Parliament and the International Association for Human Values conferred a Young Achiever Award on him in Brussels. In November 2008 he was invited to the World Bank's ICT Leadership Roundtable on using technology to boost employability in Africa. And the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for 2008-2009.

The story is not without its myth-making — Gopinath's own telling sometimes blurred the line between an advisory roundtable and the World Bank's actual board. But the core of it is undisputed: a middle-class kid from an Air Force school in Bengaluru, armed with nothing but borrowed internet hours, built a company before he could legally vote. Age and qualifications, he liked to say, are immaterial. He had the receipts.