So Jobs sold off his Volkswagen bus while fellow cofounder Steve Wozniak got money for his programmable calculator, raising $1,300 to pay for the prototype’s parts. And the first Apple computer, the Apple I, was born on April Fools’ Day, 1976.

The sacrifice paid off: A local computer dealer placed a $50,000 order for 100 units soon after it launched, with the product mainly bought up by hobby enthusiasts. But it made the entrepreneurial duo enough money to create Apple II for the mass market—the first personal computer to include a keyboard and color graphics. A year after its 1977 debut, it made nearly $3 million. 

“I was worth about over $1 million when I was 23, and over $10 million when I was 24, and over $100 million when I was 25,” Jobs told PBS in 1996. “And it wasn’t that important, because I never did it for the money.”

The days of selling their belongings to fund their fledgling business was long behind them.

From college dropout to $10.2 billion net worth: Jobs’ path to Apple success

Jobs didn’t discover his passion for technology in a college class; at age 12, the entrepreneur had already found his true calling, and took a massive leap of faith to pursue his dreams. 

A young Jobs thumbed through the yellow pages, and hunted down the phone number of Hewlett-Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett, ringing him up for a favor. At the time, the tween was in need of spare parts to build a frequency counter. But what he received was far better than some nuts and bolts; Hewlett offered Jobs an internship at the iconic $21.4 billion tech company, where he serendipitously met a talented engineer: Wozniak. 

Together, the pair started their first business, illegally selling “blue boxes” that allowed users to make free, long-distance telephone calls. Jobs reminisced about those years in the early 1970s as a “magical” time in his life that sent him on the path to soon create Apple. 

“Experiences like that taught us the power of ideas,” Jobs said in the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100-Year Renaissance. “If we hadn’t … made blue boxes, there would have been no Apple.”

Jobs later enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Ore., but his days of higher education were short-lived. He dropped out after just one semester, inevitably working for legendary brand Atari as a technician and games designer at just 18 years old. That would be the last time Jobs worked under somebody else; just two years later, Apple I hit the market, and Jobs was well on his way to becoming one of the most visionary tech pioneers in modern history. 

Fast-forward five decades later, and Apple is the second most valuable company in the world. The business sits in fourth place on the Fortune 500, having sold more than 3 billion iPhones, and boasting more than 100 million Mac users globally. 

At the time of his passing in 2011, Jobs was estimated to be worth $10.2 billion. Although he had enough money to buy a whole fleet of luxury cars shortly after founding Apple, selling his Volkswagen proved to be a critical sacrifice in making it to the top.

The startup, Advanced Machine Intelligence (AMI) Labs, aims to create what LeCun calls “world models”: AI systems that understand physics, maintain persistent memory, and plan complex actions rather than simply predicting the next word. The company plans to establish its headquarters in Paris early next year, with LeCun serving as executive chairman. He’s even picked the CEO already: On Thursday, LeCun announced on LinkedIn that he’s selected Alexandre LeBrun, founder of French health-tech startup Nabla, to take on the chief executive role.​

LeCun’s exit from Meta after 12 years—five as founding director of Facebook AI Research and seven as chief AI scientist—had been rumored for weeks before he confirmed it on Nov. 18. His departure coincides with Meta’s strategic pivot toward more powerful LLM-based models under new chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, the twentysomething founder of Scale AI.

While Meta will not invest in AMI Labs, the companies plan to forge a partnership, allowing LeCun to continue his research while maintaining ties to his former employer. ​

The spectacular valuation for a pre-revenue startup has amplified concerns about an AI investment bubble. Industry leaders have warned that excitement around AI may be outpacing business fundamentals, and LeCun’s fundraising could test whether even the most respected names in the field can command premium valuations without proven commercial traction. The startup faces competition from well-funded European rivals like Black Forest Labs, valued at $4 billion, and Quantexa at $2.6 billion.​

LeCun’s skepticism about AI’s current direction has been clear. Earlier this year, during an appearance on Alex Kantrowitz’s Big Technology podcast, he said: “We are not going to get to human-level AI just by scaling LLMs,” arguing they cannot achieve that milestone because they simply predict text rather than truly understand the world. His startup, AMI Labs, on the other hand, aims to develop systems that observe and interact with the physical environment like humans do, potentially revolutionizing robotics, transportation, and health care.​

The French computer scientist, who won the 2018 Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, has long advocated for European AI talent. He convinced Meta to open its FAIR lab in Paris in 2015 and now argues the city offers the right environment for his next-generation research.​

LeCun’s social media post announcing his departure emphasized continuity: “I am creating a startup company to continue the Advanced Machine Intelligence research program (AMI) I have been pursuing over the last several years with colleagues at FAIR, at NYU, and beyond.” He described the goal as bringing about “the next big revolution in AI: systems that understand the physical world, have persistent memory, can reason, and can plan complex action sequences.”

The partnership with Nabla provides immediate applications for AMI’s technology. The health-tech company will gain first access to world model technologies, enabling it to develop FDA-certifiable AI systems for health care. LeBrun’s transition from Nabla CEO to AMI Labs CEO signals deep integration between the two companies, though he will remain chairman and chief AI scientist at Nabla.

Although today he helms the $60 billion video game platform—and has a $5 billion net worth to go with it—when he graduated from Stanford University in 1985, he said his career prospects were anything but clear. 

Like today’s aspiring professionals, it was tempting for him to lean on the advice of mentors, professors, or friends to figure out how to jump-start his career. But Baszucki warns that mindset could leave you worse off. In fact, looking back, he says the best advice he ever received was to actually stop overvaluing what others think.

“A lot of my development has been trying to, over time, ignore advice I’ve been given,” Baszucki recalled to students at his alma mater. Instead, when you’re having a rough time, listen when people say, “Trust your gut.”

Baszucki went from lost window cleaner to billionaire tech leader

Even though Stanford has a reputation as a launchpad for billion-dollar companies—from Snapchat to Databricks—Baszucki hit a wall after graduation. His dream job didn’t materialize, and his résumé was thin: One of his only work experiences was window-cleaning with his brother one summer.

“I can remember in this terrible time right out of college trying to figure out what I was going to do,” Baszucki shared with an audience of Stanford business students.

“Rather than trusting my intuition, I can remember having a spreadsheet of nine potential careers and then all these metrics—‘it’s really good for this, but it’s not so good for this.’

“It was, like, a really weird way to try to figure out your career,” he added.

It was then that Baszucki first learned about the need to trust your own instincts.

After landing a postgrad salaried role, Baszucki spent the next two or three years in what he now calls the “absolute worst jobs in the world” where he faced “massive disappointment.” 

Eventually, he took a step back to listen to his gut—and the reset paid off. Baszucki went on to carve his own path and create Knowledge Revolution, an educational software company that sold for $20 million in 1998. After the sale, he expected to get poached for a CEO job. When he didn’t, he found himself once again adrift and needing to forge his own path.

“Time and time again, you have to participate in making your own reality,” he told Fortune earlier this year.

A few years later, he began building what would become Roblox, now a global gaming platform with over 150 million daily active users. 

Fortune reached out to Roblox for further comment.

The best career advice: Trust your own instincts

During a time when data and data-driven decision-making is all the rage in the workplace, leaning on intuition might sound misguided. However, many executives still lean on their instincts to guide even major business decisions.

“Be able to balance a lot of different people’s opinions, but at the end of the day, you have to have your own conviction deep down and make decisions for yourself,” LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky said when asked to give career advice.

“You have to know what’s right, you have to care about what’s right, to be passionate about what’s right,” Roslansky added. “And if you’re going to put yourself out there and decide to dive into the crowd, it should be because you want to … not because someone else is telling you to do it.”

Skims cofounder and CEO Jens Grede also recently echoed the importance of trusting your gut—as long as you exercise it.

“You can feed [intuition] by being a curious person,” Grede said on his wife Emma’s Aspire podcast. “Your gut is really your collective memory, your collective experience and learnings … Every book you read, every article, every conversation, every wrong or right decision you’ve made, that becomes your gut.”