It may be hard to believe that Austin Russell, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, has anything in common with others his age — but he insists that he does.
Russell, 28, has an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion, due to the performance of his Orlando, Florida-based tech startup Luminar Technologies, which currently has a market cap of $2.4 billion. The company, which Russell founded 11 years ago as a teenager, develops hardware and software meant to power self-driving cars.
Very few teenagers — or people in their 20s or 30s, for that matter — can launch and sustain that type of business. A Thiel Fellowship helped, giving Russell $100,000 to drop out of Stanford University and grow his company full-time.
But rather than focusing on technological expertise or business acumen, Russell credits his journey so far to two traits common among younger generations: energy and passion.
“People in their 20s have a lot of great energy,” Russell tells CNBC Make It. “They put a lot of passion [into] things and I’m certainly no exception to that. I probably take it to the extreme, and that’s very meaningful.”
A 2020 SAP survey of 10,000 people found that millennials are more passionate than 𝑏𝑎𝑏𝑦 boomers and Gen Xers. The only group ahead of them, currently, is Gen Z — which will likely get surpassed as the next generation comes along.
“I was like 16, 17 years old where I said … ‘I have this vision of creating a new type of laser system that will allow cars to be able to drive themselves. And we’re going to beat out the Googles of this world, and all the major automakers, at their development efforts they’re going to put into this,’” Russell told Forbes in 2021, recalling the pitch he gave investors as a teenager.
Today, Luminar has hundreds of employees. Your car may soon include its technology, if you drive a Mercedes-Benz or Volvo. Building such a company takes more than just passion and energy, Russell admits.
“I guess, I did memorize the periodic table — I think I was around 2 or so,” he told CNBC Make It in 2018. “I was just obsessed with learning certain things … just independently learning and understanding a lot of new types of scientific fields.”
But Russell might not have honed his technical and business s𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁s — from coding to marketing — without harnessing that drive at a young age. He hopes to keep his momentum going as long as he can, he says — even as he ages, and his energy and passion potentially fade.
“I think a lot of people in their 20s and 30s have a more open mind to the world,” he says. “And then it just feels like, over time, that just gets closed off, or people get ingrained in certain ways of doing things. A lot of times, you just have to approach problems from a fresh perspective.”
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