从辍学到亿万富翁：Lucy Guo的创业与人生信条

My daily routine is essentially waking up between 5:30 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. every day.

I quite literally just roll out of bed, then I go straight to Berries.

One thing about me is I literally got my house specifically because it's 5 minutes away from Berries and 5 minutes from the office.

So I can reduce my commute and I don't really need a car, which is awesome.

I shower and I hit work.

Afterwards, I'm usually just in back-to-back meetings.

I try to sometimes block off time because I need to be in Figma and actually get feedback on design, as I'm usually working until maybe 8 or 9 o'clock.

I'll get dinner, then I'll go back to work, and then I'll fall asleep sometime between 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. depending on the day, and then repeat.

In YC, they tell you you should only be doing three things: working out, talking to customers, and building.

I see why working out is so important because it puts you on a schedule and tests your discipline.

No matter how shitty I'm feeling, I will still get up and go out and work out because I know I'm going to feel better and have more energy to be better at my job the rest of the day.

So that's why my life looks like it is today, but essentially, don't sit still.

I don't waste time scrolling through TikTok, watching TV, watching movies, etc.

I think by not sitting still, I've been able to really be efficient with my time and invest it in things that make me happy.

Hi, I'm Lucy Guo. I am the founder of Scale AI and Passes, Back in Capital, and HFZ.

I angel invest, having invested in over 100 different companies.

I'm excited to chat with you guys today.

In terms of how it's potentially changed my life, my DMs are popping.

Not life-changing, but it's been cool.

Overall, I think it's probably just what makes me happy.

Everyone asks, "Okay, cool. What are you buying with your money, etc.?" But at the end of the day, what makes me happy is what drives every single thing I do.

Whether it's building Passes because it makes me happy, providing challenges in my life, or allowing me to change people's lives.

So at Passes, we're building infrastructure for creators to monetize their brand.

When you look at the largest creators, they really are like unicorns.

For example, Kim Kardashian built Skims. Logan Paul built Prime. Mr. Beast with Fastables.

I'm excited for us to eventually build a unicorn creator.

To be quite honest, I think I got suspended from kindergarten.

I think it came from me telling the teacher that what we were learning was dumb.

But if you think about it, my parents were trying to teach me things like abacus competitions, multiplication, and division back in kindergarten.

And in school, they were literally teaching the alphabet.

I was just very bored as a child.

So, I was always trying to figure out different things to do.

I was learning stuff on my own.

Specifically, the stuff I learned was to make money.

But eventually, I discovered my love for product and thought, "Oh, this is actually really fun."

You could see glimpses of this where I tried to start my own virtual pet site after being addicted to Neopets.

I was playing a lot of online video games.

I was figuring out how to start my own online arcade game website.

I think what really shaped me as an entrepreneur today is that during the early stages of me making money, my parents found all of my hidden cash and would take it away.

So then I thought, I have to figure out how they don't take away cash.

PayPal had come out, and you could just buy a Visa debit card, open up a PayPal account and that's when I started learning how to make money on the internet and then that's when I got curious about building my own websites and then that kind of led to hackathons and then I would say like the turning point of real entrepreneurship and wanting to build lasting companies like more than just bots, right?

It was at these hackathons where suddenly I was exposed to startup world and I was like wow I can build apps that millions of people use this is really really cool.

Both my parents are absolutely brilliant.

They're both technical.

I think it was interesting because they actually really discouraged me from pursuing a technical field because they kind of imagined my place as a woman was to get married and pop out grandchildren, but they still wanted me in an intelligent environment to find an intelligent partner.

I think I ended up pursuing it almost by accident.

I thought I was going to be a chemical engineer because chemistry was my favorite subject.

I loved AP chemistry and I was very good at it.

But when I ended up on this website, College Confidential, needing help with my college applications, there was this random stranger who literally looked at my extracurriculars and said, "You're an idiot."

If you want to get into the best college, just apply for computer science, and I was like, I guess that makes sense.

So that's actually kind of how I just landed in computer science.

My college days were like I was going to a lot of hackathons.

