Ten years on the CNBC Disruptor 50: Goldberg helps select 2026 list
Veale Institute executive director has spent a decade helping shape CNBC’s annual ranking—and watching the list transform around him
The first time Michael Goldberg helped select the CNBC Disruptor 50, the iPhone was less than a decade old, ChatGPT did not exist, and the companies near the top of the list included Airbnb and Snapchat.
Ten years later—when CNBC unveiled its 2026 list this week—the new No. 1 was Anthropic, the AI lab now in talks to raise capital at a valuation as high as $900 billion.
Goldberg, executive director and associate vice president of the Veale Institute for Entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve University, serves on the Disruptor 50 Academic Advisory Board—a group of leading entrepreneurship scholars from institutions including MIT, Dartmouth, Columbia, Georgetown, Indiana, Notre Dame, and Tulane, among others.
“In 2016, you’d read a submission and the company was solving a problem you already understood—a better way to get a ride, a better way to rent a room, a better way to pay online,” said Goldberg, a professor of design and innovation at the Weatherhead School of Management. “Now, we consider companies building autonomous warships, or platforms that let you bet on the next Supreme Court ruling.”
Goldberg added, “The problem some companies are solving did not exist five years ago—and in some cases the industry didn’t exist five years ago.”
For CNBC, Goldberg’s board is one of two advisory panels—the other drawn from top venture capital firms—that help CNBC weigh and rank the companies before its editorial staff make the final call.
A decade of difference
The list itself tells a story.
Forty-three of this year’s fifty companies say AI is critical to their business model. The combined valuation of the 2026 class is roughly three times last year’s—and two entirely new categories, vibe coding and prediction markets, made the list for the first time.
For Goldberg, who teaches early-stage finance and entrepreneurship, among other courses, at the Weatherhead School, says his work with CNBC and his teaching inform each other.
His students, after all, are about to walk into the world that this list describes.
“Every year I come back from this with something I didn’t expect,” he said. “That’s part of the point—if I’m surprised, my students need to hear about it.”
The 2026 Disruptor 50 list is available at cnbc.com/disruptors.
