How a 23-Year-Old Built Three Startups and Two Degrees by Age 23

With energy and a radiant smile, Mona Ghazi steps into Zurich's Monocle Café, nestled between the lakeside promenade and her current apartment. The café, owned by a lifestyle magazine, embodies the spirit of New Work—a perfect fit for its young visitor. Behind the counter, English-speaking baristas craft oat-milk cappuccinos and matcha teas, while shelves display accessories for the modern digital nomad: sleek notebooks, leather luggage tags, and stylish laptop backpacks.

Ghazi orders a homemade iced tea, and we settle into a quiet corner of an adjacent room that doubles as a podcast studio. The 23-year-old entrepreneur explains why she deliberately chose Zurich as her home base: "I wanted to live in a city by the water, go for morning runs in nature, and have strong international connections." Though she considered Lisbon, Singapore, and New York, she ultimately decided that her "personal brand"—the Mona Ghazi name—was already well established in the German-speaking world.

At just 23, Ghazi has accomplished more than many do by 50: she holds two bachelor's degrees, has founded three companies, and is working on her PhD—all while amassing 24,000 followers on LinkedIn. Mona Ghazi, the high achiever—that's one side of her story. The other is marked by a fear of failure and the unconventional ways she's learned to overcome it.

At 16, she launched her first startup—it failed

Ghazi speaks with disarming honesty: "The fear of not being good enough followed me for years." Even in school, an inner voice drove her relentlessly forward. At 14, she began studying economics alongside her regular classes; later, she added computer science. By 16, she had founded her first startup—only to watch the idea collapse. Undeterred, she tried again, this time creating an e-learning platform for industrial workers, which she sold to an international logistics corporation three years later.