So every few weeks M Hacks, Hack MIT, quite literally every hackathon I was like, "I'm going to go to," and then I made a lot of friends, and I say this because I might be biased, but when I was first hiring, the first people I went to were the friends I made in college, and they didn't even ask any questions, which is concerning.

They definitely should have asked how much their equity was worth, but they were just like, "Yeah, we'd love to come work with you." YOLO. Right.

And that was because there was that trust that was gained in college.

When you're building your next company, your network is your net worth, and you're going to be able to hire the friends that you made in college, and you know they're good.

I think if I didn't have a rebellious nature, I probably would have been the good girl that my parents wanted me to be and stayed in college, right?

And I knew I was hurting them when going to do this, but I think that part of the rebellious nature was I want to prove you wrong and show you that I can forge my own path and I will be successful without college.

So I'm sorry I'm hurting you right now, but it'll be worth it at the end of the day.

I don't think I ever doubted it.

And what helped me commit was just thinking this is not a risk at all.

College is always going to be there versus this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I'm going to be learning a lot.

I feel like I'm not learning practical skills in college and everything that I've learned was through hackathons, right?

So, if I leave college and I dive myself in the startup world, I am going to learn significantly more and be able to actually build products that millions of people use versus learning theoretical skills that I'm probably not going to use in my job.

So I was pretty dead set on it early on.

I think my conviction was to optimize learning.

So, that's always been my number one rule in life.

Even if you are leaving something, it feels like a risk.

It's not that much of a risk if you're optimizing learning because your knowledge is always going to be worth something.

And the more knowledge you gain, the more valuable you are later on in life.

I think the reaction I got from most people was, "You're an idiot."

From my parents to my friends to people who didn't know me.

People were just like, "Yo, what are you doing?"

A lot of it stemmed from the fact that I actually only had four CS classes left to graduate, like one year left, right?

So I think the risk mental calculation didn't really make sense for others, but for me, I was like, "What am I losing? Time, right?" But what's the worst-case scenario? I take a job. What's the second worst-case scenario? I go back to college. I chose to optimize for that learning and to optimize for being in a network of extremely ambitious, intelligent people.

As a founder, you already know ideas are the easy part; it's the execution, actually building the product, that slows everything down.

That's where Lovable comes in.

It's not just an AI tool.

It's your on-demand engineering team.

Simply describe your idea.

Lovable then builds a full front-end, back-end, and database, so you can launch real production-ready software without writing code.

It's already powering over 100,000 new products a day, helping 2.5 million builders turn ideas into software just by describing what they want.

No devs, no delays, no excuses.

They're launching in weeks, not months.

And guess what? These teams are still tiny.

In fact, team EO is also using Lovable to build their upcoming EOS school platform, and we're loving it.

If you're a non-technical founder or just want to build without bottlenecks, try Lovable today for free.

Use the promo code EO2YT to get 20% off your first purchase of the Lovable Pro plan.

I think at Snap I really learned how to think much bigger.

When I first joined Snap, I didn't realize the vision Evan had for Snap.

And it was very inspiring seeing his ideas on how he would eventually compete with Amazon, compete with Google, etc., which I think no one even to this day thinks about Snap competing with Amazon or Google.

But to see him think so innovatively about product and not care about that A/B test portion of things taught me just a lot about the importance of being open-minded and product driven as well and really about perfection.

The lesson I really took away from that is just get to 90%.

You don't need to spend 3 years going back and forth on a design.

But also, I remember there was that zoom out the Snap Map feature that no one at the company wanted to build because everyone thought it was so dumb, and he just kept on insisting it, and it turns out he was right at the end of the day, right?

It ended up being a very natural UX that people love and use.

That really almost tells you also that people don't really know what they want in the consumer field, right?

It might sound like the dumbest thing, but you really just have to kind of give it a go.

Hence, why he was probably just thinking eventually, "Don't think about all this research feedback, etc.," because if he did that, that would have never been shipped. But once it got into the hands of people, they realized, "Oh, I actually wanted this," but no one could have told you that.

