Well said, zaidf. This is Christine, one of the editors and writers for the project. At Inc., we largely focus on small, fast-growing companies, needless to say, pre-IPO or sale. And the names you'll see last year our list (LivingSocial, Foursquare), and previously (Modcloth, Mashable, Aaron Patzer, Mark Zuckerberg) won't appear on the list again. There are simply too many innovative, fascinating new, younger, companies each year for us to explore and profile to repeat names. Hope that makes sense.
This is a bit of an aside, but thank you for doing this. I've been enamored with the 30-under-30 list for many years, and it's become a goal of mine to get on it at some point. Don't have many years left to hit it, but I'm certainly going to try!