What is Piotr Szulczewski's Net Worth?
Piotr Szulczewski is a Polish-Canadian businessman and computer engineer. As of this writing, Piotr has a net worth of $2 billion. In 2010, along with Danny Zhang, he co-founded the e-commerce platform Wish. Currently the company's Chairman and CEO, Szulczewski is among the world's youngest billionaires.
Early Life and Career Beginnings at Google
Piotr Szulczewski was born in 1981 in Warsaw, Poland and was raised in the Tarchomin neighborhood. As communism was falling in Poland, he and his parents immigrated to Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, where he studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Waterloo. Shortly before he graduated, Szulczewski relocated to Palo Alto, California to do a four-month coding internship for Google. Subsequently, he became a full-time Google employee, writing the prototype algorithms for keyword expansion. This feature helps customers search for products from advertisers.
Szulczewski relocated again in the summer of 2007, this time to South Korea to work in the new Google offices. There, Szulczewski was trained to adapt to the Korean market, which demanded more detailed search portals than the ones used in the United States and other Western countries.
Wish.com
In 2009, Szulczewski left Google to spend six months at home, where he wrote code for an advertising recommendation platform that analyzed people's browsing behaviors. Shortly after, in 2010, he set up his own software company called ContextLogic. By September, the company received around $1.7 million in investments, including from Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman. In 2011, Szulczewski invited his longtime friend Danny Zhang to join ContextLogic as a co-founder, and to relaunch the company as Wish. The new technology they employed attracted the attention of Facebook, which offered $20 million for the company; however, Szulczewski declined the offer.
Wish was created to give shoppers the ability to make their own wish lists of their favorite products, and then to match them with merchants. In 2013, Wish became an e-commerce platform with merchants, mostly from China, hosting their products directly on the application. Szulczewski's aim with the platform was to cater to low-income households, offering smaller items that are cheaper to ship. By 2016, Wish saw over five million daily visitors. The next year, it became the most downloaded e-commerce application in the United States, and the year after that, was the most downloaded e-commerce application in the world. During this time, the company signed a multi-year partnership with the Los Angeles Lakers of the NBA. Among its features, Wish includes a "Wheel of Fortune"-style game called Blitz Buy, which offers consumers additional discounts on bestselling items.
Personal Life and Wealth
In 2016, Szulczewski was ranked #21 on America's Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40 list. A few years later, he was listed as the 34th wealthiest person from Canada, as well as that country's number-one youngest billionaire. Despite his enormous success, Szulczewski mostly stays away from the spotlight, rarely giving interviews. Because of this, many details about his private life remain unknown to the public.
Real Estate
In August 2019, Piotr paid $15 million for a home in Bel Air.