When you come up with a product, spend like 2 weeks designing it and then ship it and see how it does, and if there's traction, then go and iterate and improve on it.

But people will use products they want to use even if it's super buggy and the UX is shitty for the most part.

So it's better to ship that 90% with no user research and then double down on the product if it gets traction, versus wasting months doing all this research, etc., and shipping it, and it might fall flat.

I mean, I would say it's like risk-benefit analysis, and then, "Am I learning?" right?

So, for example, when I was at Snap, I was giving up a few million dollars, but I also was like, "That's not life-changing for me."

So, I would rather optimize learning and also have the opportunity to make life-changing money.

And if I don't make that life-changing money, at least I learned a bunch of new knowledge and I'll be able to hop to my next job and make more.

And all I'm losing is what, one to two years, because that's the amount of time it would take to figure out if I'm going to be able to build this company, unless you're crazy.

I have friends that, you know, pivoted for like six years and then finally found something, which those are obviously the founders I love investing in.

If I were making 100 million at Snap, would I have made that jump?

I'm going to be realistic.

Probably not.

I probably would have been like, "That's life-changing money."

It is worth staying four years for $100 million before moving on.

So, I would say those two things are my criteria when choosing when to make moves.

We were both working at Kora, and I think it was literally over lunch we were like, "Huh, should we start a company together one day?"

I was like, "Yeah, let's do it."

And then over winter break, we started iterating on ideas.

So we came up with a horrible one.

Class passed for clubbing, and you know it got traction, but you know it's bad when it's only VCs that are subscribing to your service.

And then we were like, "Okay, let's go do something more meaningful."

So we pivoted to Ava, which is a healthcare app that helps you find the best doctors for specific procedures.

So it's like, "Oh, you need a root canal."

Here is the best person to give you a root canal.

Also a terrible idea, but the idea ended up getting us into YC.

I think mostly because I knew we were going to get into YC because I was talking to YC partners before the interview and after the interview, and they were just like, "Oh yeah, you'll get in because you guys are both super smart."

You're obviously at Snap and a Thiel Fellow, and he is, you know, MIT.

So yeah, we entered YC, and then the idea was terrible.

So we ended up pivoting to Scale.

Generalized, my most painful failures have been trusting people that I shouldn't have trusted, which is just not great.

Especially in the workplace, for example, you might trust an employee, and then when they underperform and you need to fire them, they decide to try to extort you.

You just need to make sure that you don't want people where you constantly feel like they're going to stab you in the back on figuring out who to trust.

This is very cliché, but go with your gut.

But outside of going with your gut, you should definitely just do reference checks on both friends, people that know them, or people that aren't even friends, you know, like acquaintances, because you're probably going to get a more honest answer from acquaintances.

I think the best way to build trust again is to be extremely authentic.

But at the end of the day, if trust is broken, sometimes it can't be repaired, and that's when you know that you might just need to separate, and maturity is understanding that.

I think the team self-motivates themselves, but it's innovation when they see that we can ship a product in two weeks, and it takes a large company that's stagnant years to ship a product. That's extremely exciting for the team, especially when you tie that product to actual revenue numbers, and I think it's just constantly emphasizing that. And I think that's why a lot of engineers choose to work at startups instead of larger companies because they feel like they have more impact.

Impact is what motivates them because they're not going to get that same impact at a large company.

Leaders need to be doing IC work as well, because the only way you can judge people on their actual job is if you do the job yourself, and really it's all hands-on deck, nothing is too big to be done.

So for example, everyone was on Intercom when we got a pilot for a new customer; quite literally, we'd have a war room with engineers, like me, etc.

And we'd all be labeling that data and making sure it's perfect.

We really emphasize that nothing is below you.

You're going to do what's best for the company.

And if your time is best being spent helping close this deal, then you're going to do that.

Let's say you're running customer support and you're not doing the customer support tickets yourself, you're not going to know if your customer support reps are answering them fast enough, giving the correct answers, or if it's not an obvious answer, should they know the answer to this, or is it something more obscure?

And you really only get that muscle if you do the work.

I think the number one thing I look for is intelligence and hard work, because you can be the smartest person ever, but if you don't work hard, you're not going to impact a company.

