Billionaire college dropout recommends one year in higher education

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.

Guo instead decided to pursue the Thiel Fellowship, a program launched by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, which offers young people $200,000 to build innovative companies.

“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 benefits to higher education.

 Guo said that going to college introduced her to a network that became even more valuable 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 said. “Everyone’s going to college because they want to meet people.”

She explained there’s no other scenario where there’s such a high concentration of smart people who are also looking to make friends.

“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.

A company’s greatest assets is the people it hires, and Guo says the best hiring pool is your college peers.

“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 said.

“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 network of intelligent friends will remain handy, because you’ll already have a talented pool of people to hire.  

Guo said her peers on the two-year Thiel Fellowship program motivated her be successful 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 the program, like Guo, have gone on to produce unicorns — startups valued at over $1 billion — from Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum to Dylan Field’s Figma and Ritesh Agarwal’s Oyo Rooms.

This article is part of a series on billionaire Lucy Guo. Read more below: