The Youngest Self-Made Female Billionaire Thinks You Should Take More Risks
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Lucy Guo is firing on all cylinders, all the time.
She wakes up before the sun rises to take two, sometimes three, sometimes four back-to-back classes at Barry's Bootcamp. She has both her motorcycle license and scuba diving license, although she prefers to zip around on her electric scooter. Even the speed at which she talks feels like a train zooming by.
In that sense, her professional success has mirrored the breakneck pace at which she operates.
In the last decade alone, Guo has been selected for a Thiel Fellowship, worked at Snapchat as the company's first female designer, co-founded artificial intelligence firm Scale AI, left Scale AI, founded a venture firm and launched her own social platform Passes. In May, the 30-year-old unseated Taylor Swift as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire with her net worth of $1.3 billion, which largely stems from her nearly 5 percent stake in Scale AI. (The firm achieved unicorn status in 2019 after a $100 million investment from the Founders Fund.)
To no one's surprise, all of this happened much slower than Guo had anticipated.
"I thought I was going to build another company right away," she told Newsweek about her 2018 departure from Scale AI.
But Passes wouldn't come until years later.
Women's Global Impact: Lucy Guo
Women's Global Impact: Lucy Guo
Newsweek Illustration
Launched in 2022, the platform offers a way for creators to monetize direct-to-fan content, like subscriptions, livestreaming, pay-per-minute one-on-one calls, paid messaging and e-commerce stores.
"You've built the audience. Now it's time to monetize your fanbase," its website states.
The platform, whose slogan is "Passes makes millionaires—become the next one," appeals to creators through its low revenue split.
On Passes, creators can keep up to 90 percent of their earnings, while the platform takes a 10 percent cut and charges a 30-cent transaction fee. Comparably, creators on OnlyFans only take home 80 percent of their earnings. Patreon, another competitor to Passes, takes 8 to 12 percent as well as payout fees, with most creators reporting deductions of 15 to 20 percent.
Passes has largely been positioned as an alternative to OnlyFans, which was originally created as a general subscription platform but since become synonymous with explicit content. Asked about the comparison, Guo admitted that popular culture has made it a lot more difficult for Passes to stand on its own.
"It is definitely an uphill battle, but I do think that as we continue gaining more creators and launching different features, hopefully we're able to fight that stereotype, and people are going to see the full vision of Passes," she said.
The platform has already signed deals with well-known figures like influencer Jake Paul, NCAA gymnast Olivia Dunne, DJ and producer Kygo and media personality Paris Hilton. Paul has 28.4 million followers on Instagram, while Dunne, Kygo and Hilton each have 5.8 million, 5.5 million and 2.8 million followers on the app, respectively.
Currently, the platform supports thousands of creators creators and millions of fans, with top creators earning seven figures per year, Passes A SPOKESPERSON? told Newsweek.
Guo launched Passes after she realized it was really difficult for creators to strike deals with larger companies.
"At some point, I was like, 'You know what? Maybe I'll do it myself," she said.
Between 2022 to 2024, Guo raised $50 million for Passes over three rounds, bringing the company's valuation to $150 million.
Lucy Guo launched Passes in 2022. The platform offers a way for creators to monetize direct-to-fan content, like subscriptions, livestreaming, pay-per-minute one-on-one calls, paid messaging and e-commerce stores. Guo currently serves as founder and CEO.
Lucy Guo launched Passes in 2022. The platform offers a way for creators to monetize direct-to-fan content, like subscriptions, livestreaming, pay-per-minute one-on-one calls, paid messaging and e-commerce stores. Guo currently serves as founder and CEO.
Passes
The move from AI to the creator economy has been an adjustment. Guo said that creating an enterprise or business-to-business company, like Scale AI, is the obvious route to becoming a unicorn company, noting that "you can brute force your way into success." On the other hand, taking the consumer route into the creator economy is a lot more unpredictable.
"It requires a lot of patience," Guo said.
She likened it to working in Hollywood, pointing out that there are "a lot of personalities you have to deal with," and acknowledged that, "oftentimes, consumers don't know what they want."
"You kind of just build it and see what gets adopted," she said.
The tech founder tries to solve creator problems by observing the ways they connect with their fans, finding solutions that would make it easier for them to communicate and interact.
Choosing to build a platform for creators may not have been the easiest move, but Guo recalls that she's "always optimized for learning." Every time she's had to figure out her next step, she tends to lean into areas where she's unfamiliar.
"I think of what I'm leaving and what I'm gaining," she said. "If I'm not leaving life-changing money on the table, but I'm gaining more knowledge, that knowledge is going to be valuable down the road. Like, even if your first company doesn't work out, you're going to be able to take that knowledge and either get a job that pays more or start something else."
Guo is thrilled to see more women enter the tech industry and become founders in their own right, explaining that these women will typically go onto become investors who fund tech project led by other female founders.
She said the best advice she could offer another aspiring woman in tech is to hold off on fundraising until minimum viable product (MVP), an initial, scaled-down version of a product with just enough features for early adopters to provide feedback on.
"MVPs can be created without using any technology sometimes," Guo said. "Let's say you wanted to create a babysitter-matching app. You can literally run it off of Google Forms and start getting revenue that way. Or if you wanted to create a B2B enterprise software tool. You can can start collecting [letters of intent] from companies because that makes your fundraising so much stronger."
Guo will join Newsweek at this year's inaugural Women's Global Impact forum. The August 5 event, hosted at Newsweek's headquarters in New York City, will bring together some of the world's top female executives and connect them with rising stars across industries and job functions.
For more information on the event and entry guidelines, please visit the Women's Global Impact homepage.
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