The following exercises in Business Spotlight Übungsheft (p. 11) are based on the article “Lucy Guo – Helping creators create” (Profile, pp. 14–15). Here, we provide you with an excerpt from the article.
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Helping creators create
Would becoming a billionaire change your life very much? In 2025, 30-year-old Lucy Guo became the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, a record that had been held by singer Taylor Swift. However, Guo told CNBC: “My life pre-money and post-money, it hasn’t really changed that much.”
Guo is one of the founders of the AI data-labeling company Scale AI. “Labeling” refers to the process of tagging raw data for machine-learning models. Although she left the company in 2018, after disagreements with her cofounder, Alexandr Wang, Guo kept her five percent stake in the company. That turned out to be a very lucrative decision: When Meta invested $14.3 billion in Scale AI, the value of Guo’s shares skyrocketed to $1.25 billion.
It’s not entirely true that Guo’s life hasn’t changed — she now lives in a $30 million home in Los Angeles, for example — but she has the same work ethic she learned while growing up as the daughter of Chinese immigrants in California. In an interview in 2023, she said: “I was always an entrepreneur growing up,” selling Pokémon cards in kindergarten, coding in elementary school and making money from building bots in high school.
Financially, Guo can afford not to work anymore, but she does. And, starting at 5:30 a.m., her workday looks typical for an entrepreneur. “I probably don’t have work-life balance,” Guo told Fortune. “For me, work doesn’t really feel like work. I love doing my job.” In 2022, she founded a new social platform called Passes.
Willing to take a risk
After learning entrepreneurial and coding skills while still at school, Guo began studying computer science. However, after two years, she received the Thiel Fellowship, a program that gave her $100,000 to pursue her entrepreneurial dream. She dropped out of college. The decision was very hard for her parents to accept, after they’d sacrificed so much to give her a good education.
Guo began as an intern at Facebook (now Meta). Later, she worked at Quora, where she met Wang, and was the first female product designer at Snapchat, before she and Wang founded Scale AI, in 2016.
Guo’s new company, Passes, helps creators make money by selling access to exclusive content and products. [...] Most social media users enjoy content free of charge, but some are willing to pay for special things. Creators would like to monetize their content directly, rather than through advertising. Passes helps bring the two together, and Guo’s focus is to help creators build a sustainable business. [...]
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