Lucy Guo | How She Became The World's Youngest Self Made Woman Billionaire

We're out in Beverly Hills with the youngest self-made female billionaire in the entire world, Lucy Guo.

Did your parents not feel any type of way?

Are you sure you really want to drop out?

Are you sure you're making the right decision?

My dad was sending me angry emails for probably up to a year, and it was landing in my spam inbox because they all look the same. You are so dumb. You don't have any risk calculation. How did I raise such a dumb daughter? You're dumb.

Who got rich during the Gold Rush? It wasn't all the people going out west looking for gold. It was the people selling the shovels.

There are a lot of companies that would not exist if you asked for permission. Like, Uber is One example, they broke all the laws, but they didn't ask for permission, and now they became so ingrained in society that they kind of just had to exist.

How much did you sell the company for?

$26 billion or so. Like, if I didn't become a billionaire, I was a failure because everyone around me was so intelligent. It was very obvious that everyone around me was going to be a billionaire or was already a billionaire.

If me and you died tomorrow and you had one more message to leave with the younger generation, what would that be?

I would say—

What's going on everyone? Welcome back to the School of Hard Knocks podcast. I'm James and I'm here with Jack and Josh, and we have an incredible guest for you all today. Lucy Guo. Lucy, it's great to be here with you today.

Thank you for being here.

100%. First of all, you have one of the most incredible houses that we have ever seen. I just have to say it's so inspiring for the 3 of us. 3 of us became millionaires this last year ourselves.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

We appreciate it.

It sounds like the podcast is going well.

The podcast—

on all the counts.

Podcast is growing and the businesses as well.

Yeah.

Get around, you know, people like yourself and it just causes us to think so much bigger. So where I want to kind of get started though is I want you to take us back to when you dropped out of school. I think that there's so many entrepreneurs, you know, funny enough, him here, he's the one dropped out of the 3 of us as well. And you're kind of at that crossroads where you have a lot of expectations from maybe family members, from parents, from people, and it's maybe looked down upon to kind of make that decision. But you ultimately did that. Take us back to when you made that decision and what that ultimately meant for you in that moment right there.

Yeah, honestly, it was a no-brainer. The second that I heard that I got the Thiel Fellowship, I was like, fuck it, why not, right? Um, it was $100,000 to drop out of school, which is already awesome, but I also didn't view it as a risk because I already had job offers lined up. And what's the worst-case scenario? Like, I fail and I go back to college? Like, that's not that bad. Or I can take one of those job offers that I did have, and they were pretty incredible job offers. So for me, I just, I felt like my learning was capped in college. Like, I was learning more going to these hackathons than I was being in college, and I didn't want to waste any more time in college. I also knew, like, in my risk calculation, that it would most likely open more doors for me, because when you drop out, people just automatically assume that you are smarter than you are, or that you're going to be a prodigy, right? So they will want to meet you, they'll want to mentor you, et cetera. So it ended up being one of the best decisions of my life. I dropped out, and then I got to hang around some really cool kids.

So we're telling them to drop out of school, is that what we're saying?

Yeah, drop out of school. I do think that you should do like 1 to 2 years of college though, because I do believe that there's no place in the world where you're gonna be around people of similar intelligence levels that all want to make friends. Because even when you like, you know, go get your first new job, like most people already have friends established. And then, you know, it's obviously kind of hard to make friends in like high school, middle school, because like people made friends in preschool already. So it is And also just intelligence levels are completely different in those situations.

Did your parents not feel any type of way or your family in terms of like, hey, like, are you sure you really want to drop out? Are you sure you're making the right decision? Like, what was that conversation like?

Oh, they got so mad at me. I remember, so my dad was sending me angry emails for probably up to a year and it was landing in my spam inbox because they all look the same, which is like, you are so dumb. You don't have any risk calculation. How did I raise such a dumb daughter?

You're dumb.

Like it was all pretty much, you know, broken English, same thing. So Google marked it as spam. I also remember they cut off my phone, they cut off health insurance, all that. Because they really— I get it. They immigrated from China to America to give their kids a better future, and education is how they got a better future. And they really believed that education was the number one thing you could do to be able to raise a future stable family, which is why all Asians are like, be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer, because those are high-paying jobs. So I was basically disrespecting them, and through them, they felt like all their sacrifices were for nothing when I dropped out. So obviously they weren't happy.

So, so you did kind of grow up in that traditional sense, right? With, I guess, the Asian culture being that there's maybe some pressure to kind of go into some of those more traditional jobs. Were you exposed to something early on that told you that, you know, I don't want to necessarily go the traditional route and I maybe want to do my own thing and start my own business? Can you take us back to that moment where you first recalled being exposed to maybe being your own boss or doing something for yourself?

