The One Discipline That Made Me a Billionaire by Age 30 | Lucy Guo

My daily routine is essentially waking up between like 5.30am to 6 o'clock am every day and I quite literally just roll out of bed then I go straight to Barry's. One thing about me is I literally got my house specifically because it's five minutes away from Barry's and five minutes from the office so I can reduce my commute and I don't really need a car which is awesome. I shower and I hit work. Afterwards I'm usually just in like back to back meetings. I try to sometimes block off time because like I need to like be in figma and like actually give feedback on design. I'm usually working until maybe like 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock I'll get dinner then I'll go back to work and then I'll fall asleep sometime between like 11pm to 1am depending on the day and then repeat. You know in YC they tell you you should only be doing three things which is like working out, talking to customers and building. I see like why working out is so important because it puts you on a schedule, tests your discipline like no matter how shitty I'm feeling I will still get up and go out and work out because I know I'm going to feel better and have more energy to be better at my job the rest of the day. So why my life looks like it is today but like don't sit still essentially. I don't waste time scrolling through Tik Tok, watching TV, watching movies, etc. I think by not sitting still I've been able to really be efficient with my time and invest it in things that make me happy. Hi, I'm Lucy Guo. I am the founder of Scale.ai and Passes, Backing Capital and HF0. I angel invest. I've invested in over 100 different companies and I'm excited to chat with you guys today. I think in terms of like how it's potentially changed my life, my DMs are popping. Not life changing but it's been cool. I mean I think overall it's probably just like what makes me happy. Everyone's like okay cool like what are you buying with your money, etc. But like at the end of the day like what makes me happy is like what drives every single thing I do. Whether it's like you know building passes because it makes me happy because it provides challenges in my life but I also get to like you know change people's lives. So at Passes we're building infrastructure for creators to monetize their brand. So I think when you look at the largest creators they really are like unicorns. For example Kim Kardashian built Skims, Logan Paul built Prime, Mr. Beast with Feastables. I'm excited for us to eventually build a unicorn creator. I think I got suspended from kindergarten to be quite honest. I think it came from like me telling the teacher that what we were learning was dumb. But if you think about it like my parents are trying to teach me like I was going to like athletics competitions like multiplication, division, etc. back in like kindergarten. And in school they were literally like here's the alphabet, right? And I was just very bored as a child so I was always trying to figure out like different things to do. I was like learning stuff on my own specifically like the stuff I learned was to like make money but eventually I discovered my love for product and I was like oh this is actually really fun. But you could see glimpses of it where like you know I tried to start my own virtual pet site after being addicted to Neopets. I was playing a lot of online video games so I was figuring out how to start my own online arcade game website. I mean I think what really shaped how I'm an entrepreneur today is that through like the early stages of me like making money my parents found all of my hidden cash and would take it away. So then I was like I have to like figure out how they don't take away cash. PayPal would come out and then you could just go like buy a Visa debit card open up a PayPal account and that's when I started learning how to make money on the internet. And then that's when I got curious about building my own websites and then like that kind of led to hackathons. And then I would say like the turning point of like real entrepreneurship and like wanting to build lasting companies like more than just bots right was at these hackathons where suddenly I was exposed to a startup world and I was like wow I can build apps that like millions of people use. This is really really cool. Both my parents are absolutely brilliant. They're both technical. I think it was interesting because they actually really discouraged me from pursuing a technical field because they kind of imagined like my place as a woman was to get married and pop out grandchildren but they still wanted me in an intelligent environment to find an intelligent partner. I think I ended up pursuing it almost by accident. I thought I was going to be a chemical engineer because I was like like chemistry was my favorite subject like I loved AP chemistry and I was very good at it. But when I ended up on this website College Confidential like I need help with my college applications and there's this random stranger who literally looked at my extracurriculars and it was like you're an idiot if you want to get into the best college just apply for computer science. And I was like I guess that makes sense. So that's actually like kind of how I just landed in computer science. My college days were like I was going to a lot of hackathons like you know every few weeks mHacks, HackMIT, quite literally every hackathon I like was like I'm going to go to. And then I made a lot of friends and I say this because I might be biased but like when I was first hiring like the first people I went to were the friends I made in college and they didn't even ask any questions, which is concerning. They definitely should have asked how much the equity was worth. They were just like yeah like we'd love to come work with you. YOLO right? And that was because there was that trust that was gained in college. When you're building your next company your net worth is your net worth and like you're going to be able to hire the friends that you made in college and you know they're good. I think if I didn't have a rebellious nature I probably would have been the good girl that my parents wanted me to be and stayed in college right? And like I knew I was hurting them when going to do this but I think that like part of the rebellious nature was I want to prove you wrong and show you that I can forge my own path and I will be successful at college. So I'm sorry I'm hurting you right now but like it'll be worth it at the end of the day. I don't think I ever doubted it and what helped me commit was just thinking like this is not a risk at all. Like college is always going to be there versus this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I'm going to be learning a lot. I feel like I'm not learning practical skills in college and everything that I've learned was through like hackathons right? So if I leave college and I dive myself in the startup world I'm going to learn significantly more and be able to like actually build products that millions of people use versus learning theoretical skills that like I'm probably not going to use in my job. So I was pretty like dead set on it early on. I think my