It is hard to believe that a calm and gentle young man, as he has been seen in at least a couple of interviews, could have made big businessmen in Silicon Valley tremble, as did Alexandr Wang, who at 21 years old was named by Forbes magazine as one of the youngest new billionaires in the world.
Of Chinese origin, with scientist parents and academic siblings, he spent his childhood at the New Mexico Military Base, the same base where the first atomic bomb was dropped.
Unlike other entrepreneurs, Wang started from scratch and managed to get into one of the most prestigious universities in the technological field in the entire United States.
In 2016, surrounded by a scientific environment due to his own family background and shortly after saying goodbye to his teenage years, Alexandr, then 19 years old, created in his bedroom at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) one of the most recent and, presumably, the last of the "unicorn" start-ups, a company whose value reaches more than one billion dollars without presence on the stock exchange.
Scale Al, the company created by Alexandr Wang and which is on par with the achievements developed by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, is dedicated to mass data labeling that, with the help of artificial intelligence, enables companies to obtain enlightening answers when making decisions.
Simply put, company-generated material such as audio transcripts, images, documents, and more is collected by Scale AI software, translating that data into insightful answers for corporations across all industries.
That's why the company of Silicon Valley's youngest rebel, whose headquarters are in California, helps around 300 clients, including General Motors, Uber, PayPal, Airbnb, Toyota and even the US Army.
Although the young businessman rubs shoulders with the most powerful businessmen, the family teachings that he boasts about in interviews such as the one carried out by Index Ventures, are the typical greetings that a son receives from his kind father.
And Wang, as a chess fanatic, learned from his father from a very young age the toughness and mental strength that this game implies in order to apply it in all life scenarios, including that of artificial intelligence (AI).
The original idea for Scale AI, says Alexandr Wang, “came because with artificial intelligence you can do absolutely everything, including collecting the data that companies generate.”
Such a revelation, as atomic as his origins, led him to decide to give up his studies during his first year at MIT in Massachusetts, where he curiously tested his ideas by trying to discover which of his roommates stole his food, as well as calculating how often he should go shopping.
Among his first experiments, Wang placed a small camera inside the refrigerator, which generated a huge number of images that gave rise to his commitment to the development of artificial intelligence as well as the creation of a company that could catalogue all the stored material.
That same summer, while Wang was trying to figure out which of his roommates was stealing his food, he founded Scale AI.
The development of the Scale AI company took off thanks to “Y Combinator”, the company that powered Dropbox, Twitch and Airbnb, investing in the project of the young man with aspirations of being a detective, making him one of the richest people under 30 in the world, since it is estimated that he owns 15 percent of Scale, valued by investors at 7.3 billion dollars in 2021.
In addition to owning one of the most coveted sites by Silicon Valley and world entrepreneurs, Alexander Wang, who shares a name with one of the most emblematic clothing designers of the millennial generation, takes the time to have a personal blog where he shares his learnings about building companies with a first-person message “Things I've learned building a company” – Things I learned building a company” for which it is necessary to subscribe.
As if that were not enough, the young entrepreneur feeds his social networks with images of his travels around the world, as he does on Instagram (@alexanddeer) and on Twitter (@alexandr_wang), where he has 22.4 million followers and shares his most recent successes.
With information from El País, Forbes and Fortune.
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