Yeah, that probably goes all the way back to 2nd grade. So, um, my Asian parents realized that the best punishment, uh, was taking away my money. I would like hide them in the middle of Harry Potter books. books, like cash, and somehow they'd be gone. I'm like, how did you find it? It's literally in the middle of a Harry Potter book. So I one day discovered PayPal, and I literally went to Home Depot, bought like a Visa debit card, and then made a PayPal account. And from there on, there's like this whole underground gaming world where people are selling like black hat items, et cetera. So I basically learned to make bots on Neopets, and I first started off selling Neopoints, selling rare pets, et cetera, and then trading up, and then botting for rare items. And then I started discovering making websites. So I made a bunch of different websites from like arcade game websites, like streaming websites. And I got addicted to like that feeling of creating products that people use. There was like an adrenaline rush where I'd be like, oh my God, there's like 10,000 people on this website right now. Mostly due to like stumble upon. It wasn't like people would really actually find the website, but it was cool. It was a great feeling. So I think that was when I knew I like wanted to build a company. Maybe I didn't like fully know because when I was applying to college, I wanted to be a chemical engineer actually. My parents said no. But I also wanted to like, I then learned that if I applied for computer science, it actually gave me the best chance at getting into college because everything I had done from like second grade was computer science technically. So yeah, and then maybe like the next point I knew was just at hackathons where I again got addicted to building products.

Lucy, you built one of the most influential companies in the artificial intelligence space. For you, obviously dropping out of college, outta college and kind of going your own route. But for you, when was that first deep dive into like AI? When, when were you first, obviously you did computer science when you were in school, but like what was that first deep dive for you? And I think it'd be influential for the viewers because there's so many people, uh, who really need to be diving in and taking advantage of that. So for you, how did you get that foundation and how did that spark that, that chapter of your career?

Yeah, so I would say that it was all an accident. Um, we didn't intend to be an AI company. Um, we were literally, actually we applied to Y Combinator with a healthcare app. The idea was that we would find the best doctors for certain procedures, and there's a whole lot of reasons why that would have never worked. But we ended up pivoting into scale, and when we pivoted into scale, it was called Scale API. We wanted an API that would call doctors for us. So we thought we were going to take over the BPO industry, specifically call centers. But what ended up happening was, you know, we blasted every single YC founder and we're like, hey, we have an API for humans. What do you need humans to do? And the number one thing that people kept on coming back to us for was data labeling. And then one of our investors was like, you know, with data labeling, you can actually use AI, once you collect enough data. And we're like, oh, well, true. So we rebranded from Scale API to Scale AI. And then we became like the picks and shovels of the AI industry. So we helped every single other AI company label data to make their models better, because your models are only as good as the data that you provide it.

We were talking about this earlier today, but again, you touched on it again there. And it's such a valuable point, I think, for entrepreneurs, which is the ability that you had to pivot. The business that you initially sought out to build was to disrupt the call center industry. But you saw that it was a much greater opportunity with what which you ended up turning the business into. How important has that skill been? How vital has it been to your success knowing how to pivot and when to pivot?

I would say it's been my entire success. We actually started off with class pass for clubbing, which is another terrible idea. But we knew to pivot very quickly from that. And I would say I generally make pivots like 3 weeks in. Because too many founders, I think— actually, people in general— they fall into sunk cost fallacy. And it's really hard not to fall into sunk cost fallacy. Because you've invested so many resources, you just want to make the thing that you've invested resources in work, but you like, that's like the number one trap a founder can have. I think it's incredibly important to like just be real with yourself and be like, this does not have the like logarithmic scale that we need it to have, so it's time to pivot.

For people that aren't familiar with Scale AI, what was the company itself in terms of like what was the problem it solved and what was your primary role within the company?

Yeah, so I would say the easiest way to describe it is that we help label data for other companies. So in the self-driving car example, companies would give us like, you know, their images, their LiDAR data, et cetera. And then we would tell them, like, what's a stop sign, what's a pedestrian, what's a car on the road. And we did this for, like, all different sorts of tasks. And then my role, initially I had built out, like, some of the API, and then I was on product and I helped build out the operations team. So basically created this, like, automated process to hire the labelers, and then literally hired all our labelers and trained them and helped scale that process.

You started to work with some of the biggest companies in the world. That came to you that were clients of yours. How did you go about that client acquisition, and what was that process like early on?

