Lucy Guo
Many tech founders prefer to enjoy their success out of the public eye after building a successful company. Others dive straight back in to pursue the next big thing.
But Lucy Guo, the 29-year-old cofounder of data labeling startup Scale AI blurs the line between the two archetypes.
A self-professed "adrenaline junkie," she doesn't shy away from attention. She's active on social media, where she cultivates her in-your-face persona, partying with the likes of Billie Eilish and Charlie XCX, dancing into the night at music festivals, and skydiving to unwind. Guo has even hosted an entire festival called Lucypalooza to celebrate her birthday and has become notorious for a wild party she threw featuring a lemur and snake at her luxury Miami condo.
Yet this is the persona many have come to know since Guo left Scale AI in 2018. Aside from the high-flying social life of a young, successful entrepreneur, she's still building. Since Scale AI, Guo has founded a venture firm, Backend Capital, a startup incubator HF0, and most recently, a creator-focused membership platform, Passes, which raised a $40 million Series A in February.
"People think I party a lot," Guo said. "I definitely want to change that narrative."
Interspersed with social media posts about parties and fast cars are glimpses of her other passions: workout classes at Barry's Bootcamp and pulling long hours in the office.
Guo's daily routine is more CEO than club kid. She wakes at 5:30 a.m. and is a passionate advocate for back-to-back workouts in the morning, which she says gives her more time to work long hours at the office. And once she's there, she often stays until midnight.
"People see one side of your life," Guo said, referring to her social media presence. "I am not posting me being in the office until midnight because that's a boring story."
'I need to make money'
At first, tech was a way for Guo to make a lot of money. She grew up in Fremont, California, a city just east of San Francisco. Her parents, who immigrated from China, made a modest living as electrical engineers but were laid off early in Guo's life. As a result, they were extremely frugal, Guo said.
"I was bullied in school for being poor," she said. "So I was like, okay, I need to make money."
That drove Guo to learn how to code. And during this time in her life, it's pretty much all she did. "I basically spent all my time on the computer at home alone," Guo recalled.
One of her early successful ventures came through the virtual pet game Neopets, where she learned how to leverage bots to gain advantages in the game, like earning more Neopoints. She then would sell the leveled-up accounts for thousands of dollars.
From that initial success, Guo continued to sharpen her skills. "I remember I would go to Fry's Electronics and just sit and read books there all day on how to do HTML and CSS." As she improved, her earnings grew. Guo developed bots, including an early Twitter bot, and built digital marketing websites, eventually earning five figures by the end of high school.
Guo went on to study computer science and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, where she continued coding on the side and participated in hackathons.
Soon that itch to build outpaced the desire to finish college, and with just a few courses left to complete her double major degree, Guo decided to drop out in 2014. But she had a good reason. She got a Thiel Fellowship, which pays young entrepreneurs $100,000 to drop out of school and start a company.
During the fellowship, Guo created a food delivery app for home-cooked food, which ultimately failed due to food safety issues. However, the experience provided her with a strong tech foundation, and she became a full-time product designer at Quora, the Q&A discussion platform founded by Facebook alum Adam D'Angelo. She later became the first woman product designer at Snap.
From hacker to founder
After her time at Quora and Snap, Guo had the itch to build again. She paired up with Alexandr Wang, who she had met at Quora. "Alex and I had always talked about building a company," Guo said.
Guo and Wang experimented with various ideas. The first, which Guo dubbed ClassPass for clubbing, was a subscription service for local clubs. The next idea was a platform to find the best doctor for specific needs, inspired by Guo's own experience after breaking her jaw in an electric skateboard accident. With that idea, they applied to the startup accelerator Y Combinator for the summer 2016 batch. But, midway through the program, they pivoted again, this time to what would eventually become Scale AI.
Lucy Guo
The idea of Scale AI came from a suggestion by one of their YC roommates, who proposed creating an "API for humans." "When he said that, I was like, that is so controversial," Guo said. "That's a brilliant idea."
Guo and Wang then developed a product to connect customers with contractors to do manual and time-consuming tasks. They initially focused on outsourced phone calls but quickly narrowed their focus to data labeling and quality control for autonomous vehicles, an emerging sector at the time.
"Cruise became one of our first customers," Guo said. "There's a lot of money in self-driving cars." Since then, Scale AI has quickly grown, becoming a dominant force in the data labeling industry. It raised $1.6 billion in total funding, according to PitchBook, and was recently valued at $13.8 billion.
Guo left the startup in 2018.
"The itch to build"
After Scale AI, Guo decided to apply her learnings to a new entrepreneurial opportunity: investing. Accel, one of Scale AI's investors, provided Guo with scout money to invest in startups. Her initial success led her to establish her own venture fund, Backend Capital, which has since invested in hundreds of early-stage startups.
Backend Capital raised $8 million for its first fund, followed by a $40 million second fund. Some of her notable investments include the expense management platform Ramp, and the compensation benchmarking tool Pave.
In addition to her venture fund, Guo cofounded the startup incubator HF0 in 2019 with Dave Fontenot, who continues to run the program. For the three-month program, founders live together in a large San Francisco mansion, focusing entirely on building their startups. In exchange for 5% equity and a $1 million uncapped investment, HF0 takes care of "everything that a founder spends time on," including food, laundry, and fitness classes.
"By living with all these founders, I started getting the itch to build a company," Guo said. "I thought that living with founders and essentially incubating companies or helping other companies would fulfill me, but I was just like, ugh."
This growing desire to create something of her own again led Guo to a new idea: Passes, a creator-focused monetization platform that she founded in 2022.
"Creators are entrepreneurs," Guo said, citing examples like Kylie Jenner's lipsticks and Jake Paul's men's personal care brand. She believes that creators are key to marketing their products and should have better control over their audiences. "If you have a thousand superfans that are willing to spend $5 a day on you, that's an income."
Guo's vision for Passes quickly gained traction. Guo, as the CEO and sole founder, raised a $9 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital within a week of initiating the raise. "We literally had no name for it, no website, no deck," she said. "It was pretty crazy. It was a text message raise." In February, Passes raised a $40 million Series A led by Bond Capital.
Lucy Guo
Passes help creators monetize their audiences through various channels, including subscriptions, livestreaming, pay-per-minute one-on-one calls, paid messaging, and e-commerce stores. "This really allows people to own their fans," Guo said, explaining that a creator making $7,000 on Instagram can level up to $350,000 to $450,000 a month with Passes.
Creators on the platform span diverse categories, from sports and chess to music. Through Passes, creators can keep up to 90% of their earnings, with the platform taking a 10% cut and 30 cents per transaction. The company has already achieved eight figures in annualized net revenue, said Guo.
Passes' product roadmap is large. Drawing on her AI expertise, Guo aims to launch features such as AI-driven pricing to gauge the value of content and how much fans are willing to pay. She also plans to introduce a donation feature, allowing creators to contribute a portion of their earnings from Passes to nonprofits. Her long-term vision is for Passes to support "creators to become entrepreneurs and start creating generational wealth."
"Every single one of my creator friends always asks me, how do I get into building my own brand?" she said.
No stranger to building a brand herself, Guo is ready to help.
