The story of the world's youngest female billionaire

Dropping out of school at the age of 19 to pursue her plan to build her own company with her tuition money, Elizabeth Holmes is now the world's youngest self-made female billionaire.

Elizabeth Holmes owns 50% of Theranos. Photo: Getty

"I think many young people have great ideas and broad understanding. However, sometimes they wait for something before they start contributing. What I did was simply start a little earlier," said the 32-year-old billionaire.

In 2003, she founded Theranos, a healthcare technology company, with the idea of ​​creating a device that could test your overall health with just a drop of blood, in a shorter time and at a lower cost than traditional tests. According to Forbes, in 2014, the company's net worth was about $9 billion.

Grow up to be successful

According to the New York Times, Elizabeth grew up in a wealthy and powerful family where failure was never an option. Her father, Christian IV, lived with his mother, a famous model, and his stepfather, a successful businessman, during his growing up years in San Francisco, California, USA.

Holmes has had a distinguished career, holding several senior government positions in Washington and playing a key role in disaster relief and international trade. In an interview, the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire shared that her father’s photographs of trips to far-flung places where people needed help had a big influence on her thinking.

Her father's job influenced the self-made billionaire's dream. Photo: Reuters.

"My father often went to disaster areas to help. So I grew up in a house full of pictures of children in the most difficult places in the world. They always urged me to do something. Gradually, I realized that a company could be a tool to make my dream come true. I started thinking about what I could build to improve people's lives," Elizabeth told CNN.

Noel Anne Daoust, the billionaire's mother, is also very successful in her own career, although she spends a lot of time raising her and her two sisters. She is an American foreign affairs and defense expert.

In the early 1990s, Elizabeth's family moved to Texas, where she attended St. John's School, a private school in Houston. John Allman, the school's principal at the time, described Elizabeth as an optimistic and energetic girl with a warm smile. She also enjoyed learning Chinese.

Elizabeth always thought she would follow her parents' career path, working in government. However, the idea of ​​becoming an entrepreneur increasingly appealed to her.

“I really wanted to start a company that could be a vehicle to make a difference because you can control your own results,” the billionaire shared.

Drop out of school to pursue your dream

Since childhood, Elizabeth wanted to study at Stanford University, a symbol of invention and Silicon Valley.

As a freshman at the school, she camped out outside the office of Channing Robertson, a professor of chemical engineering, because she wanted to join his lab—which was only open to seniors and graduate students. Elizabeth went on to get a job at the Genome Research Institute of Singapore.

Elizabeth Holmes got her first patent when she was just 19. Photo: Jenny Hueston.

In the fall of 2003, she, then 19, returned to Stanford and placed a patent application in front of Professor Robertson.

"I was really surprised. I had never seen anything like it before," the professor said. He said Elizabeth came up with the idea of ​​a new health screening system that could detect drug levels in the blood and produce a series of results.

The professor did not think he was the one who led the girl to success. "This case is like teaching Beethoven to play the piano or teaching science to Einstein," he shared.

At age 19, Elizabeth convinced her parents that her college money would be better spent on starting a company, according to the New York Times. In addition, her parents invested their retirement money in their daughter's company. And so, Theranos began.

Looking for investors

Her college tuition and her parents’ retirement money were a start, but not enough to get Theranos off the ground, at least not in the way Elizabeth imagined. So she started reaching out to venture capital firms. But many of them turned her down.

A former Theranos employee revealed that venture capitalists backed out when Elizabeth failed to demonstrate Theranos' technology. And the self-made billionaire also confirmed that she is a picky person. She wants to cooperate with investors who are patient.

The people who left did not understand Elizabeth's ambition. They could only think that her idea was just a new type of cholesterol or blood sugar test while what this girl wanted was to make a revolution.

Thanks to her family connections, she finally found the right people. Timothy Drape was one of them. He was the Holmes family's neighbor when they lived in California.

“I invested her the first million dollars to start the business. This girl's vision completely convinced me,” Drape said.

Another investor was Don Lucas, a Silicon Valley heavyweight. To get his approval, Elizabeth had to ask for an introduction from a former banker at a top bank who had been a classmate of her father's at Wesleyan University.

Lucas served as chairman of Theranos’ board for a time. He also helped the company convince other investors to come on board. All told, Theranos started with about $400 million and now has a net worth of about $9 billion.

According to zing