Yeah, it was quite literally, um, so early, early on, we— because YC has so many large companies, we scraped YC's internal database, which you're not supposed to do, but we did. And then we literally just blasted every single founder, and we're like, hey, we're also a YC company, um, we have this API for humans, like, um, what do you need it for? And then we were able to get some of our first large customers that way. And then it was really just conferences. So I would print out flyers And then just leave them on the floor, on the table, etc., basically pitching like, hey, we're going to be able to label your data cheaper than everyone else. So then people would actually contact us. We also obviously used LinkedIn and would figure out who is the VP of engineering, the CTO, maybe a head engineer that could ask the VP of eng or CTO for budget to label data. And then we would manually label all the data ourselves to start. So we did a pilot. It'd be like a boardroom where we gather everyone. We're like, okay, we're going to label data, give them the perfect pilot, and then they're going to sign a larger contract, and then we're going to scale with them. Yeah.

You know, you had mentioned right there, it seems like you had a moment. I remember when we interviewed Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, and one of the things that she did early on, she talks about how when she was working at Neiman Marcus, she was trying to get her product into the store. She would go out and buy bins from Office Depot and stick all of her products at the cash registers of all the different sections of the store. She wasn't supposed to do that. So it seems like you kind of had that moment when you scraped the Y Combinator database where it's like you weren't going to ask for permission. If anything, you're going to ask for forgiveness.

Yep. I think too many people ask for permission. And yeah, if there are a lot of companies that would not exist if you ask for permission, like Uber is one example, right? Where like they broke all the laws, but, uh, they didn't ask for permission and now they became so ingrained in society that they kind of just had to exist.

So powerful right there. I love that. She said that there's a lot of companies that would not exist if they asked for permission. It's so true.

I don't know. I didn't even actually realize this and I don't want to be wrong. So cut this out of the podcast if it's not true, but someone had told me that Stripe even was one of those companies that like they didn't, uh, there was something that they did where they didn't ask for permission, and that later on they just figured it out with regulation.

I feel like when people always like to talk about, let's say, the Gold Rush back in the day in the 1800s, where everybody was always— they were moving out west to strike for gold. And we kind of see something similar in this event today with AI. But we always like to say, who got rich during the Gold Rush? It wasn't all the people going out west looking for gold. It was the people selling the shovels to go out there. And I almost feel like with your company, you guys found, a way for you guys to do that as well, and where you guys were actually labeling data for other AI companies. For you, when you found that that was the vehicle that you guys were— that was the problem that you guys were going to solve, how did you guys go about— how did you know that that was it and go about scaling for your company when you figured out that, hey, this is the right product-market fit for Scale AI?

I would say that when we got our first self-driving car customers scaling and we realized that every single automobile company needed data labeling, we were like, OK, every automobile company is very well funded, every AI companies very well funded. And the number one thing that every AI company needs, especially automobile companies, is data. Because they need to make sure— automobiles companies especially, because people can't die on the road. So we realized how much money there is to be spent. So we doubled down on this. And honestly, pro tip to everyone here, one thing I've noticed in today's age, if you want to invest in the public markets, is you should also invest in— I wouldn't say the picks and shovels, but the infrastructure for all AI companies to exist. I'm making a lot of money on NVIDIA, chips, pretty much everything that powers AI, because everyone's building an AI company. So even though not every AI company will succeed, everyone's using resources.

I feel like there's probably a ton of startup founders that are watching this and are inspired by your story. For them, like, they might be thinking, okay, should I apply to a Y Combinator and things like that? What would your advice be for those founders as far as just like, hey, like, should I apply to like a startup incubator and even something like Y Combinator? Like, how should they go about doing that? And what advice would you have for them? them?

Yeah, so I think with Y Combinator, I would suggest every single like B2B SaaS founder to apply to Y Combinator. The reason being that Y Combinator opens you up to thousands of customers immediately. And there's just a like mutual camaraderie with YC founders where it's like, if you're a YC founder, I'll talk to you, right? Because we just support the community and we give back. So it's a no-brainer for B2B SaaS founders. I think if you're like a consumer founder or, you know, like, let's say your customer isn't SaaS companies, It just becomes a question of like what you want. Like, do you want that community? Do you want that mentorship? Or do you want to save your equity and raise it at a higher valuation?

When we were talking earlier, you know, I was asking you a bit about your superpowers in the business world and what were some of the things that you were very good at. And you mentioned 2 things to me. You talked about how important it is to be like great at sales, selling in the company. But you talked about talent detection, which, you know, we've come to learn is one of the most important things to build any business. You know, from talking to people like yourself and just so many other successful entrepreneurs, we've got up to how many, 60 or 70 employees now across our different businesses that we have. Did you have a method for finding and attracting the right talent to come and work with your company? Because you mentioned, especially in tech, if somebody's extremely talented, you've got other companies coming to try and poach them with these big multimillion-dollar offers. What was your strategy for not only attracting the right talent, but then also retaining it over time?