Hard work is extremely important to me, especially because with creators, we're very creator first.

That's our culture.

Which means that because creators can be 24/7.

We need to be 24/7.

If a creator hits me up at 2 a.m. about a bug, I'm proud to say that I can call my engineers, and one of them will pick up and fix that bug at 2 a.m., which is incredibly important in an industry like this.

And I look for people that are willing to go the extra mile.

That's not saying you have to work every weekend, but if needed, are you going to show up?

Yeah.

I mean, I think as a leader, one of my biggest values in life is just kindness.

It's like you're wanting the best for everyone, right?

If someone wins, awesome.

If I lose an amazing engineer, I still want to help them succeed.

If I lose a crappy engineer, I still want to help them succeed.

For me, I think I'm very giving as both a person and a leader.

So it's like, okay, you know, I give you chances.

You're not working out in your role, but I think that you're hardworking and smart.

I try to find a role that you might be better suited for.

So I would say it was a mix of things.

I think what inspired me was actually living with all the founders.

Their energy definitely grew on me, and I wanted these founders to start bases, but no one would do it.

And around the same time, I had a friend who asked me to be CEO of his AI company.

And I kind of sat on it, like I kind of got excited, right?

I was like, "Oh my god, I feel ready to be a founder again."

Because I think a lot of the reason why I didn't do it sooner was because I was scared of failure.

But I finally got to a point where I was like, "You know what? If I fail, whatever, it doesn't matter."

My life is going to be fine.

Most people don't build two successful startups, so don't be scared of failure and just go and do the thing, right? And I didn't feel like doing an AI company again, to be quite honest. I was like, "I did B2B enterprise, I know how it works, but I would rather, if I'm doing a second company and risking failure, at least have fun doing it." And I had always been attracted to consumer, you can see this with a bunch of different random apps I had made. Snap was one of the most fun experiences of my life, so I just knew I wanted to do consumer, and I had been sitting on this idea for a little bit.

So, I was like, "Okay, let's see some competitors out there."

And really, you could only find Patreon.

They've existed for a decade, and I saw an opportunity in the market.

I was friends with a lot of creators.

I lightly asked my creator friends, "Hey, if I were to build this, would you use it?"

So, you know, like selling before building, they're like, "Absolutely."

I was like, "Great."

And then I just talked to my LPs, and they were like, "Here is money."

Go build.

So, it all happened really quickly.

I would say within the span of 24 hours of my friend asking me to be CEO of his AI company and me having commitments.

So the future I see for the creator economy, I think that AI is really going to help creators be co-pilots.

I see more creators becoming entrepreneurs.

More kids want to be creators than ever before.

So I think the creator economy is going to grow, but also everyone's creator marketing spend is going up in pretty much every country.

And I think this is due to the fact people are realizing their audience and the reach you get is much stronger spending it on creator marketing versus on ads.

So, I think because of this, we're going to see more creators work so closely with brands that they're essentially considered co-founders or start their own brands, which is why I think unicorn creators are possible, and we're excited to help them either get access to the best brands and get that equity for long-term generational wealth, or if it makes sense, to help them build that next product.

I think if 20-year-old me could go back in time, I would stop complaining about some of the people I work with and just start really getting to know them better and uplifting them.

Why do I think so?

I think that in general, most companies are very gossipy, right?

So, if you're complaining about people, it just gets around, and then it drives them away, obviously, because they hear about complaints; no one wants to be talked badly about.

And I think the best work environments and the most positive ones are when you are everyone's cheerleader.

So, I think I would have spent more effort seeing the good in people.

This is going to sound very LA, but I feel like I have manifested everything in my life.

And because I'm focused so much on positive energy, I feel like as long as I put in that hard work to bring my dreams to life and surround myself with positive people, anything is possible.

So cheesy, but I really do believe that's true.

And I have the best friends in the world that, you know, are constantly around me and encouraging me and really doing whatever they can to help.

They'll go out of my way.

They're truly incredible.

And I think that when I have such positive people around me, I only look at the upside.