[imagesource: David Paul / Bloomberg]

We introduced him briefly when we were meeting the world’s five youngest billionaires.

He’s on that list for being a young billionaire at the top, but he takes the cake for being self-made, too.

We are talking about Austin Russell, a very rich 26-year old, who is the CEO of Luminar Technologies.

Like many billionaires before him, who have excelled without getting a formal degree, Russell is also a skilled dropout.

He stepped away from his studies at Stanford in 2012 and instead worked with his $100 000 (around R1,4 million) fellowship from Peter Thiel (a big tech investor) to build the company that has made him the current youngest self-made billionaire.

His passion project is all about a laser lidar (an acronym for light, detection, and ranging), which, as per Forbes, uses sensors that now help self-driving cars see in 3D by bouncing laser beams off nearby objects and vehicles’ surroundings.

That sounds hella complicated.

Let’s meet him and see if he can explain further:

We like to nitpick the ways of the most successful business people in the hopes that we might learn a thing or two, and do something just as impressive ourselves.

Forbes is great at helping us with this.

They also have a full series of interview videos with Russell answering more business questions like “What do you like most about building a business?”, “What word of advice do you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?”, and “How do you build a ‘disruptive business’?”, which you can watch here.

Although, we have to remember not to let survivorship bias get in the way of our own success; the people who fail can also teach us a lot about making it in the world.

At least, that’s what I tell myself.

[source:forbes]