AI Billionaire Lucy Guo Pushes Into Crowded Social Media Field
(Bloomberg) -lucy Guo entered the Early, Founding Software Provider scale to the artificial intelligence industry nine years ago. He made a billionaire until he was 30 years old.
Passes Inc. He’s building another business. However, this time, Guo faces fundamental competitors and legal difficulties in a job that is not certain of success.
Passes, which has been providing a $ 50 million fund since the Launch of December 2022, is already competing in a crowded area. While Patreon is known to work with Podcasters, Cameo, an old Highflier, focuses on celebrities and is great in porn. Transitions are among these poles. It is mainly used by the popular impressives in Tiktok and Instagram, and the content tends to be angry. Guo says the power is service.
“We just want to be like a Superfan Club for Creators, Guo said Guo, in an interview, the Chairman of the Executive Officer of Pass. The aim is to provide the impressive “all infrastructure business”.
Headquarters at Western Hollywood, California, Scream Tinseltown. Beyond the Pink Neon sign in the center of the office, there is a nightclub and a stick for water from the base to ceiling. Guo’s aim is to have the facilities that the largest stars of social media – Instagram, Tiktok and Snapchat influencers make money for their work by sharing the videos of their daily lives.
The founder of Passes launched social practices and launched companies. Fremont grew up in California, began to coding, and created arcade games and virtual domestic websites before examining computer science and human-computer interaction at the university.
After receiving a Thiel Scholarship in 2014, he left after financing to develop a food distribution application. He also made a clue in Facebook, Snapchat and Information Sharing Site Quora.
At the age of 22, Guo joined the scale AI with Quora Associate Alexandr Wang. The company labeled the data used by AI companies to train chat boots, and recently sold 49% of 49% stake to Meta Platform Inc. for 14.3 billion dollars. Bloomberg reported that the founding partners fell. Guo left in 2018, but his share made a billionaire.
While looking for his next project, GUO began to receive news from Influencer Friends, who struggled to make a living from one -time approval brand agreements. Many of them were turning to subscription platforms such as Patreon, which offers regular, monthly payments.
“You can make a brand agreement and you may not get payment for six months,” Guo said. “Brand opportunities are very inconsistent.”
Guo texted several investors and told them that he wanted to create the next version of Patreon. He collected a few million dollars in 24 hours.
Like Patreon, the company helps creators to make money by charging fans to access special content such as video chats, one -to -one calls and direct messages. Creators usually maintain approximately 90% of the money. As of February 2024, Guo said Passes paid about 1,000 creators tens of millions of dollars.
Alyssa McKay, a lifestyle impressive with more than 10 million followers in Tiktok, uses passes to directly connect with fans and share special content such as tour of her new home.
“It allows me to create a unique and special experience with my audience, Mck said McKay. “I was very surprised and I passed it to see how many people were the first to see I was a host.”
The GUO connects the popularity of the application to technology, such as using the AI to test which photos or videos pay fans and the practical approach. The office doubles as a podcast studio, a photo room and a record studio soon as Soho House for Creators .. Passes 50 employees help impressives to shoot video or design products.
“If you enter Forever 21, you can’t get the same treatment when you walk like Hermès,” Guo said. “And we serve at the Hermès level.”
This high -level focus goes on to Guo’s personal life. He threw parties to Coachella, identified with celebrities like Billie Eilish and Charli XCX, and in 2023 he organized a birthday party with transitions called “Lucypalooza.
At that time, he collected $ 9 million from a group of investors in Multicoin Capital that year, that year, and bought Fanhouse, an attempt with Andrelesen Horowitz, which helped creators earn money from their audience. Purchasing, employees and creators using the platform. At that time, the transitions had only 40 creators.
Today, the transitions are far behind Patreon, which has more than 100 million memberships, and the simplicity with approximately 380 million fans. To continue to grow, Guo began to guarantee the income of the creators if they pass through other platforms, according to a person familiar with agreements.
“There are many competitors in this arena, Andrew Graham, President of Creative Artists Agency Digital Media Business Development. “In many cases, they get jobs because they are only those who want to put money.”
In January 2024, the Creator App Fanfix filed a lawsuit for transitions, claiming that the company had stolen secret information to miss customers. Fanfix also accused the company of selling content under the cost and increasing the payments of creators with temporary cash incentives and making misleading allegations about how much money they earn.
According to GUO, Passes offered a minimum of minimum guarantees to content -creators, but they saw that their revenues increased seven times. Passes rejected that he had lost money and said the company was snowy at that time.
“I think this is a unilateral beef, that is not true, we do not have commercial secrets,” he said. “They lost like every move they filled.”
A lawyer representing Fanfix said that the case was active and continuing.
The case did not slow down the growth of the initiative. In February 2024, he collected $ 40 million from investors led by Bond Capital.
Passes Long had a reputation to allow more EDGER content than some other subscription applications for impressive. According to company policies, it allows bikini paintings and obscene photos, but nudity or open sexual content bars.
Until recently, transitions allowed creators to sell content on the site between the ages of 15 and 17. However, these policies were changed in February, the same month, the company filed a class case claiming the distribution of child pornography.
The case was ruled by the 17 -year -old Creator Alice Rosenblum, who was 17 years old. Rosenblum claimed that Passes employees, including a former Fanfix employee, hired him to create sexual open content and then marketed to users on the site, although he was reşit. The case also claims that Guo has overcome security controls designed to protect non -disregard creators.
The Guo said, at least as it was about transitions, the case is completely unfair, ”Guo said. “The behavior described in the complaint is a direct violation of our service conditions, content guidelines and passes of Pass.”
Guo called Rosenblum that he had never met or interacted, and once represented him, he called the case to the case.
Lawyers representing Rosenblum did not respond to the request for comments.
Tim Humangit, who joined Passes as the Head of Trust and Security in September 2024, said the company plans to remove small ones from the site before the case. At that time, he said that less than 1% of the content crews on the site were not respected. Today, the company employs approximately eight full -time personnel and 70 contract workers in Asia to prevent the appearance of harmful content on the site.
In the meantime, Passes, according to Business Officer Seth Melnick, has grown to millions of users and thousands of creators, whom most of them were millionaires.
In order to continue to attract more impressive, management plans to hire more personnel and to provide creators to offer additional advantages such as health insurance and asset management. Guo’s aim is to be open to the public.
Orum I see you grow much bigger than Patreon, Guo Guo said. “I’m sorry, Patreon.”
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