World’s youngest self-made female billionaire dropout Lucy Guo advises spending at least a year in college

"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 told CNBC Make It. "Everyone’s going to college because they want to meet people."

Guo explained that workplaces and cities don’t offer the same level of openness, as people there are not necessarily looking to make new 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.

The 30-year-old billionaire also views universities as ideal recruiting grounds.

"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."

Guo said her peers on the two-year Thiel Fellowship program motivated her be successful as an entrepreneur. Other Thiel Fellowship alumni include Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, Figma founder Dylan Field, and Oyo Rooms founder Ritesh Agarwal, all of whom went on to lead companies valued at over $1 billion.

Billionaire Lucy Guo, co-founder of Scale AI. Photo by Instagram/@guoforit

College exit, billion-dollar entry

Guo, 30, founded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang, a former Quora colleague, eight years ago. This year, Meta acquired 49% of Scale AI for $14.3 billion, according to Bloomberg. The AI data labeling company is now valued at $29 billion.

She left in 2018, but her stake in the company made her a billionaire with a net worth of $1.25 billion, according to Forbes.

Guo, who is currently the founder of content creator monetization platform Passes, studied computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University before dropping out despite being just one year and eight classes short of graduation. Her decision shocked her Chinese immigrant parents, who viewed education as essential.

"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 told CNBC Make It.

Instead, Guo accepted a Thiel Fellowship, a $200,000 grant created by PayPal billionaire co-founder Peter Thiel for young entrepreneurs to build startups.

Reflecting on education and entrepreneurship, Guo’s stance echoes that of Bill Gates, who also left Harvard to start Microsoft but advises his children not to follow his example, according to Business Insider.

Gates has said his case was unusual. "It’s an exceptional case where the urgency is such that you interrupt those college years to go do something else," he said.

"I am always encouraging people to learn a broad set of things," Gates added, noting that his curiosity at Harvard allowed him to later apply much of what he studied.