Lucy Guo on Optimizing for Learning, Shipping at 90%, and Founding Again Without Fear of Failure
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Lucy Guo co-founded Scale AI and later founded Passes. In this interview Guo covers a daily routine, a childhood spent looking for ways to make money online, the decision to drop out of college, lessons from Snap, the messy path to Scale, and the thinking behind a second company. One idea recurs throughout: Guo judges big decisions by how much they will learn, and by whether the work makes them happy, rather than by the conventional measure of risk.
A Day Built Around Not Sitting Still
Guo describes waking between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. every day and going straight to a Barry's workout. Guo chose their house specifically because it is five minutes from Barry's and five minutes from the office, which keeps the commute short and means they don't really need a car. After showering, Guo goes to work, where the day is usually back-to-back meetings. Guo tries to block off time for hands-on product work, such as being in Figma and giving feedback on designs. Work usually runs until about 8 or 9 p.m., then dinner, then more work, and sleep somewhere between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m.
Guo cites Y Combinator's advice that founders should only do three things: work out, talk to customers, and build. Guo says they now see why working out belongs on that list. It puts you on a schedule and tests your discipline. No matter how bad Guo feels, they still get up and exercise, because they know it will leave them with more energy for work that day. Guo sums up the philosophy as "don't sit still." They say they don't spend time scrolling TikTok or watching TV or movies, and credit this with letting them use their time efficiently and invest it in things that make them happy.
What Drives the Work
Besides Scale AI and Passes, Guo mentions Backend Capital and HF0, and says they have angel invested in more than a hundred companies. Asked how success changed their life, Guo jokes that their DMs are "popping," which is "not life-changing, but it's been cool." When people ask what they are buying with their money, Guo answers that happiness drives everything they do. Building Passes makes them happy because it brings challenges into their life and lets them change people's lives.
Guo describes Passes as infrastructure for creators to monetize their brands. In Guo's view the largest creators are effectively unicorns, and they point to Kim Kardashian with Skims, Logan Paul with Prime, and MrBeast with Feastables. Guo says they are excited for Passes to eventually help build a unicorn creator.
A Bored Child Who Learned to Make Money Online
Guo says they believe they were suspended from kindergarten for telling the teacher that what the class was learning was dumb. Their explanation is that their parents already had them doing abacus competitions, multiplication, and division, while school was teaching the alphabet. Bored, Guo taught themselves things, at first mostly ways to make money. Along the way they discovered a love of product. Early signs included trying to start a virtual pet site after getting addicted to Neopets, and working out how to launch an online arcade game website while playing a lot of online games.
Guo traces their entrepreneurial side to one problem: their parents kept finding Guo's hidden cash and taking it away. Guo had to find somewhere the money couldn't be confiscated. When PayPal appeared, they found they could buy a Visa debit card, open a PayPal account, and start earning money online. That led to building websites, and websites led to hackathons.
Guo calls the hackathons the turning point, the moment they moved from building bots to wanting to build lasting companies. There they were exposed to the startup world and realized, as Guo puts it, that they could build apps used by millions of people.
Landing in Computer Science by Accident
Guo describes both parents as brilliant and technical. Even so, the parents discouraged Guo from a technical field. According to Guo, they imagined a woman's place was to marry and have grandchildren, though they still wanted Guo in an intelligent environment to find an intelligent partner.
Guo says they ended up in computer science almost by accident. Chemistry was their favorite subject, they excelled at AP Chemistry, and they planned to become a chemical engineer. While looking for application help on the forum College Confidential, a stranger looked at Guo's extracurriculars and told them they were an idiot and should apply for computer science if they wanted to get into the best college. Guo found that reasonable and did it.
In college Guo attended hackathons every few weeks, including MHacks and HackMIT, and made many friends there. Those friendships later mattered for hiring. When Guo first needed employees, the first people they approached were college friends, and those friends joined without asking questions. Guo jokes that this was concerning and that they should have at least asked what their equity was worth. Guo attributes the quick yes to trust built in college. The lesson Guo draws is that "your network is your net worth": you can hire the friends you made in college because you already know they are good.
Dropping Out: "This Is Not a Risk at All"
Guo says that without a rebellious streak they would probably have been the "good girl" their parents wanted and stayed in school. Guo knew leaving was hurting their parents, but part of the motivation was wanting to prove them wrong and show they could succeed without college.
