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Lucy Guo
Lucy Guo
CEO & Founder, Moment
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She Built a $26 Billion AI Company… Now She’s Building 3 More | Lucy Guo

📅 Aug 10, 2026 Hard Knocks Network 9 MIN 12 VIEWS 28 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
Watch the full podcast with Lucy Guo here:    • Lucy Guo On How She Became The World's You...   Join the School of Hard Knocks Community to learn directly from 7, 8, and 9-Figure entrepreneurs every week: https://www.skool.com/school-of-mento... Enjoyed The Video? Please Leave a Like and Subscribe! ❤️ - School Of Hard Knocks Clips Check Out Our Main Channel Here:    / @theschoolofhardknocks   Check Out Our Merchandise Here: shophardknocks.com Our Equipment and Books We Recommend: https://www.amazon.com/shop/theschool...

What Lucy Guo said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Lucy Guo, CEO and founder of Moment, discussed selling 49% of the company at a $26 billion valuation and her current portfolio of new ventures. She is building an infrastructure company for the creator economy, which is spinning off into a fintech app, an AI growth startup using agentic tools, and an apparel company with a hired CEO. Guo advocates for hiring individual contributors (ICs) as leaders, not managers, and compares her approach to Elon Musk's. She sees the next big creator opportunity in agentic AI tools and fintech, citing examples like Alex Earl, Jake Paul, and Logan Paul. Guo recommends everyone use tools like Replit, Cursor, and Claude, claiming they make everyone a 10x engineer. She notes she uses Claude to draft contracts, saving on legal costs, but expressed frustration about being sued over Meta Pixel by an AI lawyer. She believes vibe coding is good for MVPs but not for scaling to billions of users, and that product-market fit intuition is the key differentiator.

Key takeaways

  1. Sold 49% of Moment at a $26 billion valuation.
  2. Hires ICs as leaders, not managers, to ensure they can do the job themselves.
  3. Recommends Replit, Cursor, and Claude for building and scaling businesses.
  4. Vibe coding is good for MVPs but not for scaling to billions of users.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$26 billion Valuation for 49% sale of Moment price 0:05
80% Share of creator money through messaging metric 0:16
10x Engineer productivity multiplier from AI tools metric 4:59

Chapters

  1. 0:00Sale of 49% at $26 billion
  2. 0:13New companies in development
  3. 1:04Diversification and leadership approach
  4. 2:09Hiring ICs as leaders
  5. 3:00Creator economy opportunities
  6. 4:35AI tools for business owners
  7. 7:00Legal costs and AI lawyers
  8. 8:29Vibe coding and differentiation

Questions asked in this interview

8
  1. 0:00And how much did you sell the company for?
  2. 1:04... you know, Scale, it was all 100% into that business, but then after kind of selling part of the company, now moving on to some other ventures now, how do you feel about diversification rather than just focusing on one venture maybe?
  3. 3:00For you, like what do you see as like the next big opportunity for creators especially with the platform that you're building?
  4. 4:35What are a couple actionable steps that you think all business owners, whether it be tools or applications of AI that you think everybody should be using that are non-negotiables in their day-to-day lives?
  5. 5:30Do you know Opus Clip? Have you heard about them?
  6. 5:48So, and then in terms of just from like an efficiency standpoint though, like you leveraging all those tools in your business is probably saves you how much time on average, would you say?
  7. 7:11Claude is the biggest game changer. Do you see law?
  8. 7:40Because if anyone can kind of create a competitor to another tech product or software easily now without even knowing how to code what's going to be the separation between those companies?
Interviewer 0:00 ↗
It was this last year, I believe, that you guys ended up selling 49% of the company. And how much did you sell the company for?
Lucy Guo 0:05 ↗
It was like 26 billion or so, um, for 49%. But at a 49% at 26 billion dollar valuation.
Interviewer 0:11 ↗
You are not building a new company right now.
Lucy Guo 0:13 ↗
Yeah, I'm actually building a few new companies.
Interviewer 0:14 ↗
You tell us about some of those companies that you're building right now.
Lucy Guo 0:16 ↗
Yeah, so, um, one of them we're working on infrastructure for the creator economy, so helping creators monetize their brand, um, but we're also spinning it off into a fintech app, um, because we realized that 80% of the money is through messaging, but we're also seeing a lot of problems in other industries, um, such as service industries or like with psychics, etc. Um, so we wanted to make the UX a little bit easier, um, and broaden our TAM.
Um, another company I'm working on is, uh, an AI growth startup. I can't really speak more specifics to it, but it is going to be very fun. I think just like agentic tools to help you grow your company. Um, and then I am working on, um, an apparel company, but I can't speak more to that. Um, there'll probably be announcements sometime this summer. That one I'm just excited about cuz I'm working on it with like two very close friends.
Interviewer 1:04 ↗
What is your relationship right now with diversification? Like I would imagine when you were building, you know, Scale, it was all 100% into that business, but then after kind of selling part of the company, now moving on to some other ventures now, how do you feel about diversification rather than just focusing on one venture maybe?
Lucy Guo 1:20 ↗
I think in general you should focus on one venture, but the nice thing is I do have flexibility now. So, for example, with the apparel company, I hired a CEO in, so I don't have to be day-to-day with it and focus too much on it. Um, and for these other companies, um, I am doing something very similar, I'd say, where like I'm going to be very involved in the beginning, but then if I can find leadership to like place into these companies, um, I will.
Um, I think that like I'm kind of doing an Elon Musk approach there, I'd say.
Interviewer 1:49 ↗
So, do you believe the best way to build companies is from top-down with top-down leadership, or do you think because I especially new entrepreneurs, they kind of place, I will call it like warm bodies to kind of just serve a specific function within the organization. But it sounds like when you're approaching these new companies that you're starting to build, you're going to start out like building the leadership that can then kind of build...
Lucy Guo 2:09 ↗
So when I hire leaders, I hire ICs because I don't believe in hiring a leader or manager and having to blow up teams. So everyone I look for can do the entire function themselves and I also think that they hire better and are able to actually teach the future employees or like the future team how to actually do the function. Because it's very hard to be able to like determine whether your like direct reports are doing a good job if you're not actually doing the job yourself. For example, like let's say you're a customer support lead. How do you actually know that your customer support team is answering tickets on time, answering them well, etc. unless you know how to answer your tickets.
Like if you know how to answer tickets, you might be like, 'Oh, this one should have been answered in 30 seconds. Why did it take 3 hours to answer and why did you give it the wrong answer?' So um I hire leaders into companies but they're all ICs that wouldn't need to hire a team to do the function.
Interviewer 3:00 ↗
So obviously one of the companies that you're building right now is to help creators monetize. For you, like what do you see as like the next big opportunity for creators especially with the platform that you're building?

11 more exchanges in this transcript

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Cite this transcript

APA, MLA, BibTeX
APA

Guo, L. (2026, August 10). She Built a $26 Billion AI Company… Now She’s Building 3 More | Lucy Guo [Interview transcript]. Hard Knocks Network. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1189496/

MLA

Lucy Guo. "She Built a $26 Billion AI Company… Now She’s Building 3 More | Lucy Guo." Hard Knocks Network, 10 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1189496/.

BibTeX 
@misc{guo2026_1189496,
  author       = {Lucy Guo},
  title        = {She Built a $26 Billion AI Company… Now She’s Building 3 More | Lucy Guo},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, Hard Knocks Network. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {aug},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1189496/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}