James Dacombe: When Taking Big Risks Pays Off (Literally)

James Dacombe was born in 2000 in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England and was a talented coder from a relatively young age, starting to teach himself how to program apps and websites at the age of 13. He attended school up until the age of 17, before deciding that school was not the best path for him and dropping out of high school to focus on developing and building his company, CoMind.

Dacombe then took advantage of the Thiel Fellowship, a competitive 2-year program created by entrepreneur Peter Thiel that gives entrepreneurs $250,000 to skip college and pursue their businesses, and he got accepted into it.

In 2024, Dacombe went on to found London-based Olix, a company that builds AI chips and has been very successful, with a market cap of $3.3 billion as of August 2026. Dacombe still runs and holds a 30% stake in Olix and a 12% stake in CoMind, and as a result in August 2026 his net worth climbed over 1 billion dollars, making him the youngest self-made billionaire in Europe at the age of 25, all as a result of him taking the risk and dropping out to pursue his talents.

Dacombe really took advantage of being young, as he said to the Sunday Times, “An advantage of starting my business so young was naivety. You don’t have the scar tissues from what hasn’t worked, so you just try a lot of things. Fortunately, some of them work.” Dacombe’s success really shows how adaptable entrepreneurs have to be in this new digital age, and for some of them, college is not the best path. To be a successful entrepreneur, you often have to try crazy ideas that no one has thought of yet, and while some may doubt you, you should keep persisting with new ideas even if old ones fail.