How Lucy Guo, As soon as the World’s Youngest Self-Made Feminine Billionaire, Turned Fandom Right into a DJ Profession

Lucy Guo has spent her career building and investing in companies. She’s now added DJ to that résumé, and by her own account, it’s the role that makes her happiest.

Guo has been building technology since she was a kid. She dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, the program that pays high-achieving young people to skip college and build companies. Back in 2016, she co-founded Scale AI, an artificial intelligence infrastructure company that is now valued at $29 billion after raising $14.3 billion from Meta last summer, before exiting the company two years later.

Thanks to her 3% stake, Guo in April 2025 dethroned Taylor Swift as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, per Forbes. Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the prediction betting platform Kalshi, took the title in December later that year.

She now runs Passes, a creator monetization platform whose roster includes superstar DJs like Kygo. Adding electronic music to her plate wasn’t part of the plan until recently.

Layered on top of a demanding career in tech, that kind of ambition raises an obvious question: why? Guo isn’t the only powerful business executive who’s answered it by stepping behind the decks, joining the likes of EDM-loving founders and CEOs like Elon Musk and the late Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh.

The parallels, she says, reflect a shared desire to tap into a different side of the brain.

“Everyone needs a creative outlet, and your brain works in such a different way when you’re DJing,” Guo tells EDM.com. “It’s an escape for everyone. If I have a problem, it’s similar to writer’s block. You might not be able to solve it while you’re completely focused on it. But when you’re doing something else that you love, using a different part of your brain, the solution might just come. Ultra has this thing where everyone’s united with music, and I really do believe that. It’s such a good de-stressor for everyone. Everyone needs good vibes.”

Professionally, she still calls herself a serial entrepreneur investor first, but the numbers on the music side have started to tell a different story.

“The DJ career is paying more than when I was pre-startup world,” she says. “I’m making more as a DJ than as a software engineer and a product designer, which is really awesome to be able to say.”

Like a lot of readers, Guo started as a fan who took a chance on an unlikely invitation. The real turning point traces back nearly a decade, to a trip to Korea and a Twitter DM from a total stranger offering artist passes to Ultra Korea.

What followed was her first EDM festival, and by her own account, one of the best nights of her life. An invite to Ultra Singapore came soon after, and she didn’t think twice.

“I would say from a personal perspective, I have just been optimizing for having fun and being happy,” Guo says. “I think that everyone’s trying to do all these longevity hacks, but the number one key to longevity is being happy, and music happens to make me very happy, which is why I dove into it.”

From there, she began traveling the world and chasing festivals. The public pivot to DJing came via a 2024 New Year’s tweet declaring her intent to become a DJ. Modeling contracts and influencer deals had started landing in her inbox alongside interest from music managers and agents, and it became clear that credibility required more than a following.

“Anyone knows that you have to actually produce music and launch songs to have your DJ career taken seriously,” Guo explains. “So I was like, you know what, let’s give it a go.”

That resolve led first to remixing, starting with a club-ready flip of ‘Done with Your Ex’ alongside longtime friend Venessa Michaels and Snugs, and eventually to frustration. Even when the original artists were onboard with her flips, labels sometimes weren’t.

“What I didn’t realize was that it is much harder to get approval to actually be able to release,” she says. “That’s when I was like, you know what? I’m gonna do an original. I was really frustrated.”

The lyrics for ‘Champagne on Me’ came together on a plane. Guo brought in Australian DJ and producer Lucille Croft to sing it after early attempts at vocals fell flat. “I literally just called her and was like, ‘Are you free right now?’” Guo recalls.

The infectious tech house track, she says, is a fairly literal reflection of how she actually lives.

“Both my mom and my dad’s Oura rings have an average of 4, 4.5 hours of sleep per night,” she says. “Having two parents that don’t sleep much is great, and I never really slept much as a child either. But I don’t think that you really remember the nights that you stay in. You remember the best nights you got. So the song really is about that fun summer, hanging out with your best friends, and not sleeping and creating memories.”

Even before the release, she had built up a varied run of stages behind her, from her own ‘Lucypalooza’ party to DJ sets at the Getty Villa, the Forbes Under 30 Summit, Ayu Dayclub in Las Vegas, and the Oasis stage at Ultra Miami.

“I think EDC would probably be the dream festival,” she says. “So I am yelling at them to book me.”

That interplay between her music life and her business life shows up in her day job too. Making her own music has already started reshaping how she runs Passes.

“I’m learning a lot more about what it takes to connect with fans and do a successful song release,” Guo says, “and that’s creating different types of products and features that better suit DJs.”

Credit: Image courtesy of Press

Meanwhile, Guo’s background in artificial intelligence affords her a unique perspective in the music industry’s most explosive debate. AI’s insidious role in music production has emerged as an existential flashpoint, leading a coalition of the industry’s biggest trade groups and unions to unveil the first-ever voluntary AI labeling standard.

“If you’re using AI for production, you probably should just label it,” Guo says. “Credit is deserved where credit is due. I do know the whole drama with AI training on people’s songs without their permission, which is not great. I think AI is actually really good at figuring out what could be a Top 40 and what cannot be, because it’s pattern-matching.”

“But if you’re using that, just label it. Label AI as a co-producer, because it is a co-producer.”

As for what’s next, Guo says she’ll be staying put in Los Angeles starting in August rather than traveling as much, giving her more consistent studio time. “I’m probably going to be working on more songs, and hopefully DJ in more venues,” she says. On the business side, she adds, “I’ve been incubating a bunch of companies, so some exciting stuff to look out for.”

You can listen to ‘Champagne on Me’ below and find the new single on streaming services here.