Five Years After Forbes 25 Under 25: What the List Actually Changed

In January 2020 Forbes Poland put me on its 25 Under 25 list. Looking back at the five years that followed, the honest answer is that the list itself changed less than people assume. It didn't fund my company, didn't make our product work and didn't win us a customer. What it did change was smaller and lasted longer. Conversations with strangers started from a fact they could check instead of from zero. And it became the first line of a record I later had to prove, item by item, to a US immigration officer.

I'm writing this in 2026, about 2020 to 2025, and I'll keep it concrete: dates, links and what actually moved.

First, the three lists

I've been on three Forbes lists. My bio sums them up as 3× Forbes 30 Under 30; here they are one by one.

A word on the first one, since it's the least known. "25 under 25" is a competition Forbes Poland runs with McKinsey & Company for young entrepreneurs, startup founders, social and environmental activists, scientists and people building new technologies. The 2020 list was its second edition, published on January 30, 2020. My university in Rzeszów wrote it up within the week. When Forbes announced the fourth edition in December 2021, it named me among the people on its earlier lists and noted that for many of them it had been their first distinction of that kind.

For the rest of my record on one page, see Vadym Melnyk: Fast Facts.

What the list changed

The next conversation started from a checkable fact

When I arrived in Poland I knew two words of the language and nobody knew me. Every meeting started from zero or below. A list published by someone else doesn't make you right, but it gives the person across the table something to verify before they have to trust you. That is its real value to a founder with no pedigree: it shifts the first conversation from "who is this?" to "what does he actually do?"

I said as much the week the list came out. In the note my university published, I called it "a great pleasure and a kind of reliable proof for many of the clients I work with."

It turned into evidence

The clearest use of the list came four years later. In 2024 I received a US EB-1A "extraordinary ability" green card, and the petition ran to roughly 1,300 pages. In that process you can't write "recognized by Forbes". You attach the published list, the selection logic, the date. The Forbes lists mapped onto two of the criteria, recognized awards and published material about me, but they counted as evidence only because each one came with that primary documentation. A logo on a slide would have been worth nothing. I described the whole process in The EB1A Green Card: Inside a 1,300-Page Application.

One became a pattern

One award can be luck. The 2021 Forbes Poland 30 Under 30 and the 2023 Forbes Ukraine 30 Under 30 turned a single mention into a pattern across years and across two countries. The Ukrainian list described me in one line, at 29: owner of Dronehub, who "created an innovative solution in the drone market". That repetition is what a skeptical reader takes seriously, far more than any single badge.

What the list didn't change

The product

The year I made the 25 Under 25 list was also the year we turned down roughly €3M of outsourcing work to bet everything on our own autonomous platform. We did not have a reliable product then. Fully autonomous landing back onto the docking station, every time, in real conditions, took years more of hardware iteration. No list shortened that by a day. Our patents in autonomous drone technology came out of those same years of work, not out of any list. An award doesn't inspect a power line; the product does. The story of that decision is in I Turned Down €3M of Work to Bet on One Product.

The money

A magazine list doesn't pay for anything. Our R&D was paid for through European programs, each with its own application and review, which I've written about in How Grants Funded My Drone Hardware Company. In 2022 Dronehub became one of the GENIUS NY finalists and received a $500K investment.

The middle years

Recognition arrives late. Read as a list, 2020 to 2025 looks like a clean upward line. Lived forward, most of it was invisible iteration, the part of a deep-tech company where the story you tell investors is "we're still here, and the landing is more reliable than last quarter". I wrote about that stretch in Why Deep-Tech Takes a Decade.

Me

I treated the list as a benchmark, not a goal, and said so at the time. In my university's note that week I called it "a very good test of how I look to the competition" and added: "Honestly, I have never set any goals to get acknowledged by Forbes and tried to be motivated by other things."

What followed, 2020 to 2025

Here is what happened in the five years after the list, limited to what can be checked:

None of these was caused by a magazine list. One of them used it: the green card petition cited the Forbes lists as evidence. The rest came from the same place the list did, which is years of work that nobody photographs. I think of all of it, the lists included, as lagging indicators: confirmation that a narrow, uncomfortable bet was compounding, not a scoreboard to play for.

What I'd tell someone on this year's list

If you just made a Forbes list in Poland, Ukraine or anywhere else, here is what I learned, in the order I'd act on it:

1. Write it down exactly. The list's name, the edition, the year, the link.
2. Keep the primary documents. Save the published page and the date. If you ever apply for a visa, a grant or a board seat, you'll need the source, not the badge.
3. Use it to open conversations, not to close them. It buys you a first meeting. The product, the numbers and the references decide the second one.
4. Go back to the boring work. Whatever earned you the list is the thing to keep doing. The recognition lags the work by years.
5. Check what's being said about you. Once a year, ask two or three AI assistants who you are and compare the answer with your own record. If a namesake keeps turning up, a clear fact page with sources helps them tell you apart.

The list said I was worth watching. What happened next was up to the work, and that's the part no list can do for you. If you want the longer arc, my About page has the timeline, and A Decade in Autonomous Drones: What I Got Wrong has the mistakes.