The list highlights people who started with nothing and made it big.
He dropped out of high school, but Tyler Perry converted 330 acres of a former Army post in southwest Atlanta into one of the largest studios in the United States. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)
Some of the most prominent names in Georgia are highlighted in a Forbes list of those who overcame circumstances to become among the most accomplished people in the country.
Forbes’ Self-Made 250 list is part of the magazine’s Forbes 250 series, as the United States prepares to mark its 250th anniversary on the Fourth of July this year.
The list spotlights “those whose journeys began with profound disadvantage and were defined by resilience, reinvention and ambition,” according to Forbes. A panel of judges compiledthe list using a 1-to-10 ranking to quantify the “distance traveled” from struggle to success.
Among those recognized are Georgians and people with ties to Georgia whose lives represent inspiring stories of surmounting adversity to reach the heights of their fields.
Rosalind “Roz” Brewer is the interim president of Spelman College. (Courtesy)
Rosalind Brewer
Brewer is interim president of Spelman College and a former CEO of Sam’s Club and Walgreens. Forbes highlights that Brewer is the child of General Motors assembly line workers, and placed her at No. 234 on the list.
A 1984 graduate of Spelman, Brewer became the only Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company when she was named CEO of Walgreens in 2021. She was previously a chief operating officer at Starbucks.
Brewer also has an ownership stake in the Atlanta Falcons.
Marcia Taylor
Taylor is CEO, chair and owner of the Bennett Family of Companies, a trucking and logistics giant based in McDonough.
Forbes noted Taylor, at No. 224 in the list, “escaped an abusive marriage. With her second husband, she turned a struggling trucking company into a logistics powerhouse called Bennett.”
Mailchimp co-founders Dan Kurzius (left) and Ben Chestnut sit in their headquarters office at Ponce City Market in 2021. (Courtesy of Andrew Thomas Lee)
Dan Kurzius
Kurzius cofounded Mailchimp, which was sold for $12 billion to Silicon Valley’s Intuit in 2021 as one of the biggest sales of an Atlanta tech company.
He was “a part-time DJ and former competitive skateboarder who’d bluffed about his coding skills before co-founding Mailchimp,” according to Forbes, which has Kurzius at No. 160.
Tope Awotona
Awotona cofounded Calendly, one of the few Atlanta startups to be valued at or above $1 billion.
He immigrated from Lagos, Nigeria, to the U.S. as a teenager and “founded Calendly by maxing out his credit cards,” according to Forbes, which put him at No. 149. He was also named last year as one of the world’s 21 Black billionaires.
Operation Hope CEO John Hope Bryant was homeless before launching his first business venture. (Jenni Girtman for the AJC 2024)
John Hope Bryant
Bryant is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Atlanta-based financial literacy nonprofit Operation Hope. He’s also an investor in Centennial Yards, the redevelopment of downtown Atlanta’s Gulch.
Read the full article in the AJC here.
John Hope Bryant — founder of Bryant Group Ventures, Operation HOPE, Inc, publisher of the Bryant Journal and author of his 7th book Capitalism for All: Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America, now a bestseller.
