ByAlicia Park,
Contributor.
L
uana Lopes Lara graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science, spent college summers working for Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel and built an $11 billion startup in just six years. Yet the Brazilian native still calls high school the “most intense years of her life”: Her ballet teachers at Bolshoi Theater School in Brazil held lit cigarettes under her thigh while she extended a leg to her ear—it was a test to see how long she could keep that leg up without getting burned. Fellow dancers would hide glass shards in each other’s shoes to get ahead, and the cutthroat program required her to take academic classes from 7 a.m. to noon and ballet classes from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
The rigor and intensity of ballet training was just a small part of her grander ambitions: wanting to become the next Steve Jobs. In part inspired by her math teacher mother and electrical engineer father, Lopes Lara would study well into the night for academic competitions, winning gold at the Brazilian Astronomy Olympiad and bronze at the Santa Catarina Mathematics Olympiad. For nine months following high school graduation (in December), she performed as a professional ballerina in Austria before hanging up her pointe shoes to begin her next journey in America.