Guo says they never doubted the decision. What helped them commit was reframing it as not a risk at all. College would always be there, while this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Guo felt they weren't learning practical skills in school, since everything useful had come from hackathons. Diving into the startup world would teach them far more and let them build products used by millions, instead of theory they would probably never use at work.
Guo calls "optimize learning" their number one rule in life. Leaving something may feel risky, but Guo argues it isn't much of a risk if you are optimizing for learning, because knowledge always retains value and makes you more valuable later.
Most people, from parents to friends to strangers, told Guo they were an idiot. Part of the reaction came from how close Guo was to finishing: only four CS classes and about one year remained. Guo understood that the risk math looked wrong to others, but their own reasoning was that staying meant losing time. The worst case was taking a job; the second-worst case was going back to college. Guo chose to optimize for learning and for being surrounded by extremely ambitious, intelligent people.
Lessons from Snap: Think Bigger, Ship at 90%
Guo says Snap taught them to think much bigger. When they joined, they didn't grasp Evan Spiegel's vision for the company. They found it inspiring to hear his ideas about eventually competing with Amazon and Google, which Guo notes almost nobody associates with Snap even today. Watching him think innovatively about product, without caring much about A/B testing, taught Guo to be open-minded and product-driven.
The other lesson was about perfection. Guo's takeaway is to "just get to 90%" rather than spend years going back and forth on a design. Guo's example is the zoom-out feature in Snap Maps. According to Guo, no one at the company wanted to build it because everyone thought it was dumb, but Spiegel kept insisting, and it became a natural interaction that people love and use. Guo reads this as evidence that consumers don't really know what they want. An idea can sound ridiculous, and you have to try it anyway. Had Spiegel relied on research and feedback, Guo believes the feature would never have shipped. Only once it was in people's hands did they realize they wanted it.
From this Guo draws a working method. Spend about two weeks designing a product, ship it, and see how it does. If it gets traction, iterate and improve. In Guo's view people will use products they want even when they are very buggy and the UX is poor. So it is better to ship at 90% with no user research and then double down if it catches on, rather than spend months on research only to have the launch fall flat.
How Guo Weighs Career Risk
Guo describes a two-part framework: a risk-benefit analysis, and whether they will be learning. Leaving Snap meant giving up a few million dollars, but Guo didn't consider that amount life-changing. They preferred to optimize for learning while taking a shot at truly life-changing money. If the company failed, they would still have gained knowledge and could move to a better-paying job. The real cost would be one to two years, roughly the time it takes to learn whether a company can work. Guo adds that some founders pivot for much longer, including friends who pivoted for six years before finding something, and that those are the founders Guo loves backing.
Guo admits the calculation depends on the stakes. Asked whether they would have left if they had been making a hundred million dollars at Snap, Guo says that realistically they probably would not have.
The Road to Scale: Two Bad Ideas First
Guo describes the start of Scale casually. Over lunch, Guo and their future co-founder wondered whether they should start a company together someday and agreed to do it. Over winter break they began working through ideas. The first, which Guo calls horrible, was "ClassPass for clubbing." It got some traction, but Guo jokes that you know an idea is bad when only VCs subscribe. They pivoted to Ava, a healthcare app meant to help people find the best doctor for a specific procedure, such as a root canal. Guo calls that a terrible idea too, but it got them into Y Combinator.
Guo says they knew they would be accepted because they had talked with YC partners before and after the interview. The partners said the pair would get in because both were very smart: Guo from Snap and the Thiel Fellowship, and the co-founder from MIT. Once in YC, they concluded the idea was still bad and pivoted to Scale.
Painful Failures: Trusting the Wrong People
Asked about failures, Guo says the most painful have come from trusting people they shouldn't have, especially at work. Guo's example is an employee who underperforms and, when fired, tries to extort the company. Guo's point is that you don't want people around you who make you constantly feel you might be stabbed in the back.
To decide whom to trust, Guo admits the advice is a cliché: go with your gut. Beyond that, they recommend reference checks with friends and with acquaintances of the person, since acquaintances will probably give a more honest answer. The best way to build trust is to be extremely authentic. But Guo also says that once trust is broken it sometimes can't be repaired, and then you may need to separate. Guo calls recognizing this a sign of maturity.
Motivating a Team Through Impact and Hands-On Leadership
Guo says the team largely motivates itself through innovation. Seeing a product ship in two weeks when a stagnant large company might take years is exciting, especially when the product is tied to real revenue. Guo keeps emphasizing that connection and believes it explains why many engineers choose startups: they want impact they couldn't get at a big company.
Guo argues that leaders need to do individual contributor work, because the only way to judge people's work is to have done it yourself. At Scale, Guo describes an all-hands-on-deck culture where nothing was too big or too small. Everyone was on Intercom. When a new customer pilot came in, engineers, Guo, and others would gather in a war room and label the data themselves to make sure it was perfect. The principle was that nothing is beneath you; if your time is best spent helping close a deal, you do that.
Guo's example is customer support. A leader who never answers tickets won't know whether reps respond fast enough, give correct answers, or should be expected to know a given answer versus one that is genuinely obscure. In Guo's words, you only build that "muscle" by doing the work.
Hiring for Intelligence, Hard Work, and Availability
The number one thing Guo looks for is intelligence combined with hard work. Even the smartest person won't affect a company without effort. Hard work matters especially at Passes, whose culture Guo describes as "creator first": because creators can be active around the clock, the company needs to be too. Guo says with pride that if a creator messages them at 2 a.m. about a bug, they can call their engineers and one will pick up and fix it. Guo calls this critical in that industry. They clarify this doesn't mean working every weekend, but they want people who will show up when needed.
Guo names kindness as one of their biggest values as a leader, meaning wanting the best for everyone. When they lose an engineer, whether excellent or weak, they still want that person to succeed. Guo describes themselves as giving. They offer chances, and if someone who seems smart and hardworking isn't succeeding in a role, Guo tries to find one that fits them better.
Why Guo Started Passes
Guo gives several reasons for founding again. One was living with founders, whose energy rubbed off on them. Guo also wanted other founders to build the idea that became Passes, but no one would. Around then a friend asked Guo to be CEO of his AI company. Guo got excited and realized they felt ready to be a founder again.
Guo says the main reason they hadn't started another company sooner was fear of failure. Eventually they decided failure didn't matter: their life would be fine either way, and although most people don't build two successful startups, the right move was to stop fearing failure and act.
Guo didn't want another AI company. They had done B2B enterprise and knew how it worked, and if they were going to risk failure on a second company, they wanted to at least have fun. Guo had always been drawn to consumer products, as their many side apps show, and Snap had been one of the most fun experiences of their life. Guo had been sitting on the idea for a while. Looking at competitors, they found essentially only Patreon, which had existed for a decade, and saw an opening.
Guo validated the idea by "selling before building." They asked creator friends whether they would use such a product, got an emphatic yes, then talked to their LPs, who told them, in Guo's words, "Here is money. Go build." Guo says all of this happened within roughly 24 hours of the friend's CEO offer.
Guo's View of the Creator Economy
Guo expects AI to act as a co-pilot for creators and expects more creators to become entrepreneurs. They note that more children want to be creators than ever and that creator marketing spend is rising in nearly every country. Guo attributes this to brands recognizing that creators' audiences and reach are a stronger use of money than ads. As a result, Guo expects creators to work so closely with brands that they are effectively co-founders, or to launch their own brands. Guo sees Passes' role as helping creators get access to the best brands and secure equity for long-term generational wealth, or, where it makes sense, helping them build their own next product.
What Guo Would Tell Their 20-Year-Old Self
Guo says that at 20 they would have stopped complaining about colleagues and instead gotten to know them and lifted them up. Their reasoning is that most companies are gossipy, so complaints spread, reach the person being criticized, and drive them away. Guo believes the most positive work environments are those where you act as everyone's cheerleader, and wishes they had put more effort into seeing the good in people.
Guo closes with something they admit sounds "very LA": they feel they have manifested everything in their life. Their belief is that with a focus on positive energy, hard work to make dreams real, and positive people around you, anything is possible. Guo calls this cheesy but says they truly believe it. They credit their friends, who constantly encourage them and go out of their way to help, and say that with such people around them, they only look at the upside.
My daily routine is essentially waking up between like 5:30 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. every day and I quite literally just roll out of bed. Then I go straight to Barry's. And one thing about me is I literally got my house specifically because it's 5 minutes away from Barry's and 5 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 am usually just in like back-to-back meetings. I try to sometimes block off time cuz like I need to like be in Figma and like actually give feedback on design. Cuz I'm usually working until maybe like 8:00, 9:00. Dinner, then I'll go back to work and then I'll fall asleep sometime between like 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. 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 TikTok, 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, Backend Capital and HF0. I angel invest. I've invested in over a hundred 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, MrBeast 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 abacus 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. 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 had 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 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 were 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 I ended up on this website called 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.
In my college days like I was going to a lot of hackathons. It's 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 cuz like 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 Drive Equity was worth. But they were just like, "Yeah, like we'd love to come work with you." Yolo, right? And that was cuz there was that trust that was gained in college. When you're building your next company, your network 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 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 without 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 rule 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 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.
I think at Snap I really learned how to think much bigger. Like when I first joined Snap, I didn't realize like 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 AB 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 3 years going back and forth on the 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 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 they they 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 2 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 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, 1 to 2 years because that's the 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 6 years and then finally found something. Which like those are obviously the founders I love 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. And I probably would
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 iterating on ideas. So, we came up with a horrible one, ClassPass 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're like, "Okay, let's go do something more meaningful." So, we pivoted to Ava, which is a healthcare app that we help you find like the best doctors for specific procedures. 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 that idea ended up getting us into YC. I think mostly because I knew we were going to get into YC cuz I was like talking to YC partners before the interview and after the interview, and they were just like, "Oh yeah, like you'll get in because like you guys are both super smart. You're obviously at Snap and a Thiel 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. On figuring out on who to trust, this is very cliché, 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, cuz like you're probably going to 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 that like you might just need to separate. And maturity is understanding that.
I think the team self-motivates himself, but it's innovation. When they see that like we can ship a product in 2 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 I think 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'd 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. So, let's say you're running customer support, and you're not doing the customer support tickets yourself, you're not going to know if your customer support reps are answering them fast enough, giving them the correct answers, or like if it you know if it's not obvious answer like should they know the the answer this, or is it like something more obscure? And we 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 a company. Hard work is extremely important to me, especially cuz 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 2:00 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 2:00 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 succeed. If I lose a crappy engineer, I still want to help them succeed. For me, I think I'm very giving as both a person and a leader, so it's like, "Okay, you know, I give you chances. If you're not working out in your role, but I think that you're hardworking and smart, I try to find a role that 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 Passes, 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, I feel ready to be a founder again." Cuz I think a lot of the reason why I didn't do it sooner was cuz 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. My life is going to be fine. Most people don't build two successful startups, but 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 if I'm doing a second company and risking failure, at least have fun doing it." And I had always been attracted to consumer, you can see this with a bunch of different random apps I had made. Snap was one of the most fun experiences of my life, so I just knew I wanted to do consumer, and then I had been sitting on this idea for a little bit, so I was like, "Okay, let's see some competitors out there." And really you could only find Patreon. They've existed for a decade, and I saw an opportunity in the market.
I was friends with a lot of creators. I lightly asked my creator friends, "Hey, if I were to build this, would they use it?" So, you know, selling before building, they're like, "Absolutely." I was like, "Great." And then I just talked to my LPs, and they were like, "Here is money. Go build." So, it all happened really quickly. I would say within the span of like 24 hours of my friend asking me to be CEO of his AI company and me having 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 creator marketing spend is going up in pretty much every country. And I think this is due to the fact people are realizing their audience and the 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, you know, current creators are possible, and we're excited to help them either get access to the best brands and get that equity for long-term generational wealth, or if it makes sense, 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 getting to know them better and uplifting them. Why do I think so? I think that in general, most companies are very gossipy, right? So, if you're complaining about people, 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 the best work environments, the most positive ones, are when you are everyone's cheerleader. So, I think I would have spent more effort seeing the good in people.
This is going to sound very LA, but I feel like I have manifested everything in my life, and because I'm focused so much on positive energy, I feel like as long as I put in that hard work to bring my dreams to life and surround myself with positive people, anything is possible. So cheesy, but I really do believe that's true. And I have the best friends in the world that, you know, are constantly around me and encouraging me and really doing whatever they can to help, like they'll go out of my way. They're truly incredible, and I think that when I have such positive people around me, I only look at upside.
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