Fei-Fei Li, the 'Godmother of AI' whose startup is now valued at north of $1 billion, got her start as a dry cleaner

""We were not financially very well off at all. My parents were doing cashier jobs and I was doing Chinese restaurant jobs," she told Bloomberg in a Q&A. "My family and I decided to run a little dry cleaner shop to make some money to survive. Li said she likes to joke that she was the "CEO." She ran the shop for seven years, from when she was 18 until the middle of her graduate studies."

""I was the one who spoke English. So I took all the customer phone calls, I dealt with the billing, the inspections, all the business," she said. The experience, she said, taught her the value of resilience - a principle that continues to guide her career. "As a scientist, you have to be resilient because science is a non-linear journey. Nobody has all the solutions."

Fei-Fei Li immigrated to the United States from China at age 15 and helped her parents run a dry-cleaning shop in Parsippany, New Jersey to make ends meet. She worked in the shop for seven years, handling customer calls, billing, and inspections while attending Princeton and later pursuing a Ph.D. at Caltech. That early responsibility taught resilience and shaped her approach to science, which she describes as a non-linear journey requiring persistence. Li later became a Stanford professor known for ImageNet and founded World Labs, a year-old AI startup valued at over $1 billion focused on building world models.

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