They say he could be the next Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, which might not be so far-fetched considering the meteoric growth of the company he founded before he could legally drink. Silicon Valley’s latest prodigy, Alexandr Wang, is just 25 years old and has a net worth of over $1 billion. The young man’s photo has already been splashed all over magazines about the rich and famous, but his success is due to a bold entrepreneurial vision, not a hyphenated last name, a show business celebrity or to a huge legacy.
The son of Chinese immigrants grew up on the New Mexico military base where the first atomic bomb was developed. The young entrepreneur convinced some of the world’s largest companies to entrust the future of their artificial intelligence systems to the pioneering data labeling system he invented during summer vacation. In a recent interview with Forbes, Wang said, “I told my parents that it would just be a thing I would do for the summer. Of course, I never went back to school. Forbes recently proclaimed Wang the new youngest self-made billionaire in the world, the same honor he bestowed on Kylie Jenner in 2019. Forbes later recanted after accusing Jenner of lying.
Alexandr Wang — not to be confused with the fashion designer of the same name — is the co-founder and CEO of Scale Al, the startup he started in 2016 when he was just 19. The San Francisco-based company’s breakthroughs in massive data tagging to optimize artificial intelligence systems have caught the attention of dozens of companies seeking to improve their automated processes for audio transcription, image recognition and document collection. While data has typically been used in charts and tables to support decision-making, the software Wang developed can turn a bunch of numbers into valuable insights for businesses in all industries.
Scale AI is the newest Silicon Valley Unicorn– companies that reach a billion-dollar valuation before going public. Well-known companies like Uber, Airbnb, Toyota, PayPal, and General Motors are among Wang’s impressive corporate clientele, and the U.S. military uses Scale AI’s software to quantify Russian bombing damage in Ukraine , among others. The company has signed military contracts worth $350 million and its board includes former Amazon executives and Michael Kratsios, the United States’ chief technology officer under former President Trump.
The idea for Scale Al came to Wang during his brief student stay at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), recognized as one of the best universities in the world. Wang was convinced that one of his housemates was stealing his food, so he decided to install a camera inside the fridge to catch the suspected thief and collect information to help him predict when he needed to do his shopping. races. Wang was never able to confirm his suspicions because it was impossible to distinguish between all the hours of video, but the experiment sowed the seed that gave birth to the Scale AI software that now enables organizations to unleash the full potential of their stored data. That same summer, he founded Scale AI and secured funding from Y Combinator, the tech startup accelerator that has helped launch other startups like Dropbox, Twitch, and Airbnb. A few years later, Wang is on every list of the world’s richest people under 30.
As a child, Wang already showed a talent for numbers by participating in math Olympiads and programming competitions all over the United States. His parents worked as physicists on US military projects, and Wang grew up near Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the secret government facility where the first nuclear weapon was created. “Because of the type of work they did, my parents had a big impact on our family’s worldview. That’s why I decided to become a programmer — I wanted to make a difference in this world,” Wang said at a recent TED talk. With nothing on his resume and no work experience, he packed his bags at 17 and headed to Silicon Valley, where he got a job as a programmer on the Q&A site Quora. There he met Lucy Guo, who later co-founded Scale AI with Wang. Besides her tech credentials, Guo is a well-known socialite and neighbor to celebrities like David Beckham, and has been dubbed “Miami’s number one party girl” by the New York Post.
Although not a party animal like his co-founder, Wang actively uses social media to promote his public image. Like most young men, he takes to Twitter to share his views on the news. Spider Man film with his 20,000 subscribers, and has a blog in which he writes about the secrets of his success and offers advice to future entrepreneurs. Some of his blog posts say that an optimistic attitude is fundamental to achieving goals, and the easiest formula for success is to hire employees who care about the business and its goals. It seems to have worked for Wang: Scale Al raised $325 million in its last funding round, and is currently valued at over $7 billion.
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