After building a successful company, many tech founders prefer to enjoy their success outside of the public eye, while others quickly return to the industry to pursue the next big thing.
But Lucy Guo, the 29-year-old co-founder of data-labelling startup Scale AI, blurs the lines between the two archetypes.
A self-described “adrenaline junkie,” she’s not afraid of the spotlight. She’s active on social media, where she’s cultivated a bold persona, partying with the likes of Billie Eilish and Charli XCX, dancing late into the night at music festivals, and skydiving to unwind. Guo has even hosted a festival called Lucypalooza to celebrate her birthday and made a name for herself by throwing a wild party with lemurs and snakes at her luxury Miami condo.
But that’s the persona many have come to know Guo as since she left ScaleAI in 2018. Aside from the glamorous social life of a young, successful entrepreneur, she’s still building. Since ScaleAI, Guo has founded venture firm Backend Capital, startup incubator HF0, and most recently Passes, a membership platform focused on creators, which raised $40 million in Series A funding in February.
“People think I party a lot,” Guo said. “I definitely want to change that.”
In between her social media posts about partying and luxury cars, you’ll also find glimpses of her other passions: training classes at Barry’s Bootcamp and long hours at the office.
Guo’s daily routine is more CEO-like than club kid: She’s an avid advocate of waking up at 5:30 a.m. and doing back-to-back morning workouts, which she says allow her to work longer hours in the office — and once there, she often stays until late into the night.
“People only see one side of your life,” Guo said of her social media presence. “I don’t post pictures of myself at the office until late at night because that’s a boring story.”
“I need to make money.”
Initially, tech was Guo’s way to make a lot of money. She grew up in Fremont, California, just east of San Francisco. Her parents, who immigrated from China, made a modest living as electrical engineers but were laid off when she was a child. As a result, she says, they lived an extremely frugal life.
“I was bullied at school because I was poor,” she said, “so I felt I had to earn money.”
That prompted Guo to learn to code, which is what she did most during this time: “I basically spent all my time at home alone in front of the computer,” she recalls.
One of her early successes was the virtual pet game Neopets, where she learned how to use bots to gain an advantage in the game (like earning NeoPoints), and then sold leveled-up accounts for thousands of dollars.
From that initial success, Guo continued to hone her skills. “I remember going to Fry’s Electronics and reading books all day on how to do HTML and CSS.” As her skills improved, so did her income. Guo developed bots, including an early Twitter bot, built digital marketing websites, and was earning a five-figure income by the time she graduated from high school.
Guo studied computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, and continued coding and participating in hackathons on the side.
Soon, her desire to create something outweighed her desire to graduate, and with only a few courses left to complete her double-major degree, Guo decided to drop out in 2014. But she had a good reason: She had won a Thiel Fellowship, which pays $100,000 to young entrepreneurs who drop out of school to start their own companies.
During her fellowship, Guo developed a home-cooked delivery app that ultimately failed due to food safety concerns. However, the experience gave her a strong technical foundation and led her to become a full-time product designer at Quora, a Q&A discussion platform founded by ex-Facebook founder Adam D’Angelo. She later became Snap’s first female product designer.
From hacker to founder
After her stints at Quora and Snap, Guo was once again inspired to start a company, so she teamed up with Alexandr Wang, who she met at Quora. “Alex and I had been talking about starting a company for a long time,” Guo said.
Guo and Wang tried out different ideas. Their first was a subscription service for local clubs, which Guo called ClassPass for Clubs. Their second was a platform to find the best doctor for your specific needs, inspired by Guo’s own experience after breaking his jaw in an electric skateboard accident. With that idea, the two applied to startup accelerator Y Combinator’s summer 2016 batch. But midway through the program, the two pivoted again, this time landing on the company that would eventually become Scale AI.
Lucy Guo, CEO of Passes and co-founder of Scale AI; Lucy Guo
The idea for Scale AI came about when one of his YC roommates suggested building an “API for humans.” “When he said it, I thought that was super controversial,” Guo says. “It was a great idea.”
Guo and Wang then developed products to connect customers and contractors to do manual, time-consuming tasks, initially focusing on phone outsourcing but soon narrowing their focus to data labeling and quality control for self-driving cars, then an emerging field.
“Cruise became one of our first customers,” Guo said. “There’s a lot of money going into self-driving cars.” Since then, Scale AI has grown rapidly to become a dominant player in the data labeling industry. The company has raised $1.6 billion in total funding and was recently valued at $13.8 billion, according to PitchBook.
Guo left the startup in 2018.
“The desire to build”
After Scale AI, Guo decided to apply what he learned to a new entrepreneurial opportunity: investing. Accel, one of Scale AI’s investors, provided Guo with scout funding to invest in startups. With his initial success, Guo founded his own venture fund, Backend Capital, and has since invested in hundreds of early-stage startups.
Backend Capital raised $8 million in its first fund, followed by $40 million in a second fund. Her notable investments include expense management platform Ramp and compensation benchmarking tool Pave.
In addition to his own venture fund, Guo co-founded startup incubator HF0 with Dave Fontenot in 2019 and still runs the program. During the three-month program, founders live together in a large mansion in San Francisco and focus on building their startup. In exchange for 5% equity and an uncapped investment of $1 million, HF0 takes care of “everything the founders spend their time on,” including meals, laundry, and fitness classes.
“Living with founders made me want to start a company,” Guo said. “I thought living with founders and growing a company and helping other companies would be fulfilling for me, but I just thought, hmmm.”
Feeling a desire to create her own work again, Guo came up with a new idea: Passes, a creator-focused monetization platform she founded in 2022.
“Creators are entrepreneurs,” Guo said, citing Kylie Jenner’s lipstick and Jake Paul’s men’s personal care brand as examples. Guo believes creators are key to marketing their products and should have more control over their audience. “If you have 1,000 raving fans who are willing to spend $5 a day, that’s income.”
Guo’s vision for Passes quickly attracted attention. Within a week of starting fundraising, Guo, the CEO and sole founder, raised a $9 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital. “We literally had no name, no website, no documentation,” she says. “It was pretty crazy. We were fundraising by text message.” In February, Passes raised $40 million in a Series A round led by Bond Capital.
Path Office Space Lucy Guo
Pass helps creators monetize their audiences through a variety of channels, including subscriptions, livestreaming, pay-by-the-minute one-to-one calls, paid messaging and e-commerce stores. “It really allows people to have their own fanbase,” Guo said, explaining that a creator making $7,000 on Instagram could make $350,000 to $450,000 a month by using Pass.
Creators on the platform span a variety of disciplines, from sports and chess to music. Through Pass, creators can keep up to 90% of their revenue, while the platform takes a 10% commission and 30 cents per transaction. The company is already doing eight figures in annual net revenue, Guo said.
Passes’ product roadmap is extensive. Guo hopes to use her AI expertise to introduce features such as AI-driven pricing, which measures the value of content and how much fans are willing to pay. She also plans to introduce a donations feature that will allow creators to donate a portion of their revenue from Passes to nonprofits. Her long-term vision is for Passes to help “creators become entrepreneurs and start building generational wealth.”
“All my creative friends are always asking me, ‘How do I start my own brand?'” she says.
With his own experience building brands, Guo is happy to help.