Lucy Guo, the world's youngest self-made billionaire and serial entrepreneur, credits her frugal parents with motivating her to start hustling at a young age.
Guo, 30, was recently named Forbes' youngest self-made billionaire with a net worth of $1.3 billion. Her first company, Scale AI, an AI data-labeling firm, was acquired by tech giant Meta for a whopping $25 billion.
Today, Lucy Guo is the founder of Passes, a content creator monetization platform launched in 2022. She also founded a venture capital firm, Backend Ventures, in 2019 to invest in early-stage tech startups.
Growing up in Fremont, California, with Chinese immigrant parents, Guo was taught the importance of both education and money. "They threw me into Abacus competitions," she told CNBC Make It, adding that she was "definitely forced to have good academics."
Lucy Guo dropped out of college
Her focus on academics led her to study computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University. However, she dropped out after two years, with only a year left to complete her Computer Science degree. This decision was a major disappointment for her parents.
"They sacrificed everything to immigrate from China to America to give their kids a better future," Guo explained. "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 program that provides young people with $2,00,000 to build innovative companies. "I think they [parents] viewed that as a sign that I didn't love them," she said, "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."
Lucy Guo's parents lived "a very frugal life," but always emphasized the importance of having money. As a result, she started hustling in elementary school. "I would find ways to make money on the playground," she said. This included trading and selling Pokémon cards, colored pencils, and "anything I could find."
Her parents were strict, and if she misbehaved, they would take her money away. In response, Guo, in second grade, went to Home Depot to get a debit card and opened a PayPal account to store her cash.
How Lucy Guo learned to earn money as a kid
As the years went on, her money-making endeavors grew. A fan of the game Neopets, she would sell virtual creatures and in-game currency on forums. "I would get rare pets, rare items, and resell them for actual cash," she said.
After discovering engineering and coding, she began making and selling bots to cheat in games. From there, her ventures "snowballed." "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 is quoted as saying.
Source: Times of India
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