Lucy Goo will be present when Passes presents Lucypalooza 2024 at LA Tech Week on October 16, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California.
Gonza Romaroquin | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
From Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg, hundreds of millions of billionaires and successful entrepreneurs never went to college. Lucy Guo, 30, recently joined their ranks.
The California-based founder became Forbes’ youngest home-built billionaire in June, boasting a net worth of $1.25 billion after it was acquired by Tech Giant Meta in a deal valued at $29 billion by its first business, Scale AI.
Guo, the founder of Content Creator Monetization Platform Passes, which was launched in 2022, told CNBC she would not follow the traditional path of completing higher education.
She studied computer science and human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, but dropped out two years later. At the time, she only had to go to one year and eight classes before graduating. This came as a shock to her Chinese immigrant parents.
“They (parents) sacrificed everything to emigrate from China to America to give their children a better future, and education gave them everything in life, so it was like a slap in the face to suddenly let go of education when their children were almost accomplished,” she said.
Instead, Guo decided to pursue Thiel Fellowship. This is a program launched by Paypal’s billionaire co-founder Peter Thiel, which offers young people $200,000 to build innovative companies.
“I think they (the parents) saw them as a sign that I didn’t love them, when they chose to bet on themselves and optimize what they thought would be a better future for them.”
But even billionaire college dropouts see some benefits in higher education.
The best networking opportunities
Guo said that going to college introduced her to a network that made her even more valuable as a founder.
“My recommendation to my people is that you’re very good in a year or two in college because you’re going to make best friends in college and meet the smartest people in college,” Guo said. “They want to see people, so everyone goes to college.”
She explained that there are no other scenarios where smart people want to make friends are concentrated like this.
“When you go to work for a new company, you’re not looking for new friends because everyone you work with already have friends. If you’ve never been to college and just jumped into the city, you can go to these events and try to meet people.
Future employee
The biggest asset of a company is the people who hire, and Guo says the best employment pool is your university companion.
“Get out your clever peers and make sure you’re actually friends with them. Personally, I think the best place to do this is actually in college,” she said.
“I can’t even think of a place that is very dense people and that is the most likely place (university) you’re planning on seeing your future employment.”
She says this network of intelligent friends will remain convenient as you already have a talent pool of people you hire.
Guo said his two-year Thiel Fellowship program fellows motivated him to become successful as an entrepreneur.
“You’re part of the normal community to build a unicorn company because you have to be a little crazy to build a company. You have to believe you’re filming building a company that could become a unicorn.
Other alumni of programs like Guo have produced Unicorns (a billion-dollar startup) from Ethereum at Vitalik Buterin to Figma at Dylan Field and Oyo Room at Ritesh Agarwal.
This article is part of a series about billionaire Lucy Guo. Please see below:
