Meet Lucy Guo, the world's youngest self-made billionaire, a coding prodigy at 12, co-founder of Scale AI at 21.

And if you haven't heard of Scale AI, you will soon. Meda just acquired half

the company for $14 billion in cash. Pushed out from the billion dollar unicorn she co-founded

at 24, Lucy roared back with passes, the platform turning the creator economy upside down.

Today on Aspire, Lucy's getting real about the founder mistakes nobody tells you about,

the future of creator's success and exactly how to pick yourself up when life knocks you down.

If you're a creator or an aspiring founder, you will not want to miss this episode.

Thank you. miss this episode. I'm so happy you're here, Lucy.

We've got so much to talk about.

I have to say you are one difficult person to do the research on.

There is so little out there about, yes, yes.

You're like a mysterious enigma of a person, but there's one thing that I do know about you, my love. And that is that you are the world's youngest self-made, female, billionaire, say it again, say it again, it's insane. And I have so many questions for you. I'm here for them. So many. But I feel like we kind of have to go back a little bit so that I can understand. First of all, like, how did you get here and where did you come from? So take me back to you. Where were you born? So I was born in a Bay Area. I came from my two brilliant parents. They immigrated from China to get here. They're both electrical engineers. So shout at them for, you know, their IQ points. And it's sort of really young because they had immigrated. They had the mindset of newcomers, essentially. And they were extremely frugal. They emphasized education, et cetera. And I learned to really value education and money early on. Do you have siblings? I have a little brother.

What about to your parents?

Are you close to them? I talk to them, I would say, at least a few times a week now, which is nice. So nice. It's definitely gotten a lot. Like, I've been able to get closer to them after, you know, moving on from college, etc. And, like, really understanding why they were so strict as parents. Yeah, getting through those teenage years. Were they super strict with you?

They were absolutely tiger parents.

I love that. What did they? understanding why they were so strict as parents. Yeah, getting through those teenage years. Were they super strict with you?

They were absolutely tiger parents. I love that. What did that look like for you as a kid? Let's see. My parents put a key logger on my computer so they can monitor everything I was doing on the internet. That's actually probably like how I kind of got into computers, whereas I had to figure out how to get this key logger off of my... Did you figure it out?

You could press an arrangement of keys on your computer to get into the admin account and then just delete the key logger. And you figured this out at what age exactly? Oh, this one I probably figured out. I want to say like maybe third grade. Wow, that's something. All right. So you were destined for this life. What did you

study at school? I said computer science and human computer interactions. And where did you go to school? Carnegie Mellon. Okay. So you were like immediately, you're like computer science. That's my jam. You knew that about yourself. I actually didn't, which is funny, because I had been coding for so long at this point. But how did you get into coding? Tell me that. I get coding. I get coding. Because if you grow up in the

Bay Area, like, I guess there's a proximity thing of like a lot of people being around you, but, you know, how do you even start coding as a young woman? It was completely not from outside influence. Essentially, my parents were taking away my cold, hard-earned cash. I was like, man, like, I need to figure out how to, like, make it so that they can't just steal my cash in my hiding places. I was literally putting it in Harry Potter books and it would disappear. And I'm like, how are you finding this? So one day I discover PayPal. I was like, okay, amazing. I can have money on PayPal. So I literally go to Home Depot. I get a Visa debit card. I opened up a PayPal account. And then voila. And I'm already playing neopets at this point. And I'm, you know, on these online forums. And I see this entire like black market economy where people are able to buy and sell neopo points, neopets, etc. And that's when I start

diving deeper and learning you can create bots to essentially get these items by cheating.

Wait a minute. You were creating bots at what age? I was like in second grade, second grade, third

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