conviction was to optimize learning so I've always like that's been my number one role in life like even if you're leaving something it feels like a risk it's not that much of a risk if you're optimizing learning because your knowledge is always going to be worth something and the more knowledge you gain the more valuable you are later on in life. I think the reaction I got from most people was you're a ******* idiot. From my parents to my friends to like people who didn't know me people were just like yo like what are you doing? A lot of it stemmed from the fact that I actually only had four CS classes left to graduate like one year left right? So I think the like risk mental calculation didn't really make sense for others but for me I was like what am I I'm losing time right but like what's the worst case scenario I take a job what's the second worst case scenario I go back to college. I chose like to optimize for that learning and like optimize for being in a network of like extremely ambitious intelligent people. As a founder you already know ideas are the easy part. It's the execution actually building the product that slows everything down. That's where Lovable comes in. It's not just an AI tool it's your on-demand engineering team. Simply describe your idea Lovable then builds a full front-end back-end and database so you can launch real production-ready software without writing code. It's already powering over a hundred thousand new products a day helping 2.5 million builders turn ideas into software just by describing what they want. No devs, no delays, no excuses. They're launching in weeks not months and guess what these teams are still tiny. In fact team EO is also using Lovable to build their upcoming EO school platform and we're loving it. If you're a non-technical founder or just want to build without bottlenecks try Lovable today for free. Use the promo code EO20YT to get 20% off your first purchase of the Lovable pro plan. I think at Snap I really learned how to think much bigger like when I first joined Snap I didn't realize that kind of the vision Evan had for Snap and it was very inspiring seeing like his ideas on how he would eventually compete with Amazon, compete with Google etc. Which I think like no one even to this day thinks about Snap competing with Amazon or Google but to see him think so innovatively about product and not care about like that A-B test portion of things taught me just a lot about like the importance of being open minded and like product driven as well and really about like perfection. I think the lesson I really took away from that is like just get to 90% you don't need to spend three years going back and forth on a design but also like I remember there was like that zoom out the Snap Maps feature that like no one at the company wanted to build because everyone thought it was so dumb and he was just like kept on insisting it and it turns out like he was right at the end of the day right. It ended up like being a very natural UX that people love and use that really almost tells you also that like people don't really know what they want in the consumer field right. Like it might sound like the dumbest thing but you really just have to like kind of give it a go hence like why he was probably just like you know just think innovatively like don't think about like all this like research feedback etc because if he did that like that would have never been shipped. But like once it got into the hands of people they realized like oh I actually I wanted this but no one could have told you that when you come up with a product spend like two weeks designing it and then ship it and see how it does and if there's traction then go and iterate and improve on it but people will use products they want to use even if it's super buggy and the UX is shitty for the most part. So it's better to ship that like 90% with like no user research and then double down on the product like if it gets traction versus wasting like months doing all this research etc and shipping it and like it might fall flat. I mean I would say it's like a risk benefit analysis and then am I learning right? So for example like when I was at Snap I was giving up a few million dollars but I also was like that's not life-changing for me so I would rather optimize learning and also have the opportunity to make life-changing money and if I don't make that life-changing money at least I learned a bunch of like new knowledge and I'll be able to like hop to my next job and make more and all I'm losing is like what one to two years because that's amount of time it would take to like figure out like am I going to like be able to build this company unless you're crazy like I have friends that like you know pivoted for like six years and then finally found something which like those are obviously the founders I left investing in. If I were making like a hundred million dollars at Snap like would I have made that jump like I'm going to be realistic probably not. I probably been like that's life-changing money it is worth staying four years for a hundred million dollars before moving on. So I would say like those two things are like my criteria when choosing like when to make moves we were both working at Quora and like I think it was literally over lunch we're like huh should we start a company together one day I was like yeah let's do it and then over like winter break we started integrating on ideas so we came up with a horrible one class pass for clubbing and you know it got traction but you know it's bad when it's only VCs that are subscribing to your service and then we were like okay let's go do something more meaningful so we pivoted to Ava which is a health care app that we help you find the best doctors for a specific procedure so it's like oh you need a root canal here is like the best person to give you a root canal also a terrible idea but the idea ended up getting us into YC I think mostly because I knew we were going to get into YC because I was like talking to YC partners before the interview and after the interview and they're just like oh yeah like you'll get it because like you guys are both super smart you're obviously at Snap and a Teal fellow and he is like you know MIT so yeah we entered YC and then the idea was terrible so we ended up pivoting to scale I think like generalized my most painful failures have been trusting people that I shouldn't have trusted which is just not great especially in the workplace for example like you might trust an employee and then like when they underperform and you need to fire them they decide to try to extort you it's just like you need to make sure that like be like you don't want people where like you constantly feel like they're going to like stab you in the back I'm figuring out on who to trust this is very cliche but go with your gut but outside of going with your gut like you should definitely just do like reference checks on both like friends like people that know them or like people that aren't even friends you know like acquaintances because like you're probably gonna get a more honest answer from acquaintances I think the best way to build trust again is like be extremely authentic but at the end of the day if like