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 school, from Invoice Gates to Mark Zuckerberg — and 30-year-old Lucy Guo not too long ago joined their ranks.
The California-based founder grew to become Forbes’ youngest self-made billionaire in June, boasting a web price of $1.25 billion, after her first enterprise, Scale AI, was acquired by tech large Meta in a deal that valued the AI knowledge labelling firm at $29 billion.
At the moment the founding father of content material creator monetization platform Passes, launched in 2022, Guo advised CNBC Make It that she did not observe the standard path of finishing increased schooling.
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 yr 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 the whole lot to immigrate from China to America to present their youngsters a greater future, and since schooling gave them the whole lot that they’ve in life, for his or her youngsters to immediately let go of their schooling once they have been nearly finished was like a slap within the face,” she stated.
Guo as an alternative determined to pursue the Thiel Fellowship, a program launched by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, which provides younger individuals $200,000 to construct modern corporations.
“I feel they [parents] seen that as an indication that I did not love them, they usually weren’t very pleased with it, when it was simply me betting on myself and selecting to optimize for what I assumed can be a greater future for myself.”
However even the billionaire school dropout sees some advantages to increased schooling.
One of the best networking alternative
Guo stated that going to school launched her to a community that grew to become much more beneficial to her as a founder.
“My advice for individuals is that one to 2 years in school is definitely simply extremely nice, as a result of you are going to make one of the best pals in school, and you are going to meet the neatest individuals in school,” Guo stated. “Everybody’s going to school as a result of they wish 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 pals.
“While you go to work at a brand new firm, not everybody you are working with is on the lookout for a brand new pal as a result of they have already got pals. In case you by no means went to school, and also you simply dive right into a metropolis, you may 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 pals,” she added.
Future staff
An organization’s biggest belongings is the individuals it hires, and Guo says one of the best hiring pool is your school friends.
“Make sure that to get to know your smartest friends and truly be pals with them. One of the best place to do that, I feel personally, is definitely in school,” she stated.
“I can not even consider one place the place it is such a excessive density of individuals which are clever and that is the probably place [college] the place you are going to meet your future hires.”
She says this community of clever pals 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 turn into a part of a neighborhood the place it is so regular to construct a unicorn firm, as a result of with the intention to construct an organization, you need to be a bit of loopy. You must be so conceited 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 feel, the fantastic 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 Discipline’s Figma and Ritesh Agarwal’s Oyo Rooms.
This text is a part of a sequence on billionaire Lucy Guo. Learn extra beneath:
