Lucy Guo - Episode 89

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, Sabrina Hsueh hosts engineer and entrepreneur Lucy Guo, co-founder of the infrastructure and software company Scale.AI and founder of Passes, a creator monetization and social media platform. Scale.AI, the data-labeling platform that industrialized human-in-the-loop infrastructure for generative AI and robotics, was acquired by Meta in 2025, making Guo the youngest self-made female billionaire at that time. In the past, she also helped develop Snap Maps as a product designer at Snap and founded Backend Capital, a venture capital firm that primarily funded early-stage engineering startups. Lucy describes her evolution from a childhood hacker into a technology entrepreneur. She stresses a persistent “builder-first,” nimble mindset, the power of surrounding yourself with ambitious peers, solving problems you personally face, and the enduring importance of high-quality data evaluation (especially in high-stakes fields like medicine and clinical trials). She talks about the challenge of pivoting from enterprise data infrastructure to consumer tech, the rising role of female founders and investors enabled by micro-funds; how AI tools are democratizing product-building and design; and her investment focus. Lucy also shares advice for college students and other young builders looking to create a positive and lasting impact.