Lucy Guo, the 30-year-old cofounder of Scale AI, is now the youngest self-made woman billionaire on the planet. Guo unseats pop star Taylor Swift, 35, who has held that title since Forbes declared her a billionaire in late 2023.
A computer science college dropout, Guo cofounded artificial intelligence firm Scale AI in 2016–when she was 21–with Alexandr Wang, who was then 19. Wang became CEO and Guo ran the operations and product design teams at the San Francisco startup. The cofounders both made Forbes’ Under 30 list in 2018.
Now, less than a decade later, Guo is founder and CEO of Passes for which she raised $50 million over three rounds from 2022 to 2024 from investors like Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, talent agent Michael Ovitz and Menlo Ventures, valuing the company at $150 million.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2025/04/17/this-ai-founder-lucy-guo-scale-ai-has-unseated-taylor-swift-as-the-worlds-youngest-self-made-woman-billionaire/
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A computer science college dropout, Guo cofounded artificial intelligence firm Scale AI in 2016–when she was 21–with Alexandr Wang, who was then 19. Wang became CEO and Guo ran the operations and product design teams at the San Francisco startup. The cofounders both made Forbes’ Under 30 list in 2018.
Now, less than a decade later, Guo is founder and CEO of Passes for which she raised $50 million over three rounds from 2022 to 2024 from investors like Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital, talent agent Michael Ovitz and Menlo Ventures, valuing the company at $150 million.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2025/04/17/this-ai-founder-lucy-guo-scale-ai-has-unseated-taylor-swift-as-the-worlds-youngest-self-made-woman-billionaire/
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Thinking of myself as a role model, the one advice I try to give people is like, yes, it can sometimes feel like you're fighting an uphill battle being a woman.
00:09Discrimination does exist. I think that like you're going to have a lot more people that are hoping for your demise because they don't want to see a woman succeed.
00:17I just tell them like it sucks, but like just work harder, prove everyone wrong and use that as a driving force to win.
00:24A 2018 30 Under 30 alum, Lucy Guo was named Forbes' youngest self-made woman billionaire in April of 2025 at only 30 years old.
00:35Guo was one of just six self-made women billionaires on the planet under the age of 40.
00:39She's also the only one who's made the bulk of her fortune from a company she left years ago.
00:45I think that like we're about to see a lot more entrepreneurs be women and valuations grow at a tremendous rate.
00:51Like I wouldn't be surprised if someone else took the title next year, but it's really exciting to see.
00:57Guo, who co-founded Buzzy artificial intelligence startup Scale AI in 2016 with Alexander Wang, is now estimated by Forbes to have a net worth of $1.3 billion, largely due to her ownership of just under 5% of Scale AI.
01:13I still live a very frugal lifestyle.
01:16Like, for example, for lunch, I get like buy one, get one, freeze all the time, or like, you know, the 50% off deals.
01:23If like one day I decide I need a private jet, maybe I'll sell some shares, but like at the moment, I'm very happy buying commercial.
01:30Guo unseats pop star Taylor Swift, who has held the title since Forbes declared her a billionaire in late 2023.
01:38Taylor has always struck me as someone that's like very pro-woman and wants other people to win.
01:43I am like a huge fan of her. I think she's an icon. I think that like meeting her last year, like it was a handshake.
01:51She probably doesn't remember who I am, was like the highlight of my entire year.
01:56So, yeah, she's amazing and I hope she's okay with it.
02:00Guo's parents, both electrical engineers, had migrated to the San Francisco Bay Area.
02:05Growing up with Chinese immigrant parents really shaped who I am today.
02:09I think that like my Asian parents really valued discipline, they valued education, they valued money, right?
02:15They were extremely frugal and that was what allowed them to save up and invest and really help support like my education.
02:23Growing up, Guo made her own money mowing lawns and selling Pokemon cards in order to buy the toys and clothes her parents considered wasteful.
02:31I would hide my money inside like the middle of Harry Potter books or like other hiding spots, really.
02:36But they just kept on finding it and I was like, I need this to stop.
02:40On the internet, she discovered two things.
02:42A new way to hide her money electronically with PayPal and a new way to make money, creating virtual pets on a browser-based game called Neopets.
02:52I discovered like people were botting to essentially get these items and get these pets.
02:56So I started going on the internet to learn how to like make these bots, which is like very simple JavaScript code back then.
03:03And I just started making bots to be able to like auto-adopt rare pets, like auto-buy like morphine potions on the internet, etc.
03:11And I would just resell all these items and then make money and I could sell like 10 rare-ish pets and then get enough money to buy myself an extra rare pet.
03:20I think I was around like second, third grade when I was doing this.
03:22Guo leaned into her entrepreneurial spirit, continuing to code well into her later teen years, studying computer science and human-computer interactions at Carnegie Mellon University.
03:34I think like almost every single child in America, not just, you know, Asian children are told, hey, you need to go to college, you need to study, get a good degree, get a good job.
03:43I just like felt like I wasn't learning as much in college as I was going to these hackathons.
03:48So these hackathons were like 24, 48 hour coding competitions held at various universities where you would make apps essentially and then win prizes.
03:56And I was learning like new languages.
03:58Like literally I learned how to like make iOS apps within a weekend at these events.
04:02I felt like I was learning more at these hackathons than I was in school and I've always optimized my life for learning.
04:07So when the opportunity came to like drop out of college and be able to learn outside of school, I took it.
04:14In 2014, Guo became a Teal Fellow, a program sponsored by billionaire investor Peter Teal to pay entrepreneurial college aid students to drop out or skip college and instead create companies.
04:26I got to live in a house with like 20 Teal Fellows who are all brilliant and it really opened up opportunities for me.
