Several billionaires and successful entrepreneurs never went to college, from Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg — and 30-year-old Lucy Guo recently joined their ranks.
The California-based founder became Forbes’ youngest self-made billionaire in June, boasting a net worth of $1.25 billion, after her first business, Scale AI, was acquired by tech giant Meta in a deal that valued the AI data labelling company at $29 billion.
Currently the founder of content creator monetization platform Passes, launched in 2022, Guo told CNBC Make It that she didn’t follow the traditional path of completing higher education.
She studied computer science and human computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, but dropped out after two years. At the time, she only had one year and eight classes to go before she graduated. This came as a shock to her Chinese immigrant parents.
“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 said.
