Lucy Guo, recently named Forbes’ youngest self-made woman billionaire at 30, has opened up about her unconventional path to success. With a net worth of $1.3 billion (around ₹10,800 crore in INR), Guo co-founded Scale AI, an artificial intelligence data-labelling firm that was acquired by Meta for $25 billion. She is now the founder of Passes, a content monetisation platform launched in 2022, and also runs her own venture capital firm, Backend Ventures, which she started in 2019 to back early-stage tech companies, according to a report by CNBC.
Growing up in Fremont, California, with Chinese immigrant parents, Guo said her upbringing was defined by discipline, frugality, and the constant reminder of the value of money. “They threw me into Abacus competitions,” she told CNBC Make It, adding that she was “definitely forced to have good academics.”
Her parents’ focus on education pushed her towards computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. But despite excelling academically, Guo chose to leave after two years, with just a year left to complete her degree. “They sacrificed everything to immigrate from China to America to give their kids a better future,” Guo explained to CNBC. “For their kids to suddenly let go of their education when they were almost done was like a slap in the face.”
Instead of finishing her degree, Guo pursued the Thiel Fellowship, a competitive programme that grants $200,000 to young people to build innovative companies. “I think they [parents] viewed that as a sign that I didn’t love them,” she admitted. “When it was just me making a bet on myself and choosing to optimise for what I thought would be a better future for myself.”
As per CNBC, her early life was defined by constant hustling, shaped by parents who lived “a very frugal life” but always stressed the importance of financial independence. From a young age, Guo was finding ways to earn. “I would find ways to make money on the playground,” she said, recalling how she sold Pokémon cards, coloured pencils, and “anything I could find.”
When her parents confiscated her money as punishment, she outsmarted them by opening a PayPal account and getting a debit card from Home Depot while still in second grade.
Her ventures quickly moved online. A fan of the game Neopets, she started selling rare pets and in-game currency for cash. Soon after, she discovered coding and began making bots to cheat in games. “I then started finding other ways to make money on the internet from making websites using Google AdSense, then creating internet marketing tools… it just snowballed from there,” she said.
Guo’s story highlights the tension between traditional expectations and the risk-taking mentality that defines many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Despite her parents’ initial disappointment, her decision to drop out of Carnegie Mellon and back herself has paid off, cementing her status as one of the youngest billionaires in the world.
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