Shadowing Practice: Life Lessons From The World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire - Learn English Speaking with Video

I'm glad to welcome Lucy Guo back to the stage.

Lucy co-founded Scale AI at the age of 20, 21 years old.

She now runs Passes, a content creator platform, and is a successful VC investor in her own right.

She is the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world.

She's about as wealthy as Taylor Swift, and she's five years younger than Taylor Swift.

I think Taylor still might be more liquid.

That's probably true, but she might trade the five years for the liquidity.

So can you just walk us through, you know, you've started a couple very successful companies, very young.

What's your origin story?

You know, how do you become the wealthiest, you know, self-made woman billionaire in the world?

Yeah, I always think that everything is a combination of luck and hard work.

But I do think I got the drive to be an entrepreneur pretty early on.

Grew up with immigrant parents who really emphasized education and money.

And I really just took in the money aspect

because I wanted to buy things that I could not afford or I was not allowed to buy.

For example, I was not allowed to skateboard or buy a ripstick, and I wanted to buy one.

So I figured out how to make money on my own.

It started off just like in the playground, you know, selling Pokemon cards, colored pencils, anything I could find.

And then I discovered the Internet where I could have Internet money

that my parents could not take away from me as punishment.

So that's when I started creating bots on Neopets, created my own virtual pet site, arcade game websites, like really everything that I could like throw an ad on essentially.

And fast forward, went to hackathons.

First off, how old were you when you were doing all of these things?

I was in second grade when I was making the bots.

I started creating my own websites and around like third grade just off of WordPress, but you know, like literally sticking every single annoying ad on these websites.

I remember I would like some of these websites on the stumble upon

and just a bunch of different services to you know gain traffic on them So I would get paid per impression.

I Was got very clever around like I think like fifth

and sixth grade where I realized that because I wasn't allowed to watch TV

So I would watch TV like shows on the internet.

I started creating my own websites where I like, you know search up popular TV show names like Pretty Little Liars, Vampire Diaries, et cetera, and I would just buy the domain name,

like watchvampirediaries.net, and then I would find a trailer for an episode that didn't exist yet, and then Photoshop a play button on top, and then stick ads on the site,

and submit it to every streaming service possible.

So people would hit the website trying to find an episode that didn't exist, and I'd make money off of it.

And so what, you know, before we move on to your incredibly successful career,

after your very successful career as a child.

Are there any, is there any mindset or any lessons

that you learned from those early hustles that carried you forward when you started Scale.AI?

Yeah, I think the main thing is like, the first is like not everything is a risk.

Like things might feel risky, but it's not.

So when I dropped out of college, I remember a lot of my peers, my family obviously, didn't agree with that decision.

But in my head, I was like, okay, like, it's not really a risk because I'm not, like, the most I lose is like a few years, right?

I can always go accept a job offer.

I could go back to college.

But your network is your net worth.

And that's something I realized very early on, too, where I believed that doing a TL fellowship would open doors for me

because people would just be more willing to talk to me because I was a TL fellow.

I kind of also learned this early on in high school where someone had just given me advice.

Hey, like if you email a VC, like just send a cold email, they're more likely to respond to you because you're a kid and everyone wants to help kids out.

So and that was true, like a cold email VCs and I would actually get responses versus

if I weren't who I am today and I cold email the VC, I don't know if I would get a response.

So I think those are probably like and then optimizing for learning.

So I think those are three lessons that probably got me to where I am today.

Because the second I got bored, like I was known as someone that would job hop a lot, right?

But for me, it was like when I stopped learning and I felt like I was no longer growing, even though I was leaving millions of dollars behind, I felt like it made sense to make my next career move

because the knowledge I would be gaining would be valuable later on in life.

And so those three key lessons there, I'd love to run through all three of those.

So the first one, it's not that much of a risk.

Yes.

A couple questions.

One is, how responsive to that argument were your parents at the time?

And do you have any advice for other people who might be in this room

and have had similar conversations or are thinking about having similar conversations maybe with their parents?

Yeah.

So, I mean, education gave my parents everything they had in life.

So I fully understood that they felt like I was throwing away their sacrifices when choosing to drop out of college.

That being said, I think that they didn't really realize how good my job offers were

that I already had before leaving college.

So they weren't, you know, they weren't happy about it.

But other than they, like nowadays, they're like, oh, like there was a different path to success outside of like getting your college degree.

And we understand that.

Yeah.

And, you know, you'd also mentioned, you know, VCs being willing to answer a kid's email.

I'd love to hear a little bit about the ways that you think youth can be an advantage rather than a disadvantage.

I mean, I think youth is an advantage in many ways.

A, as a kid, you have so much free time nowadays, right?

So if you have that free time, spend some of it learning about technology in the future, I think that you have less responsibilities.

For example, when you have a family and you have kids, you just have less time to experiment

and like every like spending a few years not making as much is actually meaningful

because you have to support

that family versus like as a kid you don't really need any resources uh like

if you're a kid literally a kid you're living at home with your parents

but if you know you're in your early 20s um like i was couch surfing

and drinking soylent

and figuring out how to like you know have free food

through all these vc-sponsored apps it was great actually i was literally living for free

and it was fine like i was fine couch surfing i

didn't need a bed like Like I didn't need a house, a family.

And then I think if you're in college specifically, it is the best time to find your future hires and your future co-founders because there's no time,

any, like there's no other time in your entire life where

you're gonna be in such a dense network of intelligent people

that all want to be friends with you because they have no friends, right?

Like quite literally when you go from high school to college, it's the only period in your life where everyone is starting a new life and no one has any friends,

so everyone's willing to get to know you.

Yeah, OK.

And then it's easy to say you don't have a lot to lose.

You don't have a lot of money to lose.

You don't have a lot of time to lose.

Worst case, you lose a couple of years.

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I think when you're in that moment, and I think probably a lot of people out here are probably somewhere in that moment, it doesn't feel that way a lot of the time.

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You feel maybe anxious to get things going now.

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You do feel like you need to make money now.

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So do you have any advice for how to have the fortitude, I guess, to actually go and take that risk?

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I mean, the way I've always thought about things is if it's not life changing, then like if I'm not leaving life changing money behind on the table,

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then it just makes sense to go do the next thing.

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And again, it's optimizing for learning, because even if I don't make life-changing money with my next endeavor, I will have that knowledge that will be valuable in the future.

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And I'll always be able to get that job back.

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If you're a high performer, your job is still there.

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Your company will very happily take you back.

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So knowledge is, I think, just the key to success.

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So if you think you're going to learn more doing another endeavor pursuit, it makes more sense in the long term.

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It's an investment.

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And you know, you you drive out of school, you know, you're studying computer science to, you know, to become a Teal Fellow.

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But, you know, you had taken before you co-founded Scale AI, you take taking a couple of jobs in Silicon Valley, right?

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You had worked at Quora, you'd worked at Snap.

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So how important do you think it was?

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I guess all of these different educational experiences that you had, you know, You learned all these things growing up.

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You learned some stuff in college while you were there.

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Then you took these jobs all before you went to co-found a company.

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What do you think was the most important or most instructive?

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And do you think that doing all of those things made you more well-rounded?

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Or do you think you could have skipped college altogether or you needed to go?

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Yeah, so I actually don't think I could have skipped college altogether.

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And I think that was the most important for me because

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that was where I gained that network of people

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that I ended up hiring as my first husband hires

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because they're the like you're this crazy kid

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and like you may have raised funding

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but you're like hey like you should not take millions of dollars

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that other companies are offering you and come work for me

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and the only people that are going to do that are people

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that have worked with you and believe in you

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and got close to you um

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and those happen to just be the people i went to college with

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so i actually suggest everyone to college for like one to two years

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because of what i said before which is

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that it's the only time in your life

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that you're going to meet highly intelligent people that all really want to be your friend.

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And then I think that working at Quora and Snap, because they were two such different companies in the way they operated, helped me understand how I would want to operate my company.

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So for example, Quora, they basically ran philosophy that the product was absolutely perfect.

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And all they needed to do was A-B test every single part of the funnel and optimize.

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So for example, let's A-B test and get more signups.

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Then we need to A-B tests certain features to get more questions asked and more answers.

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And as the flywheel goes, the company grows.

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Versus at Snap, A-B test wasn't really a thing.

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It was just like all product innovation.

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Like, I remember being shocked the first day I walked in because I saw how Evan was trying to compete with Google, compete with Amazon, et cetera.

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And these were things that I would have never imagined Snap to really be.

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So he was much more of a visionary founder.

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But I do think the right answer is like being in the middle

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because you do need to optimize certain parts of the funnel.

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I learned that changing one word on a sign-up page can affect conversions by 30%, which is absolutely crazy to me still to this day.

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And that does have a drastic effect on your numbers, but also it's important to really think big and be a visionary.

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And so you co-found Scale AI 2016.

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It feels like a forever ago in the world of AI.

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Hi.

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Pretty famously had a falling out with your co-founder and left after a couple of years.

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What lessons can we all draw from that experience?

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What did you learn and what might others learn in terms of co-founding a company with somebody

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and sometimes things don't go according to plan?

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Yeah, I think the main thing is that if you can't be your co-founder's biggest cheerleader, It's probably not great to be their co-founder just because

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when things go wrong in a company

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and it's always going to be a roller coaster and you guys can't align on a decision, if you're going to be bitter about it, you're going to have a falling out.

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You guys are going to butt heads.

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But at the end of the day

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when other people at the company are looking at the decisions the company is making and you can't stand beside your co-founder,

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even if you have disagreements, just going to cause issues.

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You have to be your co-founder's biggest cheerleader.

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Mm-hmm.

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And so just moving along.

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So I'd love to talk about passes.

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Could you just walk us through sort of what it is?

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And what I'd really love to hear about is, what do you see going on in the creator economy right now?

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And what are the opportunities that are out there for people who are looking to be creators?

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Yeah.

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So we're building infrastructure to help creators monetize their

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and this really became inspired through the fact that I saw creators really building these unicorn companies.

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So Mr. Beast with Feastables, that's actually the main reason his net worth is so high.

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Logan Paul with Prime, Jake Paul with W and Better, et cetera.

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And I think we're going through a phase right now, like after Kylie built her lipstick brand, creators are realizing that they are the brand, right?

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I think that a lot of founders are also realizing

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and willing to give up double digit percentage equity because they see that with creators,

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they no longer need to spend money on customer acquisition costs because the creators are able to convert.

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So what I see the future being is creators really like being businesses.

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I don't necessarily see creators being like the CEO though.

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Like I think that what's gonna happen is operators are gonna partner with creators

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and they're gonna act as like chief creative officers and really do the marketing behind a brand and offer creative inputs.

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But I think a lot of creators are starting their own venture funds.

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They're grabbing equity into companies, et cetera.

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And this is going to be the trend going forward, because everyone wants to build generational wealth, which I think is why creators are so interested in tech right now,

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because they're seeing this is how a lot of new money is being built.

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And so I would love to, Randall had said earlier today that there are probably several billionaires, future billionaires out in the crowd today.

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You managed to hit the milestone at a very early age.

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At the time, you had said to Forbes that you don't think about it very much, and it's not very liquid.

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Has your perspective on any of that changed?

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I mean, what's your reaction, I guess, to being the world's youngest self-made billionaire?

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RANDALL P.

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My life's pretty much the same.

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I'm still waking up at 5.30 a.m., going to Barry's, going to work.

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We work in the office every single day of the week, so I just go to work, then go home.

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Yeah, and you're very famously very frugal, trying to get a deal on Uber Eats or something like that.

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Is there a point where you can relax on that, or do you think that that's a mindset that everybody should always have?

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I mean, I would say relax on it, but I'm Asian, so it's almost just like a game, right?

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Like I get excited getting deals and free things.

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I really like free things.

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All right.

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And so, you know, I guess in closing, what's the what's the biggest takeaway from from your short but, you know, very high journey,

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I guess, to success that everybody else can can take away?

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If there's one thing that, you know, you think people could take away from your story.

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What is it?

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Yeah, I mean, I think it's optimized for learning

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and always be willing to help people out because everyone that you like help out unselfishly, like I do think karma is a real thing, it comes back at you.

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And when you are successful, I think you should reinvest into the ecosystem.

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So nowadays I'm literally just trying to find all my favorite products and like, you know, people that I just believe in and reinvest in them.

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Because I remember what it was like, you know, first starting out

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and I had all these people just help me with like no questions asked

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and I don't think I would be here today without um doing

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that oh and then I would say just like ask for things I think people are too scared to like

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ask um

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and I mean like you will get a yes most likely

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no matter what like people are going to like there's going

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to be someone willing to give their time there's gonna be someone that's gonna give you money um

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and I think that people are too scared for of rejection

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but um you just have to be like a no is

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like whatever like you get a no right like what's the worst thing

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that happens like it hurts your ego a little bit

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but like the first yes you guess is going to change

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your life yeah yeah cool all right well thank you

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so much for joining us

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and thank you for starting your dj career here at the

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yeah i appreciate it i know i'm excited thank you for letting me here

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Thank you.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: Life Lessons From The World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire - Learn English Speaking with Video

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