Lucy Guo used to sell Pokémon cards, dropped out of college: Here's the story of world's youngest self-made billionaire

Very few can become billionaires, let alone at the age of 30. But Lucy Guo is one of them. With an impressive $1.3 billion fortune, she has been recognized by Forbes as the youngest self-made billionaire at just 30. So, how did she become a billionaire?

Daughter of Chinese immigrants

Guo has co-founded Scale AI, which was later acquired by Meta for $25 billion, and today she leads Passes, a content creator monetization platform launched in 2022, as well as Backend Ventures, a venture capital firm she established in 2019. Remarkably, she accomplished all this after dropping out of Carnegie Mellon University, where she studied computer science and human-computer interaction.

Her decision to leave school was difficult for her parents, who were Chinese immigrants in Fremont, California. They had emphasized both education and money, raising her with discipline and sacrifice. “They sacrificed everything to immigrate from China to America to give their kids a better future,” Guo told CNBC Make It. “For their kids to suddenly let go of their education when they were almost done was like a slap in the face.”


Guo’s parents instilled in her a focus on academics from childhood. She participated in Abacus competitions and recalled being “definitely forced to have good academics.” However, after two years in college, she pursued the Thiel Fellowship, which provides $200,000 to young people to build 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.”

Her drive to earn money started young. “I would find ways to make money on the playground,” she said, describing how she sold and traded Pokémon cards, colored pencils, and “anything I could find.” Her strict parents often confiscated her earnings if she misbehaved, which pushed her to get creative. “In second grade, I went to Home Depot to get a debit card and opened a PayPal account to store my cash.”

Her ventures grew as she got older. A fan of the game Neopets, she sold rare pets and in-game currency for real money. “I would get rare pets, rare items, and resell them for actual cash,” she recalled. After discovering coding, she created and sold 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.