Lucy Guo attends as Passes presents Lucypalooza 2024 throughout LA Tech Week on October 16, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California.
Gonzalo Marroquin | Getty Pictures Leisure | Getty Pictures
A number of billionaires and profitable entrepreneurs by no means went to varsity, from Invoice Gates to Mark Zuckerberg — and 30-year-old Lucy Guo lately joined their ranks.
The California-based founder grew to become Forbes’ youngest self-made billionaire in June, boasting a web value of $1.25 billion, after her first enterprise, Scale AI, was acquired by tech large Meta in a deal that valued the AI information labelling firm at $29 billion.
At the moment the founding father of content material creator monetization platform Passes, launched in 2022, Guo instructed CNBC Make It that she did not comply with the standard path of finishing larger training.
She studied pc science and human pc interactions at Carnegie Mellon College in Pennsylvania, however dropped out after two years. On the time, she solely had one 12 months and eight lessons to go earlier than she graduated. This got here as a shock to her Chinese language immigrant dad and mom.
“They [parents] sacrificed all the pieces to immigrate from China to America to offer their children a greater future, and since training gave them all the pieces that they’ve in life, for his or her children to all of the sudden let go of their training once they had been virtually completed was like a slap within the face,” she stated.
Guo as a substitute determined to pursue the Thiel Fellowship, a program launched by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, which affords younger individuals $200,000 to construct progressive firms.
“I believe they [parents] seen that as an indication that I did not love them, and so they weren’t very pleased with it, when it was simply me betting on myself and selecting to optimize for what I believed could be a greater future for myself.”
However even the billionaire faculty dropout sees some advantages to larger training.
The very best networking alternative
Guo stated that going to varsity launched her to a community that grew to become much more worthwhile to her as a founder.
“My suggestion for individuals is that one to 2 years in faculty is definitely simply extremely nice, as a result of you are going to make one of the best associates in faculty, and you are going to meet the neatest individuals in faculty,” Guo stated. “Everybody’s going to varsity as a result of they need to meet individuals.”
She defined there is no different situation the place there’s such a excessive focus of good people who find themselves additionally trying to make associates.
“While you go to work at a brand new firm, not everybody you are working with is in search of a brand new good friend as a result of they have already got associates. When you by no means went to varsity, and also you simply dive right into a metropolis, you possibly can go to those occasions and attempt to meet individuals, and it does work out. However, once more, not everyone seems to be determined to make associates,” she added.
Future workers
An organization’s best property is the individuals it hires, and Guo says one of the best hiring pool is your faculty friends.
“Be sure to get to know your smartest friends and truly be associates with them. The very best place to do that, I believe personally, is definitely in faculty,” she stated.
“I am unable to even consider one place the place it is such a excessive density of individuals which might be clever and that is the probably place [college] the place you are going to meet your future hires.”
She says this community of clever associates will stay helpful, since you’ll have already got a proficient pool of individuals to rent.
Guo stated her friends on the two-year Thiel Fellowship program motivated her achieve success as an entrepreneur.
“You develop into a part of a group the place it is so regular to construct a unicorn firm, as a result of so as to construct an organization, you need to be a little bit loopy. It’s a must to be so smug to imagine that you’ve got a shot at constructing an organization that may very well be a unicorn. And it is simpler to imagine that, and to delude your self, if you end up surrounded by so many individuals which have, and that’s, I believe, the great thing about San Francisco and the Thiel Fellowship.”
Different alumni of this system, like Guo, have gone on to supply unicorns — startups valued at over $1 billion — from Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum to Dylan Area’s Figma and Ritesh Agarwal’s Oyo Rooms.
This text is a part of a collection on billionaire Lucy Guo. Learn extra beneath:
