Lucy Guo’s second act: After the 29-year-old left Scale AI, she has the ‘itch to build’ something new

The idea of Scale AI came from a suggestion by one of their YC roommates, who proposed creating an “API for humans.” “When he said that, I was like, that is so controversial,” Guo said. “That’s a brilliant idea.”

Guo and Wang then developed a product to connect customers with contractors to do manual and time-consuming tasks. They initially focused on outsourced phone calls but quickly narrowed their focus to data labeling and quality control for autonomous vehicles, an emerging sector at the time.

“Cruise became one of our first customers,” Guo said. “There’s a lot of money in self-driving cars.” Since then, Scale AI has quickly grown, becoming a dominant force in the data labeling industry. It raised $1.6 billion in total funding, according to PitchBook, and was recently valued at $13.8 billion.

Guo left the startup in 2018.

“The itch to build”

After Scale AI, Guo decided to apply her learnings to a new entrepreneurial opportunity: investing. Accel, one of Scale AI’s investors, provided Guo with scout money to invest in startups. Her initial success led her to establish her own venture fund, Backend Capital, which has since invested in hundreds of early-stage startups.

Backend Capital raised $8 million for its first fund, followed by a $40 million second fund. Some of her notable investments include the expense management platform Ramp, and the compensation benchmarking tool Pave.

In addition to her venture fund, Guo cofounded the startup incubator HF0 in 2019 with Dave Fontenot, who continues to run the program. For the three-month program, founders live together in a large San Francisco mansion, focusing entirely on building their startups. In exchange for 5% equity and a $1 million uncapped investment, HF0 takes care of “everything that a founder spends time on,” including food, laundry, and fitness classes.

“By living with all these founders, I started getting the itch to build a company,” Guo said. “I thought that living with founders and essentially incubating companies or helping other companies would fulfill me, but I was just like, ugh.”

This growing desire to create something of her own again led Guo to a new idea: Passes, a creator-focused monetization platform that she founded in 2022.

“Creators are entrepreneurs,” Guo said, citing examples like Kylie Jenner’s lipsticks and Jake Paul’s men’s personal care brand. She believes that creators are key to marketing their products and should have better control over their audiences. “If you have a thousand superfans that are willing to spend $5 a day on you, that’s an income.”

Guo’s vision for Passes quickly gained traction. Guo, as the CEO and sole founder, raised a $9 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital within a week of initiating the raise. “We literally had no name for it, no website, no deck,” she said. “It was pretty crazy. It was a text message raise.” In February, Passes raised a $40 million Series A led by Bond Capital.

Passes help creators monetize their audiences through various channels, including subscriptions, livestreaming, pay-per-minute one-on-one calls, paid messaging, and e-commerce stores. “This really allows people to own their fans,” Guo said, explaining that a creator making $7,000 on Instagram can level up to $350,000 to $450,000 a month with Passes.

Creators on the platform span diverse categories, from sports and chess to music. Through Passes, creators can keep up to 90% of their earnings, with the platform taking a 10% cut and 30 cents per transaction. The company has already achieved eight figures in annualized net revenue, said Guo.

Passes’ product roadmap is large. Drawing on her AI expertise, Guo aims to launch features such as AI-driven pricing to gauge the value of content and how much fans are willing to pay. She also plans to introduce a donation feature, allowing creators to contribute a portion of their earnings from Passes to nonprofits. Her long-term vision is for Passes to support “creators to become entrepreneurs and start creating generational wealth.”

“Every single one of my creator friends always asks me, how do I get into building my own brand?” she said.

No stranger to building a brand herself, Guo is ready to help.