I think this goes back to really building a network, especially when you're younger. So the initial talent that we attracted literally came from my college. I hit up the smartest engineers I knew at Carnegie Mellon, which thankfully was the number one CS program. And they all decided, yeah, we'll come work with you. To the point where some of them didn't ask for how much their equity was worth, which was very confusing to me. They were just like, yeah, startup, you're building one, I'll come. Which was cool, and that was because of that emotional connection that I had built with them over college. I would say outside of that, I like seeing people that take action on their own. So for example, people that attend hackathons, they're great because they're not just sitting in college doing the bare minimum, completing classes, et cetera. Like, they're going out and finding competitions to do. Like, they're learning how to, like, take the theoretical knowledge they learned from college and apply it practically. So I really like hackathon kids as well. I think that competitive people in general are very successful at company building. So this can be anything from, you know, like, math competitions to being an athlete, because it requires a level of discipline and hard work that exceeds, I think, the Was there a mistake that you made early on that shaped how you built the rest of the company?

Maybe it was a contract going wrong or you lost data. Was there a mistake you made early on that shaped how you built the rest of the company?

I mean, we've definitely had issues with data that we've given where we almost lost contracts. But, and I think that was always going to happen. But I think one thing we very quickly learned is everything is emotional retention. So we literally sent champagne and a cake and everything was all good. And from then on, I really learned like how much sales and retention is emotional.

What kind of taught you that? Like, how did you understand the psychology of like the people that you were dealing with?

It was pretty early on, I think. Like when I was trying to convince, you know, people to choose us over several different offers, I would have to talk to them every single day. And I realized that like, you know, our offer wasn't as high, so I would have to really sell them. It got to the point where I was doing Barry's Bootcamp with them. I was like buying Pikachu presents for them. I think we also got taught this by our investors though. Like they were telling us like, you know, us, the Stripe founders, would take people on plane rides, would go on jogs with them. Plane rides is a really cool way to pitch someone, I guess. And then that was the way that they managed to convince people to work with them. So a mix of intuition, a mix of just seeing what other founders have done, which is also why it's so important to be surrounded with smart people. Because when you're around people that have done it before, they can tell you what worked and what didn't.

It was this last year, I believe, that you guys ended up selling 49% of the company.

Mm-hmm.

And how much did you sell the company for?

It was like $26 billion or so, um, for 49%. But at a 49% at $26 billion valuation.

You are now building a new company right now.

Yeah, I'm actually building a few new companies.

Can you tell us about some of those companies that you're building right now?

Yeah, so, um, one of them, we're working on infrastructure for the creator economy, so helping creators monetize their brand. Um, but we're also spinning it off into a fintech app, um, because we realize that 80% of the money is through messaging. But we're also seeing a lot of problems in other industries, um, such as industries or like with psychics, etc. So we wanted to make the UX a little bit easier and broaden our TAM. Another company I'm working on is an AI growth startup. I can't really speak more specifics to it, but it is going to be very fun. Think just like agentic tools to help you grow your company. And then I am working on an apparel company, but I can't speak more to that. There'll probably be announcements sometime this summer. That one I'm just excited about because I'm working on it with like 2 very close friends.

What is your relationship right now with diversification? Like I would imagine when you were building, you know, Scale, it was all 100% into that business. But then after kind of selling part of the company, now moving on to some other ventures now, how do you feel about diversification rather than just focusing on one venture maybe?

I think in general you should focus on one venture, but the nice thing is I do have flexibility now. So for example, with the apparel company, I hired a CEO in, so I don't have to be day to day with it and focus too much on it. Um, and for these other companies, um, I am doing something very similar, I'd say, where like I'm going to be very involved in the beginning. But then if I can find leadership to place into these companies, I will. I think that I'm kind of doing an Elon Musk approach there, I'd say.

So do you believe the best way to build companies is from top down with top down leadership? Because I feel like especially new entrepreneurs, they kind of place— I will call it warm bodies— to kind of just serve a specific function within the organization. But it sounds like when you're approaching these new companies that you're starting to build, you're going to start out by building the leadership that can then kind of build up.

So when I hire leaders, I hire ICs, because I don't believe in hiring a leader or manager and having to blow up teams. So everyone I look for can do the entire function themselves. And I also think that they hire better and are able to actually teach the future employees or like their future team how to actually do the function. Because it's very hard to be able to like determine whether your like direct reports are doing a good job if you're not actually doing the job yourself. For example, like let's say you're a customer support lead.

Yeah.

How do you actually know that your customer support team is answering tickets on time, answering them well, et cetera, unless you know how to answer tickets. Like if you know how to answer tickets, you might be like, oh, this one should have been answered in 30 seconds. Why did it take 3 hours to answer? And why did you give it the wrong answer? So I hire leaders into companies, but they're all ICs that wouldn't need to hire a team to do the function.

So obviously one of the companies that you're building right now is to help creators monetize. For you, like what do you see as like the next big opportunity for creators, especially with the platform that you're Yeah, so I would say that at the moment, creators haven't really had tech built for them.

And I think the next opportunity, because creators are really good at creating content, but they don't want to do everything else, is probably agentic tools and AI tools that help them do literally everything else, from like A/B testing, like what times to post, to like captions that are going to convert the best, titles, like translating videos so like more of your audience can see it versus just like, you know, the US population, for example. So I'm excited about that for creators. And I also think that— At the moment, from what I've understood at least, creators are very— creators aren't well-versed in— I'm going to repeat that. Creators aren't that well-versed when it comes to actually managing their money. So I think fintech is actually a really big opportunity within the creator economy as well, especially when you're seeing creators with large teams be able to really do this well. Creators with incredibly large teams are able to hire people in to help them choose the best angel investments to proceed in. or like help them incubate a company or help them partner with the right company where they're getting like co-founder level equity. Um, we're seeing this really with, you know, like Alex Earle just started her skincare line. Jake Paul did W, Logan Paul did Prime. Um, and this is really how creators, I think, build, um, generational wealth. Um, so I think that there is an opportunity there as well. I love it.

We, you know, we were chatting about it earlier as well, right? You know, AI is the business that you ultimately built your fortune, right? And are still continuing to crush it in. But for the people out there, Right, that they think of AI as like a buzzword and they're not necessarily utilizing it or using it on a daily basis. What are a couple actionable steps that you think all business owners, whether it be tools or applications of AI, that you think everybody should be using that are non-negotiables in their day-to-day lives?

Yeah, so I would say that everyone should be messing around with Replit, Cursor, Claude Code, et cetera, because right now is like really the first time that you could build full-scale applications and bring your ideas to life without actually knowing any code. And I think that that's really democratized being able to build companies, especially tech companies, because obviously there's tons of companies you can build that don't require technology. But tech companies scale better than other companies because all you really have is server costs. And now everyone can be a 10x engineer because of all these tools.

Yeah, I'm going to add one more tool in there though. Do you know Opus Clip? Have you heard about them? So they just recently launched, I think it's called Agent Opus, I believe. And we've been using it where essentially you can have Like a script or even just audio, and it will turn it into a short-form video that's like already ready to post.

That's amazing.

All right, you guys, we're gonna be right back to the episode. But before that, listen, one thing that I've learned after talking to so many entrepreneurs is this: the best ideas that you will have, they usually come from conversations just like these, or meetings that you have with business partners or people that you're doing business with. But the problem is most people forget them. And that is exactly why, like I was just talking about, I've been using something new from Opus Clip, and it is called Agent Opus. And it is honestly one of the most useful AI tools that I've ever seen for content. You can take a simple script or even audio from a conversation just like this. It turns it into a legitimate video that is actually ready to post and promote your brand or your business. And what I like the most about it is, like I was saying, guys, it doesn't feel like your generic AI-generated content that people cannot stand and they scroll the minute that they see it. It feels like legitimate content. Everything in the content actually matches— the visuals, the message, the pacing. It feels like real content that you would actually watch. Now here's where it gets even better, okay? Instead of having some massive team that you think needed to create this content, you can turn it into one clear idea that you ready to publish and post right away. So if you want to try it out today, check out Agent Opus by going down to the link in the description of this video and watch your business change. But yeah, so, and then in terms of just from like an efficiency standpoint though, like leveraging all those tools in your businesses probably saves you how much time on average would you say?

I would say everyone's a 10x engineer now. Everyone's a 10x employee. Um, honestly, like this is very questionable, but I've been using Claude to draft like all my contracts. So I'm saving a lot in legal costs too.

Claude is the biggest game Game changer.

DC law, we call it the crib law. That's where we got our JD from GPT law.

Although I'm getting really annoyed with all these AI lawyers because today we just got sued actually for using MetaPixel. And we looked up the guy that sued us and he's just using an AI lawyer and he sued like dozens of companies for ridiculous stuff in hopes of quick settlement. And I'm like, everyone uses MetaPixel. Like how did we just get sued for using MetaPixel? What the hell?

That's insane. And well, I just think it's hilarious, the fact of like DC, like, oh, so there's a meme inside the company called DC Laws, Decrypt Law. And it's because with AI, like you don't necessarily need an entry-level like lawyer to basically like, you know, resolve problems or, you know, answer, like pretty much sort through like all of the legalese. And one of the things I was kind of curious about for you is with now it being easier than ever to vibe code and just, you know, create apps and applications, What's the biggest differentiator now? Is it distribution? Is it brand? Because if anyone can kind of create a competitor to another tech product or software easily now without even knowing how to code, what's going to be the separation between those companies?

Well, I mean, you need to be able to move fast. I don't actually think vibe coding is going to help you create good competitors. You're still going to want to hire the best engineers, because vibe coding has a lot of issues to it as well. I think it's great at creating MVPs and lifestyle businesses, because if the If the product has tech problems, that's fine if you're making a few hundred thousand a month even. But it's not going to scale to billions of users. I think that the differentiation right now, though, is just intuition on product market fit. Because right now, if you were an ideas guy before, it was impossible to raise funding. But now as an ideas guy, you have a good idea, you're going to be able to vibe code it out, and then you're going to be able to show investors. And then you can raise less funding than before, to be able to build large companies, because you don't need to hire as many engineers, because every engineer can be a 10x engineer. So I would say if you're able to have good ideas and you're able to convince good engineers to work for you, huge differentiator.

Lucy, when me and you first met, we were at a Kanye West concert. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is because I want to get your perspective on work-life balance and whether or not it has changed after becoming a billionaire. When you were initially building your company, did you have work-life balance in those early days? Like, was there always a part of you that was like, I'm going to have some of my time dedicated to this, to not even focusing on the business? Or what ultimately was that like? And how has your perspective of work-life balance changed, especially after achieving the status that you're in now?

I don't actually think it's changed. I probably work almost the same amount. I will say that when I was building out Scale, I was doing the 5:00 and 6:00 AM Barry's. So I was waking up at 4:00 AM because I lived a little bit further from Barry's, and I also skateboarded there. But now I do the 6:00 and 7:00 AM Barry's every day, which means I get to wake up at 5:30 because I have a car now. But no, I mean, I would say, like, I think work-life balance for me, and I literally, like, put this through Claude and ChatGPT, but I basically, I don't sleep that much. Like, I get around 5 hours of sleep a day. But then—

Do you function well?

Yeah. So I function really well. And my sleep efficiency score is always, like, 100% quality. So I got kind of curious. And I'm like, I was asking, I was like, I perform really well at Barry's. My mind feels great. Like, what's wrong? Or like, am I getting enough sleep? And they basically spit out, they're like, you're not functioning at 100%. but you're functioning at 85%. And like your version of normal is probably like still pretty good, but you don't know what you could be at like 100%. So you should still sleep more. But the point is, I would rather have 85% efficiency and have those extra 3 hours to like hang out with friends and have work-life balance versus get 100% and like have no work-life balance. Because I do think that like being happy is so important to like not burning out, for example. And if I got 3 hours more sleep but didn't get to see my friends, I think I'd be a lot more miserable.

Yeah.

And you still even kept that even while you were building scale as well?

Yeah. I mean, I would say at scale, I was probably getting closer to like 4 hours because again, I was waking up like an hour earlier per day. So yeah, I think that by being a billionaire, I guess like now I can have security take me to Barry's and I have a car, which is really nice. And I live closer to Barry's. So I've been able to get those like extra hours of sleep. But no, I'm still like, like I literally am at 6, 7 AM Barry's.

Have your relationships changed since becoming a billionaire? Like, has your relationship with friends and just family changed since, you know, coming into wealth?

Um, I would say in general, no. Um, most of my friends are actually like very wealthy on their own, or, um, they're just like, like they've been old friends, like they've been there before everything has happened, right? Um, I would say with like new people probably, um, or like if I, for example, like meet a new friend and I'm like, okay, let's go on this trip, YOLO, then I think that friend that haven't been on like the PJ with me get a little bit salty because they're like, we were your day ones, why aren't we on the PJ? And I'm like, well, the PJ left from like London to Ibiza and you weren't in London. So like, you're always invited. Um, but it's stuff like that that maybe feels like it changed. But I said like, no, life is pretty good. Um, I think people treat me nicer. Yeah. Um, I think you get a lot more free things when you're like a billionaire. Um, which is great.

Did you ever envision this happening? Especially like in the beginning when you were first building your company? Did you ever like, was this the dream?

I would say that in order to be a billionaire, you have to have this relentless belief that you're going to be one, because you're going to be— starting a company doesn't make sense. At least starting a tech company. You have a 99.9% chance of failure, right? Why would anyone do that? And most people that have the ability to do that, they have multimillion-dollar offers at other companies, because they're smart. So I would say that after dropping out and joining the Thiel Fellowship, it became the norm. If I didn't become a billionaire, I was a failure. Because everyone around me was so intelligent, and they were raising tens of millions of dollars for their companies. Obviously, like, we knew a few billionaires. Um, like, like, quite literally, it was very obvious that everyone around me was going to be a billionaire or was already a billionaire. So, um, I knew that, like, like, that was, like, the bare minimum bar for me.

I heard this actually in another podcast, and that in order to build great companies, and depending on the company that— and the size of company that you want to build, it actually requires that level of, uh, thinking and a capability within their team. So let's just say if you want to build a 7-figure company, you need people who, if they wanted to go out on their own, they would be capable of building a 6-figure, maybe multiple 6-figure business on their own. But if you want to build an 8 or a 9-figure company, then you need multiple people who are capable of building multiple 7-figure, multiple 8-figure companies on their own. Maybe they just don't have that same risk profile within themselves or the desire to go out and do it on their own. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. Because who you hire is what the company is. And people that have the ability to do that and also have the risk tolerance to do that are the types of people that are going work harder at your company. Especially your early hires, like they're Swiss Army knives, right? Like, you don't want the person that's like, oh, this is not in my job description, I'm not going to do that. Like, we literally had our engineers labeling data. And you want people like that, because those are the types of people that are going to help you build from 0 to 1. And I would say that like most of our early hires, they ended up going out to build their own companies, because that's what they eventually wanted to do. I wouldn't even argue it was risk profile. I would just argue like it was a good opportunity, so they decided to take it instead of building their own company.

I think the best example of that was like the PayPal Mafia back in the day, where it's like literally all of them became billionaires.

Yep, exactly.

Yeah.

And you know, you were just talking about how for you, with the people that you were surrounded by, it was like you had to become a billionaire per se, just because that was what you were around. When you think about in today's world, especially with how important proximity was for you, if you were starting out, right, if we're talking to that young entrepreneur out there, what are some cities that you would instill in them that it's like, hey, this is probably a great spot for you for the company that you're trying to build? What are some of the top 3 to 5 cities that you would be in today's world?

I don't think there's 3 to 5. I think that San Francisco, by far number one, and then New York.

Why those 2?

I think that those are where the smartest entrepreneurs go and the smartest people. If you look at every single Ivy League, you look at Stanford, Berkeley, everyone ends up in SF and New York. And you want somewhere where there's a lot of talent density and a lot of people that want to be entrepreneurs, because those are the people that are also going to have that relentless belief that they're going to be billionaires. And they're going to have that risk profile, because you're the average of the people you hang out with, right? And you're going to have a lot more of that. If San Francisco, every single person is trying to build a unicorn, you're going to feel incredibly lazy if you're like, I'm an engineer at Google. And you're going to feel embarrassed every time someone asks, what do you do? And you're like, I'm an engineer at Google. And I think public embarrassment is actually a really great way to push you to be more ambitious. So yeah, I don't think any other city really has that. And I say this in LA even. I don't think LA has that. I am here mainly because we're in the creator economy and there are a lot of— this is creator central. But if I were building any other company besides a creator business, I wouldn't be here.

Where do you see the future of the creator economy heading in the next 5 to 10 years maybe, or 1 to 2 years per se?

Again, I think that AI is really going to take over when it comes to the creator economy. I think that right now a lot of creators are against AI because they don't know how their data is going to be trained. But selling their likeness is probably the future because it doesn't really make sense for them to— work with a brand, fly out, create content, and then come back. Because that actually costs a lot more money for a brand to do versus if they can just sell their likeness, the brand can create the perfect piece of content that they want with the creator. And then they'll also be able to scale their time too, right? Because they'll be able to work with more and more brands. Obviously, they can't dilute their brand, so don't work with too many brands. But let's say you're working with every luxury fashion house out there, right? That's not going to dilute your brand. You're just going to look even cooler. So I believe that that's the future of the creator economy, but we haven't really gotten there yet. And we need like the first person to really become incredibly rich from doing that before it becomes mainstream. Kind of like when the first person, I forget who was the first creator that like Kylie Jenner's lipstick maybe. And then everyone was like, I want to build a company too. Right. But before that, no one would take equity. Everyone was like, I just want money and cash.

I want to be sponsored by a big company.

Someone I feel like actually recently just did that is, is KB Lame. He makes like a, he doesn't talk on any of the, uh, on any of the content. He just makes like kind of just entertainment-based content. I believe he, I don't remember. Do you guys know how much he sold it for? It was a lot of money.

Oh, I saw that. Yeah.

Yeah. A lot of money. And I mean, that's where I was. One of the things I wanted to ask you is, do you feel like creators selling their likeness, which you said that you do think it's gonna become more common, but do you think like AI avatars and just AI-centric creators where it's not even a real person, do you believe that's gonna become more normalized? Or do you think people are gonna have a hard time coming to kind of terms that that's not a real person on the other side of the screen?

