Youngest billionaire Lucy Guo shares a rare connection with unicorn founders like Oyo's Ritesh Agarwal and Figma's Dylan Field. Can you guess?

When it comes to billionaires who skipped college, names like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg often dominate the conversation. Now, Lucy Guo, 30, has entered that exclusive club. In June, the California-based entrepreneur became Forbes’ youngest self-made female billionaire with a net worth of $1.25 billion. Her first company, Scale AI, was acquired by Meta in a deal that valued the startup at $29 billion, CNBC Make It reported.

Betting on Herself with the Thiel Fellowship
Guo studied computer science and human-computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon University but dropped out just a year before graduating. Her decision shocked her Chinese immigrant parents, who had emphasized education as the foundation of success. But instead of finishing college, Guo chose the Thiel Fellowship, a program created by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel that gives $200,000 to young innovators willing to leave school and pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions.

Reflecting on her choice, Guo told CNBC Make It, “It was me making a bet on myself and choosing to optimize for what I thought would be a better future.”

The Power of Networks
Interestingly, Guo acknowledges college still played an important role in her journey. She sees it less as an academic milestone and more as an unmatched networking opportunity. “One to two years in college is incredibly great, because you’re going to make the best friends and meet the smartest people,” she said. She also noted that these peers often become future employees or co-founders, something traditional workplaces rarely offer so openly.

The Thiel Fellowship Circle
Where Guo’s story becomes even more fascinating is in her shared bond with other unicorn founders. The Thiel Fellowship has produced a surprising number of billion-dollar companies, and Guo is in the company of entrepreneurs like Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin, Figma’s Dylan Field, and India’s own Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo Rooms.

This unique fellowship community normalizes building unicorns, Guo said, because it surrounds young founders with peers who dream big. “You have to be a little crazy to believe you can build a unicorn. It’s easier when you’re surrounded by people who already have.”

Guo now runs Passes, a creator monetization platform she launched in 2022. But her journey shows how tightly connected today’s startup ecosystem can be. Oyo’s Agarwal also won the Thiel Fellowship in 2013 before transforming India’s hospitality sector. Field dropped out of Brown after receiving the fellowship in 2012 and went on to build Figma, now valued in the billions. Buterin, who left the University of Waterloo after his own fellowship grant in 2014, co-created Ethereum, one of the most influential blockchain platforms in the world.