Lucy Guo attends as Passes presents Lucypalooza 2024 throughout LA Tech Week on October 16, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California.
Gonzalo Marroquin | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Several billionaires and profitable entrepreneurs by no means went to college, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg — and 30-year-old Lucy Guo just lately joined their ranks.
The California-based founder turned Forbes’ youngest self-made billionaire in June, boasting a internet 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.
Currently the founding father of content material creator monetization platform Passes, launched in 2022, Guo instructed CNBC Make It that she did not observe the normal path of finishing higher education.
She studied pc science and human pc interactions at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, however dropped out after two years. At the time, she solely had one year and eight lessons to go earlier than she graduated. This got here as a shock to her Chinese immigrant dad and mom.
“They [parents] sacrificed everything to immigrate from China to America to give their kids a better future, and because education gave them everything that they have in life, for their kids to suddenly let go of their education when they were almost done was like a slap in the face,” she mentioned.
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 firms.
“I think they [parents] viewed that as a sign that I didn’t love them, and they weren’t very happy with it, when it was just me making a bet on myself and choosing to optimize for what I thought would be a better future for myself.”
But even the billionaire college dropout sees some advantages to higher education.
The greatest networking alternative
Guo mentioned that going to college launched her to a community that turned much more beneficial to her as a founder.
“My recommendation for people is that one to two years in college is actually just incredibly great, because you’re going to make the best friends in college, and you’re going to meet the smartest people in college,” Guo mentioned. “Everyone’s going to college because they want to meet people.”
She defined there isn’t any different state of affairs the place there’s such a excessive focus of sensible people who find themselves additionally seeking to make buddies.
“When you go to work at a new company, not everyone you’re working with is looking for a new friend because they already have friends. If you never went to college, and you just dive into a city, you can go to these events and try to meet people, and it does work out. But, again, not everyone is desperate to make friends,” she added.
Future workers
An organization’s best belongings is the individuals it hires, and Guo says one of the best hiring pool is your college friends.
“Make sure to get to know your smartest peers and actually be friends with them. The best place to do this, I think personally, is actually in college,” she mentioned.
“I can’t even think of one place where it’s such a high density of people that are intelligent and that’s the most likely place [college] where you’re going to meet your future hires.”
She says this community of clever buddies will stay helpful, since you’ll have already got a gifted pool of individuals to rent.
Guo mentioned her friends on the two-year Thiel Fellowship program motivated her achieve success as an entrepreneur.
“You become part of a community where it’s so normal to build a unicorn company, because in order to build a company, you have to be a little crazy. You have to be so arrogant to believe that you have a shot at building a company that could be a unicorn. And it’s easier to believe that, and to delude yourself, when you are surrounded by so many people that have, and that is, I think, the beauty of San Francisco and the Thiel Fellowship.”
Other 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 Field’s Figma and Ritesh Agarwal’s Oyo Rooms.
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