Lucy Guo, who cofounded Scale AI with Alexandr Wang in 2016 before leaving in 2018, built her fortune less on daily involvement with the company than on the equity she kept after departing, a stake that paid off substantially once Scale AI was later sold to Meta. Guo, who describes herself as an average student during her two years at Carnegie Mellon University studying computer science, became a billionaire before turning 30.
Betting on herself twice more
Rather than stepping back after Scale AI, Guo has stayed active on two fronts: she's CEO of Passes, a creator monetization platform she founded in 2022, and runs Backend Capital, a venture firm through which she's made a string of startup investments. One of those bets already paid off again, an investment in a company later acquired by Anthropic that made her a major shareholder.
Working harder, not less, because of AI
Guo's read on AI's effect on daily work cuts against the common narrative that automation frees people up. "I think AI is making people work harder actually because you have to be awake for your agents to be running," she has said, adding that she recently logged a 26-hour day without sleeping. That experience lines up with a UC Berkeley study of 200 technology workers, which found that employees have been accelerating their pace, taking on more tasks, and working longer hours without being explicitly asked to. Guo also lost her previous title as the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire to Kalshi cofounder Luana Lopes Lara over the past year, a shift she says she's genuinely happy about, framing it as a good sign for women in business broadly.