Lucy Guo’s path to being a billionaire started in 2nd grade

By Randall Yip, Executive Editor

Tech entrepreneur and billionaire Lucy Guo learned the value of money at an early age. Her parents taught her the importance of both education and a bank account.

“Every dollar that they earn, they have saved,” said the 30 year old about her Chinese immigrant parents. Both came to America for education and graduated with advanced degrees in electrical engineering.

The lesson must have worked. Forbes recently named Guo the youngest self-made woman billionaire, overtaking Taylor Swift, 35.

Guo saw on the playground how her friends had all these things “I didn’t have.” She knew if she wanted “those things,” because her parents were frugal, she would have to find a way to buy it herself.

Glued to her computer in the second grade mesmerized by video games, she figured out that acquiring rare virtual pets as rewards for playing these games had value.

“You can write a bot that would like find a rarest pet and just like snatch it before anyone else can do it. And you can resell this pet for like thousands of dollars,” she told AsAmNews. “So, I was like, okay, cool. Like, I don’t have $1,000 to spend, but like if I write a bot, then I can get this pet. And then I realize it was an entire resell market for this. So that’s kind of like how it started.”

Some of those pets sold in the low four figures.

By fourth grade, she had learned WordPress and began building websites and creating her own video games.

That caught the attention of engineers, designers and artists who agreed to work with Guo for free.

“Then we built our own virtual pet site. I have no idea how I did that. But yeah, it was just like building random stuff all through like elementary and high school.”

Guo’s English teacher looks back

Her English teacher in both the 10th and 12th grade, Lisa Sohn, noticed something special in Guo.

“One of the stories she told me is that when she was 10 years old, she would wake up in the middle of the night and sneak into her dad’s office in order to program things and like if she got caught, she’d be in trouble.” Sohn told AsAmNews.

Those late hours are something she’s maintained in adult life. She’s up at 5 in the morning, heads for her morning workout where she looks forward to being stimulated by loud music. Then she gets ready for a long workday that doesn’t routinely end until midnight. Her hectic schedule is only occasionally interrupted by spending an hour or so with friends.

That frantic pace did her well in high school.

“By senior year, she had already created a couple online companies that were generating enough income to help her parents with their mortgage and pay for some of her college,” said Sohn.

Guo attended Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh majoring in computer science and human-computer interaction. By senior year she dropped out of college to accept the Thiel Fellowship in 2012.

Guo turns college dropout

She admits her parents weren’t crazy about the idea and had visions of her living on the streets struggling to support herself.

Quite the opposite happened. Guo would subsequently get hired at Quora where she met Alexandr Wang. Snapchat would follow. In 2016, she left the company to team up with Wang to launch Scale AI. They quickly learned applications for AI in the driverless car industry.

The two had a falling out in 2018 and Wang pushed Guo out. Seeing that coming, Guo wheels had already been churning about her next adventure.

Ultimately, she decided she needed a break before eventually launching her own venture capital fund. But that proved unsatisfying.

“I got the itch to build a company while living with all these founders,” she said. “Yeah, I ended up raising like $9 million dollars over a text message. to start Passes.”

She considers her current company an updated version of Only Fans. She envisions it empowering creators to take control of their own careers, building their own brand as well as generational wealth. For her, it’s about assisting creators to “turn their followers into fortune.”

Despite no longer being with Scale AI, she still has a 5% stake in the company. Those shares are expected to be worth $1.2 billion once a tender offer closes on June 1.

Guo reflects on her values

Being the world’s youngest women billionaire and one of the newest still hasn’t hit her yet.

“My lifestyle is very much so the same as it always has been,” she told AsAmNews. “Like I’m buying one, getting one free and 50% off deals on Uber Eats, right? I just don’t really think about it.”

She still keeps in constant touch with her teacher Sohn who confirms that Guo’s frugalness is not exaggerated.

“She’s going to be cheap till the day she dies,” proclaimed Sohn. “She tries to get free food, free clothes, but when I go out to eat with her now, I do expect her to pay for my lunch. I do.”

She also says Guo is known to hit the electronic dance music circuit calling her a partier who knows how to get things done. Sohn believes people who do business with Guo feel her energy and trust her.

“She had this perfect mix of being able to innovate, design and implement that a lot of CS people, whether they’re men or women, aren’t capable of doing all three. And then being able to walk into a a room of men predominantly and say, give me money. And then they give it to her. And that’s just really uncommon, right?”

The teacher hopes her former student can be an inspiration to others.

“It might be scary to go away from the conventional Asian career journey, but it’s okay,” said Guo. “Take the values that you learn. Life is not as much of a risk as you think it is when making large decisions. So, for example, a lot of people think that dropping out was considered a large risk, but it’s not, right? Almost every single college will just accept you back. You might lose a few years of your life, but, there’s no better time to take these, quote unquote risks than when you’re young.”

(An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of money Guo made reselling virtual pets)