Meet Alex Rodrigues, Young Man Who Dropped Out Of School to Build Robotic Company Worth $4 billion

A brilliant student identified as Alex Rodrigues from the University Of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada dropped out of the University at age of 20 to focus in building his business which he started as a joke but now has become the CEO of a multi-billion company.

The young man, who is now one of the youngest CEOs in the world, started building robots at a very young age, his first working robot which he built in his seventh grade while still a junior high school student in Calgary, Alberta was achieved at the age of 11.

According to him,  In 2009, he won a world robotics championship by assembling the 3-foot-tall robot and programming it to complete a very Canadian task: “Put hockey pucks into a bin in the middle of a field.”

Few years after, Alex Rodrigues, 26, and two of his friends – Brandon Moak and Michael Skupien established Embark Trucks, a company focused on building self-driving trucks to make the freight industry safer, more sustainable, and more efficient using the knowledge of robotics.

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As university students in Ontario, Canada, Rodrigues and his two friends, started by building a self-driving golf cart in his parents’ garage in Calgary.

CNBC reported that Rodrigues described it then to be an outlandish idea and that he joked that their futures could lie at Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley tech incubator. The group of friends all laughed, Rodrigues recalls.

However, after building the robot successfully, they could not immediately know if their business idea for self-driving vehicles would work out and had to make a tough decision of either staying in university or dropping out to start a company from its scratch. Now the company worth $4 billion.

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