Lucy Guo attends as Passes presents Lucypalooza 2024 throughout LA Tech Week on October 16, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California.
Gonzalo Marroquin | Getty Photos Leisure | Getty Photos
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 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 knowledge labelling firm at $29 billion.
Presently 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 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 courses to go earlier than she graduated. This got here as a shock to her Chinese language immigrant mother and father.
“They [parents] sacrificed every part to immigrate from China to America to present their youngsters a greater future, and since training gave them every part that they’ve in life, for his or her youngsters to abruptly 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 gives younger individuals $200,000 to construct progressive firms.
“I feel 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 assumed can be a greater future for myself.”
However even the billionaire faculty dropout sees some advantages to increased training.
The very best networking alternative
Guo stated that going to school launched her to a community that grew to become much more useful to her as a founder.
“My advice for individuals is that one to 2 years in faculty is definitely simply extremely nice, as a result of you are going to make the most effective mates in faculty, and you are going to meet the neatest individuals in faculty,” Guo stated. “Everybody’s going to school as a result of they need to meet individuals.”
She defined there is not any different situation the place there’s such a excessive focus of sensible people who find themselves additionally trying to make mates.
“If you go to work at a brand new firm, not everybody you are working with is searching for a brand new good friend as a result of they have already got mates. In the event you by no means went to school, and also you simply dive right into a metropolis, you’ll be able to 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 mates,” she added.
Future workers
An organization’s biggest property is the individuals it hires, and Guo says the most effective hiring pool is your faculty friends.
“Ensure to get to know your smartest friends and truly be mates with them. The very best place to do that, I feel personally, is definitely in faculty,” she stated.
“I can not even consider one place the place it is such a excessive density of individuals which might be clever and that is the almost certainly place [college] the place you are going to meet your future hires.”
She says this community of clever mates will stay useful, 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 out to be a part of a group the place it is so regular to construct a unicorn firm, as a result of in an effort to construct an organization, you must be somewhat loopy. It’s important to be so conceited to consider that you’ve a shot at constructing an organization that might be a unicorn. And it is simpler to consider that, and to delude your self, if you find yourself surrounded by so many individuals which have, and that’s, I feel, 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 Subject’s Figma and Ritesh Agarwal’s Oyo Rooms.
This text is a part of a sequence on billionaire Lucy Guo. Learn extra beneath:
