Passionate, decisive, and gritty. These are the three words Steven Wang ’24, CEO and co-founder of investment startup Dub, uses to describe himself.
“You have to have a vicious belief, to know what you’re doing to drop out. It’s dedicating your life to
what I’m doing right now. My life is essentially my company. To be a leader and to be CEO, you make a lot of hard calls and often don’t have much time or context,” Wang noted, in reference to his company, Dub. “You just need to be good at something to fail, and sometimes you just don’t have time to waste.”
Building a company brings “a lot of emotional hurdles and tackles and just pain every single day,” he said. “The desire and end goal is to win. You have to be ready to get there.”
The 20-year-old entrepreneur is no stranger to dropping out. In 2017, he forwent his sophomore year of high school to pursue a virtual reality education startup, Realism. After raising money from investors and receiving a grant from MIT, he and his co-founder spent two years in Cambridge working on the company, ultimately selling it and returning back to high school.
Wang decided to attend Harvard because he “didn’t like working for other people… it’s pretty cool to see that there are actually so many lowkey Harvard alums,” he said. “There are brilliant startup CEOs, founders, or venture capitalists. Talking about the application process, and after getting in, deciding where to go, that really sold me.”
In his second semester of his first year at Harvard, Wang was tasked with working on a company for a class project. After securing high-profile investors, raising money, and crystallizing what he
started, Wang became excited about this new venture, naming it “Dub.” That’s when he decided Harvard wasn’t for him. Dub allows people to take agency in their own investments, as well as to copy those who are skilled in investing. Its purpose is to “transform how individuals think about investing,” keeping up with the changes within the world of investing, especially now as this current
generation looks to “invest in the future,” Wang explained.
“Two weeks before finals, I was like ‘screw finals.’ I want to work on this. I don’t want to write my Expos 20-page finals paper. So, off we go. I left, moved to New York, and started working. It’s been for the past year and 3-4 months… I knew what I could do the first time around. And there were just too many incredible opportunities to give up.”
Steven Wang was only at Harvard for 8 months.
His story begins in Detroit, where his parents immigrated from China. In the second grade, his mother sent him to an investing summer camp. “That led me to be a hustler growing up. I was
always selling something, whether it’s cookies or Pokemon cards during recess. I always had a little bit of free cash and I grew up investing a lot whenever I had time.”
Wang has always known he wanted to succeed, and what success meant to him. “I view success with two lenses. I like to live every day like my last… I’m personally very interested in existentialism and one of the teachings in that philosophy is that you should live everyday like it’s your last and you never know what could happen tomorrow,” he explained. “In the lens of what would you do today, if it’s actually your last and to be successful is to be able to do that every day.”
“The second part of that definition is given a longer-term impact for me when success to me is within the lens of my company, is really improving economic outcomes for people globally,” Wang continued. “If I can say someone has built generational wealth because of using Dub, that’s something I get very excited about. So two lenses: one is a personal lens of success and one is based on what I’m doing, my work, and my company.”
After moving to Texas in 2008, Wang and his family came back to Detroit, where he spent his middle and high school years. After his high school hiatus, he moved to the Bay Area and worked for Apple for half a year, doing co-op as a product manager for Apple Watch. Inspired by Steve Jobs and his philosophy, Steven Wang ultimately realized that he, like Jobs, did not enjoy working for other people.
Arriving at Harvard peak-pandemic in the fall of 2020, Wang articulated his desire to follow the footsteps of successful Harvard graduates and described Harvard as a place where “some of the most brilliant minds have just done it.” Although online classes transformed Wang’s vision of “hallowed halls” into an experience he found both unfamiliar and uninviting, he speaks highly of the friends he made during his first year. “The people were just some of the hands-down smartest and most brilliant individuals that I’ve met in my career.”
Yet he decided that he didn’t need a Harvard diploma to have a successful career. “You go to college and figure out what you want to do. And you build that network through that. I already knew what I wanted to do, and I have a good network of folks,” Wang noted. “There’s nothing else that brings me more joy than to work on my company.”
Wang recognizes the great benefit and utility he derived from his time at Harvard. He recalled reaching out to the connections he made at school, some of whom later invested in Dub. “I think we’re very lucky to get some Harvard grads that really believed in what I was doing,” he stated. “There’s an incredible network of folks and that really paid off in the realest way, as they invest in what we’re doing.”
In addition to securing investments from Harvard alums, Wang has seen investments from venture capital firms like Sequoia to the founders of Uber and Airbnb. “We’re building a social investing marketplace so you can copy anyone else’s investments,” Wang explained. “It’s a really simple, easy way for you to essentially follow someone else that you believe in. No longer are you investing in yourself where 90% of investors underperform the markets. You’re investing in someone else that knows how to invest the best ideas that you really care about.”
Wang hopes Dub can have a “lasting tangible impact” on the field of investing, and help bridge the gap between prospective, newer investors and high-profile companies. “I hope that one day, generations later, there will be people that are using products made by my company. And we have seriously changed and altered the course of humanity through it.”
Wang believes that if anything, he would only return to the Harvard community in a decade or two to pursue something he is truly curious about. “Even if this company might, in the worst case, fall through, I probably wouldn’t go back. I would just start something new.” He is not yet finished with the Harvard community, and claims he is “very keen” on hiring Harvard students soon.
Arguing that Dub’s timely opportunities trumped any factors keeping him at school, Wang insists he made the right choice in dropping out of Harvard. “There’s like a wave that’s coming at you. You only have one chance to get on it. And I’d much rather do that and do my life’s mission, my life’s work, than anything else,” he said.
Steven Wang’s overall philosophy goes back to his objective to live everyday like it’s his last, as well as the three characteristics he so used to describe himself: passionate, decisive, and gritty. He champions the value of failing every day until he succeeds.
“Never get complacent because you’re always failing until you really do what you set out to do,” he stated. “That keeps me hungry. That keeps me motivated. It gets me up early in the morning. I got a lot of work left to do and I can never afford to lose sight of my mission. I’m a failure until proven not.”
Layla Chaaraoui ’26 (laylachaaraoui@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Independent.