trust is broken like sometimes it can't be repaired and that's when you know like you might just need to separate and maturity is understanding that I think the team self-motivates themselves but it's innovation when they see that like we can ship a product in two weeks and it takes a large company like a that's stagnant like years to ship a product that's extremely exciting for the team especially when like you tie that product to actual revenue numbers and I think it's just constantly emphasizing that and that's why a lot of engineers choose to work at startups instead of larger companies because they feel like they have more impact impact is what motivates them because they're not going to get that same impact at a large company leaders need to be doing IC work as well because the only way you can judge people on like their actual job is if you do the job yourself and like really it's all hands on deck like nothing is too big to be done so for example like everyone was on intercom when we got a pilot for like a new customer quite literally we'd have a war room with like engineers like me etc and like we would all be labeling that data and making sure it's perfect we really emphasize like nothing is below you you're going to do what's best for the company and if like your time is best being spent like helping close this deal then like you're going to do that let's say you're running customer support and you're not doing the customer to support tickets yourself you're not going to know if your customer support reps are answering them fast enough giving the correct answers or like if it you know if it's not obviously it's like should they know the answer to this or is it like something more obscure and you really only get that like muscle if you you do the work I think the number one thing I look for is like intelligence and hard work because you can be the smartest person ever but if you don't work hard you're going to not impact the company hard work is extremely important to me especially because like with creators we're very creator first that's our culture which means that like because creators can be 24 7 we need to be 24 7 like if a creator hits me up at like 2 a.m like about a bug I'm proud to say that I can call my engineers like and one of them will pick up and fix that bug at 2 a.m which is incredibly important in an industry like this and I look for people that are willing to like go that extra mile that's not saying like you have to work every weekend but like if needed like are you going to show up yeah I mean I think as a leader one of my like biggest values in life is just kindness it's like you're wanting the best for everyone right like if someone wins awesome like if I lose an amazing engineer I still want to help them like succeed if I lose a crappy engineer I still want to help them succeed for me I'm like I think I'm very giving as like both a person and a leader so it's like okay like you know I give you chances I like try to if you're not working out in your role but I think that you're hard working and smart I try to find like a role that like you might be better suited for so I would say it was a mix of things I think what inspired me was actually living with all the founders like their energy definitely grew on me and I wanted these founders to start bosses but no one would do it and then around the same time I had a friend who asked me to be CEO of his AI company and I kind of sat on it like I kind of got excited right I was like oh my god like I mean I feel ready to be a founder again because I think a lot of the reason why I wasn't I didn't do it sooner was because I was scared of failure but I finally got to a point where I was like you know what if I fail whatever it doesn't matter like my life is going to be fine most people don't build two successful startups like don't be scared of failure just go and do the thing right and I didn't feel like doing an AI company again to be quite honest I was like I did b2b enterprise I know how it works but I would rather like if I'm doing a second company and like risking failure at least have fun doing it and I had always been attracted consumer you can see this with like a bunch of different like random apps I had made snap was like one of the most fun experiences of my life so I like just knew I wanted to be consumer and I had been sitting on this idea for a little bit so I was like okay like let's see some competitors out there and really you could only find like patreon they've existed for a decade and I saw like an opportunity in the market I was friends with a lot of creators I lightly asked my creator friends like hey if I were to build this would that you use it so you know like selling before building they're like absolutely I was like great and then I just talked to my LPs and they were like here's money go build so it all happened really quickly like I would say within the span of like 24 hours and my friend asking me to like be CEO of his AI company and me having like commitments so the future I see for the creator economy I think that AI is really going to help creators be co-pilots I see more creators becoming entrepreneurs more kids want to be creators than ever before so I think the creator economy is going to grow but also everyone a creator marketing spend is going up in like pretty much every country and I think this is due to the fact people are realizing like their audience and like the like reach you get is much stronger spending it on creator marketing versus on ads so I think because of this we're going to see more creators work so closely with brands that they're essentially considered co-founders or start their own brands which is why I think like you know current creators are possible and like we're excited to help them either get access the best brands and like get that equity for long-term generational wealth or if it makes sense to like help them build that next product I think if 20 year old me could go back in time I would stop complaining about some of the people I work with and just start really like getting to know them better and uplifting them why do I think so I think that like in general most companies are very gossipy right so if you're complaining about people like it just gets around and then it drives them away obviously because they hear about complaints like no one wants to be talked badly about and I think like the best work environments and the most positive ones are when you are like everyone's cheerleader so uh I think I would have like spent more effort like seeing the good in people this is gonna sound very LA but I feel like I have like manifested everything in my life and because I'm like focused so much on positive energy I feel like as long as I like put in that hard work to like bring my dreams to life and like surround myself with positive people like anything is possible so cheesy but I really like do believe that's true and like I have like the best friends in the world that you know are constantly around me and encouraging me and like really doing whatever they can to help like they'll go out of my way they're like truly incredible and I think that when I have like such positive people around me like I only look at like upside