Lucy Guo: The Fastest Way to Build a Business Today (The #1 Strategy That Saves You Months of Wasted Work)

**Lucy Guo** (0:00)
I think that being delusional is necessary to be a founder. You really have to believe I'm going to be part of the.01% that's actually going to build a unicorn.

**Jay Shetty** (0:08)
What advice are people being told about success that you think is outdated?

**Lucy Guo** (0:13)
I think that college is no longer needed. That means that I believe that your network is your net worth, and there's no better place to go than college to expand your network.

**Jay Shetty** (0:21)
So you're saying go to college, but don't go there for the degree.

**Lucy Guo** (0:24)
Exactly.

**Jay Shetty** (0:25)
How do you think the best ideas are found?

**Lucy Guo** (0:28)
Ideas are cheap and execution is everything.

**Jay Shetty** (0:37)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. Today, I'm sitting down with Lucy Guo, entrepreneur, investor, co-founder of Scale AI, and one of the youngest self-made female billionaires in the world. Today, we dive into the new rules of success, why speed has been a greatest advantage, and how AI is reshaping opportunity. Please welcome to On Purpose, Lucy Guo. Lucy, I am so happy to be with you here because not only do we know each other a little bit offline, we've been to some pretty crazy places together.
So I saw you last year on Luminara on the yacht trip, which was amazing.

**Lucy Guo** (1:13)
Yes.

**Jay Shetty** (1:13)
And then I saw you at my house where we did a fundraiser event. Then I saw you at the Dior party. It feels like our lives have just been messy.

**Lucy Guo** (1:21)
We've been worldwide and now we're seeing each other in Cannes next week.

**Jay Shetty** (1:23)
Yeah, exactly. It's awesome.

**Lucy Guo** (1:25)
Thank you for having me.

**Jay Shetty** (1:26)
Oh no, I'm so excited for my audience to learn from you. I think that right now we're living at such an exciting time where so many young people are driven, they're ambitious, they want to do incredible things. You've already lived that, you've done it. You're going on to do more. I know you've shared some ideas with me. So I can't wait to get inside your brain today. This is going to be fun.
I wanted to ask you, the first question I have for you is, what advice are people being told about success today that you think is outdated?

**Lucy Guo** (1:56)
I still think that college is extremely outdated. I think that we're taught to go study and then get a traditional job, but especially in the world of AI, I think that college is no longer needed. That means that I believe that your network is your net worth and there's no better place to go than college to expand your network. Because college is really the first time and only time in your life where you're going to be thrown into a world where everyone wants to make friends, no one knows each other. So everyone's open to this emotional connection. I always tell people, I actually think one to two years of college is extremely useful because that is where you're going to build your network and you're going to build the deepest network because their most talented friends are always going to get these like multi-million dollar job offers straight out of college. But if you're able to have that emotional connection, like everything is sales from retaining your employees to selling them to get you them to join your company. And college is the best place where you can really build that emotional connection because everyone is open to it. Afterwards, you may go work at a company, you may join different interest groups, etc.
But it's just not at the same density as college is.

**Jay Shetty** (3:05)
So you're saying go to college, but don't go there for the degree.

**Lucy Guo** (3:08)
Exactly.

**Jay Shetty** (3:09)
Right. Go there for the networking, the groups of people, the emotional connections, practicing things.

**Lucy Guo** (3:15)
And I think college is a really great place, especially in classes, so you learn a lot and learn how to think. But you should apply those skills to practical skill sets, or you should apply the skills that you learn into practical use cases. So I would learn how to think in these classes, and then I would start using AI tools, right? And really accelerate what you can do and be that 10x executor earlier on in life.

**Jay Shetty** (3:38)
Where did you go to college again?

**Lucy Guo** (3:39)
I went to Carnegie Mellon.

**Jay Shetty** (3:40)
Did you go to college with anyone that you're still friends with? What are your peers doing now? What else have they done?