Apple’s Youngest Employee Dropped Out of Harvard. Now His Startup Has Powered $1.6 Billion in Trades
Steven Wang’s dub is a social investing app that mirrors the portfolios of experienced investors.
Steven Wang. Photo: Courtesy dub
Steven Wang sold origami in first grade. He ran a sneaker resale business in middle school. At 16, he dropped out of high school to build a virtual reality startup, raising venture capital and hiring employees before he could legally sign a lease. By 18, he’d sold that company and landed a job at Apple, drawn by a childhood obsession with Steve Jobs and a chance to see how the world’s most valuable consumer company built products “at civilization scale.”
Then he quit.
“Working at Apple also showed me that I didn’t like executing on other people’s ideas,” Wang says. “I wanted to create my own.”
So he enrolled at Harvard. Eight months later, he dropped out of that too.
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Today, at 25, Wang is the founder
Today, at 25, Wang is the founder and CEO of dub, a social investing app that lets everyday users automatically mirror the portfolios of experienced investors and advisers. Five years after he left his dorm room to build it full time, dub has been downloaded nearly 2 million times, raised $47 million in venture funding, and processed more than $1.6 billion in lifetime trades.
The idea traces back to his childhood. Wang’s parents opened a custodial brokerage account for him in second grade, and he’d been fixated on investing ever since. His Harvard freshman year happened to coincide with the Robinhood-and-meme-stock frenzy that pulled millions of first-time investors into the market almost overnight.
“I saw how excited people were by this newfound accessibility,” Wang says. “But I also saw the flip side and how easy it was for new investors to make poor decisions based on bad advice or hype.”
Source: www.inc.com
