Adam Guild, 21
Co-founder and CEO, Owner.com
Location: Palo Alto
Education: Dropped out of high school in tenth grade, later completed independent courses online through Harvard Business School and MIT.
Resume: Forbes 30 under 30 (Class of 2020), Thiel Fellow Class of 2020, first LLC established at age 13
Fun fact: Adam’s younger brother, Topper Guild (19), has more than 25.3 million followers on TikTok.
For Owner.com co-founder and CEO Adam Guild, a pet project he started at 12 years old — building an online community in the PC game Minecraft — ultimately became a crash course in growth marketing, coding, entrepreneurship and the betting-on-yourself confidence to launch multiple businesses by his 21st birthday.
It didn’t appear that way at first, when he dropped out of school in tenth grade to put more time into growing the server that would eventually reach some 7 million players (his parents were “super f—ing pissed about it, to be fair,” according to Guild). But it's hard to argue with results. After growing a lucrative side hustle via players’ purchases of in-game currency, the then-17-year-old channeled his experience in community building into online marketing for his mom’s new dog care grooming business in West Hollywood.
Through a number of iterations, Guild eventually developed — with the help of friend and eventual co-founder Dean Bloembergen — a suite of tools for small businesses to turn website visits into conversions and manage food delivery orders, but at a lower cost and allowing clients better autonomy over their own data than services like UberEats, DoorDash and GrubHub. In a remarkable twist last year, an interviewer for the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship recognized Guild’s old Minecraft username.
“We knew each other by our server and in-game names. We hated each other because we were always having to compete for players,” Guild said. “At the end of our conversation, he said, ’I want to give you $100,000 of my own money to help you figure this out, and help you raise the rest.’”
Within 72 hours, Guild informally secured $3.6 million in commitments from Redpoint Ventures and other backers, ultimately leading to a $10.7 million seed round led by the SaaStr Fund and contributions from Redpoint Ventures, Day One Ventures, The Chainsmokers, the host of MSNBC’s “The Profit,” and some of Guild’s own clients who believe in a big future for the freemium platform.
