Lucy Guo: From Hackathons to Co-Founder of a Billion-Dollar AI Data Labelling Startup.
By the age of 23…
Some people are unbelievably impressive.
Lucy Guo learned to program in second grade and has been creating websites since sixth grade.
Growing up in Silicon Valley, she was heavily influenced by the tech industry and started building websites, apps and games throughout school. By the end of High School, she had even earned 5 digit figure revenues off the internet by marketing businesses and ads.
Lucy then attended Carnegie Mellon University where she studied Computer Science and Human-Computer interactions. During her second year, she applied for the prestigious Thiel Fellowship. This scholarship awards 20 people under 20 years old $100,000 and mentorship to build a business. On one condition: to drop out of school for the duration of the two-year program.
She dropped out of college in her senior year when she earned her 2014 Thiel Fellowship.
“The Thiel Fellowship gave me an opportunity. I was able to drop out and pursue my dreams earlier than I would have. On top of that, the community has been phenomenal. It’s a group of young founders who understand you. They push you to your boundaries and help make you a more intellectual and mature human being,” said Guo.
Lucy used the money from the Thiel Fellowship to build a food delivery app. The app targeted sororities trying to fundraise money from bake sales. After some initial success, the app was closed due to legal issues surrounding food delivery from non-commercial kitchens.
Lucy then interned at Facebook and was a product designer at Quora and Snapchat. She enjoyed working in smaller companies because having a lot of ownership in a fast-growing company was important to her as well as the people she would work with and the culture.
During Lucy’s stint at Quora she met Alexandr Wang with whom she teamed up to form Scale, one of the startups that launched at Y Combinator S 16. Scale is the simplest API for repetitive human operation and, according to TechCrunch, is growing 40 percent week over week with over 50 percent gross margins. Scale enables developers to use an API for humans to complete repetitive tasks. Many startups use Scale for various tasks from content moderation to phone calling businesses.
Lucy eventually left scale and is now an Angel Investor. She. Is. 26.
Reading Lucy’s story not only reminds me of my own inadequacy but also some of the learnings from Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers: The Story of Success”. Malcom argues that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Lucy benefited from being surrounded by tech, product design from an early age. She saw first-hand the process of early-stage VC investing.
I am simultaneously excited and nervous to see what she does next.