I think it's a very, very different market. Um, like for example, there's apps like Replika, which is a romantic partner that's AI. And the normal person isn't going to talk to like Replica and fall in love with Replica, right? But there's a whole subset of people because there's billions of people on this earth that do talk to Replica and Replica makes a lot of money. Um, and I think that the majority of people are not going to be, uh, enamored by AI creators, but I think there is a small subset that's enough of a market that will be.

I think we saw that 13 years ago with the movie Her. Yeah. The guy was talking to like the AI voice. Yeah.

I wanted to just briefly touch on the mindset that you had when you were building this company, right? You know, we were talking You were talking about it earlier that among yourself and all the billionaires that, you know, like there's a certain level of kind of crazy that they have to be, like that unwavering self-belief that they have in themselves. Do you recall back and maybe even in the earlier days, in the first couple years into building your company, that like maybe there were some low points in the company, maybe you had a bad day, or maybe a mistake was made? What was your self-talk in that moment? Did you always have a certain kind of motto or a certain level of self-talk that you would kind of resort back to where it's like, we're going to persist through this?

I don't think failure was an option. I hate the idea of losing people money and disappointing people. Maybe it's the Asian parents that I had, but I really don't like disappointing people. Maybe I'm a people pleaser. Who knows? But I just thought to myself, you have to get through this because you can't disappoint anyone.

And then the process of taking on investors, was there any money that you turned away, per se, that you didn't necessarily want them to come into the company? What was your thought process? What was your decision-making process for capital that you brought in and then decided not to?

Well, I mean, we were oversubscribed. So I would say the thought process was just like, are you going to be value-add as an investor? So for example, could your company be a customer? Or are you going to help us hire engineers? Where is your value going to be? I think that value-add investors are the best. And then you want investors that are just going to leave you alone. But the number one thing you don't want is an investor that wants to be really, really helpful and be a little bit too involved in the business. Because you know that when things go south, They're going to be really annoying. And the best thing you can do when things go south is leave a founder alone unless they reach out to you for help. You don't want someone hitting you up going, how's the business doing? How can I help? You're doing this wrong, et cetera, et cetera. Because you don't want bad advice. And most investors will give bad advice.

That's a really interesting philosophy. Yeah, did you experience that at all at any point in time with people?

I have definitely regretted bringing some people onto the cap table, which is fine. But I've, in general, like, like even those people I like knew, oh, this is probably a bad idea, but I got guilt-tripped into it.

Well, Lucy, we like to end these podcasts off with 2 questions for our guests. I'll start and then, and then Jack will end it off here. So Lucy, how old are you today?

I am 31 years old.

31. Became a billionaire this last year.

Yes.

If me and you died tomorrow and you had one more message to leave with the younger generation, what would that be?

I would say, especially if you're in college, go make friends with every single person that you know. Um, there is literally no other time in your life that you're You're going to be surrounded by such intellectual people that all need friends. Because you're a freshman in college, let's say, no one has friends. Everyone wants to make new friends. And these people are going to be your future hires, your future investors, your future co-founders. And if you miss out on that, it gets a lot harder as people start building new friend groups and new lives after they graduate. And if you have graduated, just try to stay close to the people that you did meet in college, because there's a level of Um, like emotional— there's a level of emotional bond that you guys have that can't be replicated. And that is probably like, as if you stay close to them, they're still going to end up being your future hires and your future co-founders. But once you lose touch, like you lose your college network. And when you lose your college network, it really does become a lot harder.

I'll just say this, that's one of my favorite closing answers I think we've ever received, because I even look at when I have kids one day. It's— I, I don't want to send my kids to college, be like, solely for the education. Of course I'd want them to go to a good school if they want to go to college, but it's not about the education itself, it's about who you meet.

Yeah, I don't think any single person from college is like, wow, I use everything I learned in college at my job. Like, I don't think not one single person, especially like in engineering. Like, when you study computer science, all you learn is theoretical stuff.

Obsolete.

And it's— yeah, exactly. And Lucy, for, you know, everything you've accomplished, looking back at your legacy, how do you want to be Honestly, just a nice, friendly person, like, that's super happy all the time, which I'm glad I actually had that reputation. So yay.

Well, Lucy, this was an excellent podcast. Thank you so much for being on and the incredible advice you dropped from start to finish.

Thank you.

But for everybody watching right now, guys, be sure to like and subscribe for amazing content coming every week to the School of Hard Knocks podcast. We're going to put the links down to Lucy's socials that we're able to follow along with her as she continues to build more billion-dollar companies. And lastly, we're going to put the link down in the description to join the School of Mentors, where every week we host live calls with the 8, 9, and 10-figure entrepreneurs that we interview. Of you on the School of Hard Knocks. So if you want direct access to the School of Hard Knocks billionaire network, go down, click the link in the description to join. We can't wait to see you on the inside. With that being said, we'll see you in the next video.