04:36And even to this day, like every single one of the Teal Fellows I've met, they're all doing incredibly well.
04:40And I think a lot of it is like their own drive, but also the resources that we all received from the outside world.
04:47People just wanted to help you if you were a Teal Fellow, which is cool to see.
04:50In 2015, Guo got a job as a product designer at question and answer firm Quora.
04:57I felt like I would learn more working at a company and actually shipping products and seeing the impact that the products I shipped had versus like trying again on a new idea.
05:06Guo left Quora and worked briefly at Snapchat, continuing her career in product design under a different kind of leadership with CEO Evan Spiegel.
05:15When I first got to Snap, Evan was like, we don't do A-B tests here.
05:19And he was like very product oriented and it was like very much so gut feeling where you would design something, he would just play around with it.
05:25And then like when it felt good, he was like, this is great.
05:28But he could also change his mind a lot.
05:31About a year into her time at Snap, Guo reconnected with an old colleague, Alexander Wang.
05:36I started getting the itch to build product again.
05:39So I hit up Alexander who I had met at Quora and I was like, hey, like we should apply to YC.
05:44So we started working on a bunch of side projects.
05:46The first one was ClassPass for clubbing.
05:48Like it was a total failure.
05:50But while at the startup accelerator, Y Combinator, the duo's next project was a success.
05:56In 2016, Guo and Wang started Scale AI, a company that labels the data required to power AI.
06:03I had essentially built up the entire operations team that labels data and that today is still the main like thing the company does.
06:10Right. Alexander was focused a lot on like sales to enterprise companies and like making revenue from them.
06:16And I was dealing with like thousands of scalers essentially complaining that they weren't getting payments on time, et cetera.
06:22And that just became like a little bit frustrating for me.
06:25We had like different priorities in terms of roadmap.
06:27Customers grew to include the U.S. government, which used Scale's tech to analyze satellite images in Ukraine, and OpenAI, which used it to help train ChatGPT.
06:39But in 2018, Guo left the company.
06:42I'm very proud of what the Scale team has done.
06:45I think that like clearly like the company is doing very well, which means that like maybe Alex was right.
06:49Like it made more sense to focus on getting contracts.
06:53After leaving Scale, I was like, what have I not done before?
06:56And I've been an engineer.
06:57I've been a product designer.
06:58I've been a founder.
06:59I've done operations.
07:01But I had never done venture really.
07:03After Guo left Scale, she started a small venture capital firm called Backend Capital to invest in early stage companies.
07:10One of its best investments, a six-figure bet in 2020 on financial software firm Ramp, a company now valued at $13 billion.
07:20Guo not only financed these startups, she also lived in a house with a bunch of the founders.
07:26Honestly, like I am at passes today because I was in that environment.
07:30Like when living with these founders, I felt that energy.
07:33I felt that ambition.
07:34I was like, wow, like I want to build a company again.
07:36In 2022, she shifted her focus away from the VC firm to start her own business called Passes, which is similar to Patreon and OnlyFans, a platform for creators and celebrities to connect with fans who pay for online chats and videos.
07:51I ended up raising $9 million over text message for our seed round, which is crazy with like no deck, no real idea, no name.
08:00It was genuinely one of the more incredible things I think I happened to pull off.
08:05I really do believe we are the first creator commerce platform.
08:08We're not just a subscription platform, but we really provide a toolbox for creators to monetize their brand and become an entrepreneur.
08:15So not only do they monetize off of subscription, but we have live streamings.
08:19We have like one-on-one video calling.
08:21We get to change people's lives every single day.
08:23We have creators tell us like, hey, like because of you, I'm able to support my family.
08:28I'm able to like buy a house.
08:29I'm able to pay off my loans.
08:30We literally see people's lives change overnight, where before they might have been making like $2,000 a month, and suddenly they're making like $100,000 a month.
08:39And that really is mind-blowing and life-changing for them.
08:42And it allows them the time to be able to pursue their passions, whether it is just creating content for their fans or it's an entirely new hobby.
08:49Pass has also signed deals with celebrities, including gymnast Olivia Dunn, basketball legend Sakiel O'Neal, and DJ Kygo.
08:58And it hosts big bashes like a recent event at the Coachella Music Festival.
09:03I think in our business, emotional attention is incredibly important.
09:07There's only so much that you get in terms of like connection with a human being when it's over text message, email, Zoom, et cetera.
09:14And by having events at passes, we're able to allow the community to get to know us better as a team, and then also be able to connect with other creators on our platform.
09:24I think our investors actually really want us to do more events because they realize the importance of emotional retention.
09:31And they believe that it is like a marketing tool.
09:35People, especially creators, care about being cool, and they want us to be a cool brand that does good events.
09:41I was actually told by one investor who was like, make sure none of your events are ever bad.
09:48And I'm like, okay, noted.
09:55One glance at Guo's social media accounts, and you'll see how she practices what she preaches.
10:01Especially in the creator economy, things are built off of trust, and I'm very authentic on my social media.
10:05And I think that actually makes me different than a lot of founders out there who are more rigid in what they are posting because they want a certain image.
10:13Passes is now valued at $150 million, adding to Guo's wealth.
10:18But her parents' passion for her education has never let up.
10:21Even after scale, you know, I was like worth nine figures, et cetera.
10:24They were like, so when are you going back to college?
10:26They were like, we don't even care what degree you get.
10:28You can study history just to go back to college.
10:31I was like, wow, you'll let me study history?
10:34As I've grown up, I've realized, like, my parents may have been strict, but they've always just really wanted the best for me.
10:40And it feels nice that, like, now they're proud.
10:42So, yay.