Hi everyone. I am so... Thank you for saying hi back. That's so good. It's good afternoon energy. But speaking of energy, I have been looking forward to this interview for so long. These women blow me away. I know they're going to blow you away. We have two of the biggest tech female founders of our time sitting on the stage and they are no joke. So, we have Lucy Guo. And by the way, they're both Forbes cover women, I guess we should say. So, Lucy Guo is the richest self-made female billionaire in the world, according to Forbes. And May runs an incredible tech company called Writer which has also been on our Tech AI50 company. Both of them in their own right are just incredible leaders and I know you're going to be really inspired by their stories. So both of them have been at this for quite some time. So it's kind of interesting even though I'd say all of us are young but you're both younger than I am. But you guys have literally been busting through walls and building for what now is really the future. Tell us about your story. How did you guys literally get here? You want to start, Lucy?
Yeah, I guess I can start. I think I got here really by optimizing for learning everywhere in my life. So, it really started off in kindergarten. I was extremely bored at school and I wanted to learn how to make money. So, I quickly figured out by trading up Pokémon cards and selling them, I was able to make cash. My parents ended up taking all that money from me and then I wasn't really a lot of friends. So I figured out I was spending a lot of time on the internet and then I wanted certain Neopets and I found a forum where people were buying and selling rare Neopets and I decided to learn how to code to basically hack the game and get these pets. I discovered PayPal really early on and basically bought a Visa debit card from Home Depot, made a PayPal account and then just started making bots to hack this. Wasn't really spending that much time in school but was learning on the internet, learning HTML, CSS, PHP, etc., all the old coding languages to make these websites. So I started building internet marketing tools like I built one of the first Twitter bots out there that would autofollow and unfollow people. Sold to internet marketers for like 10,000.
Wait, you have to say how old you were when you were doing this. You are like you're up here and I'm here.
So, I started the Neopets thing back in like second grade and then I started making random websites from then on. I don't know how but in like sixth grade I convinced a bunch of engineers and designers to work for me for free to create a virtual pet site. I wish I could do that nowadays. Not happening. And then really, I went to college and I was going to these hackathons. I was learning about apps. And I learned about startups and I was like, 'Wow, I can actually build products that millions of people use.' So I felt like I wasn't learning as much in college as I was at these hackathons and I ended up dropping out. And then from there, really every step of my career has been optimizing for learning. Like when I joined Snap because I wanted to learn more about product and Evan Spiegel was probably one of the best product minds of this generation. I really learned to think ahead in the future and think larger. Like everyone thought Snap was just this pictures app and he was really thinking like how do I beat Amazon? How do I beat Google? And to this day I accidentally got dinner with him a few weeks ago. His vision from 2016 on how we're going to interact with computers, he's still working on today. So good on him. And then I decided I wanted to build a company. And then I decided I wanted to go into venture and learn about breadth versus depth because when you're building a company, you really go deep, right? But I wanted to learn about different industries. And now I'm in consumer because I think it's one of the hardest challenges and I'm learning a lot there.
You are all right. May, I don't know if it's Pokémon or getting Home Depot credit cards when you're 12, but give us a little of your similar theme in terms of starting really young.
I had my first job in the family business when I was eight. And a big theme of my life across all of the various jobs I've had has been language. I grew up in a non-English-speaking household. I'm Lebanese. And as a firstborn immigrant child, you end up teaching everybody English because you learn it in kindergarten and you learn pretty fast. Our first company, my co-founder and I, was in the machine translation space. I'd always been really interested in language, speak a bunch of languages. And the idea that we could really train models that could do translation and use machine translation to break all these barriers that I had seen in my life. I mean, learning English and being good at it opened up so many doors that it just did not do for other members of my extended family. It was just very fascinating. I was always very attracted to that space. And when we started our first company in 2012, it was the era of statistical machine translation and it was kind of insane. We had different models for Japanese to English than English to Japanese and it's just kind of crazy and mindboggling today that we've got these incredibly powerful models that can translate but also write code and develop and build images and all of that in the same model. And really the throughline of my entrepreneurial life has been following and productizing on top of the technology. When we were working in machine translation, we stumbled upon transformers and started working on encoder decoders and then really stripping out the decoder. We're one of today five or six labs in the world that trains models from scratch. And it turns out natural language isn't just for producing language. You are now able to really use language as the medium for intelligence. And by writing about it, we're having people build software and build tooling. It's pretty incredible where this path has led us and led me. I've really just been following the technology and following language technology. But certainly, the entrepreneurial bug was in there early from family.
The entrepreneurial bug, and I know you've both spoken about it. Again, first generation immigrated from Lebanon. Lucy, your parents were immigrants. Do you think that had something to do with either just driving you or wanting to take on risk or being risk averse?
Yeah, I mean I think a lot of the actual literature is that most immigrants are actually more risk averse. I think for me it was like a go big or go home kind of mentality at all times and there was just nothing to lose and everything to gain. And I think I learned leverage much later. I want to teach that to my kids, my daughter especially. Taking these really big swings and levered bets very early and very big. I really learned that as an adult, Lucy. It seems like you learned it much younger. But doing what the crowd wasn't, I've always been very intentional about that. Like I remember being a six-year-old and not wanting to do what other people were doing because it just did not feel like the path to a highly levered outcome.
I would say same. My parents are very risk averse. They wanted me to just go to college, get a normal job. They actually wanted me to study pharmacy because they thought that was the most stable job possible out of college and I would be able to be like a housewife because I would only have to work three days a week. I think why I am where I am today is because my parents and those around me never really believed in me and I was a bit of a rebellious child. So I felt the need to prove them wrong. And it's just because my brother is so much smarter than me in every single way from an IQ standpoint. He skipped several grades in math, was taking AP Calc BC back in elementary school and I was this kid that maybe tested to skip one grade in math. Yay. So it was just constant like my environment was telling me you can't do this and honestly part of the reason I dropped out was to piss my parents off. I know it sounds ridiculous. I was like I'm going to prove you wrong because you don't think I can succeed without a college degree. I'm going to show you that I can.
It's so amazing too. And as we think about it and I know we've heard so much today, so many people talking about encouraging either our daughters or mentoring young women into fields that women typically haven't been in, whether that's engineering and coding and now certainly both of you at the helm of AI and your companies that you've built, what can we do to make sure that women, your daughter, my daughters, maybe your future, Lucy, do not miss out on this next revolution which we clearly have for the past at least my whole career which has been over 30 years? And the early data isn't good. I mean, the vast majority of people who are using ChatGPT are men. The vast majority of people who work in AI are men.
I think for the last hundred years we've built companies to organize pretty labor intensive execution and that is about to change. Departments, hierarchies, complex processes, AI really disrupts a lot of that and it makes execution abundant and on demand and programmatic. And when you think about the kind of leadership that's required to lead in that way, lead in a way that's not clinging to hierarchy but actually much more open, much more collaborative, women are really good at that. And I think we have, I mean we serve the enterprise, half the Fortune 500 are our customers. This is a very important time for leaders in the enterprise to get this not just digital transformation right, it's much more than that. This is a fundamental reorganization of the enterprise and women have to lead because there's a vacuum from leaders who are thinking too much of the old era and not really bringing the right tools to what's required for real AI transformation. And we want to both at the junior levels create jobs we'd be proud for our children to have and also create environments where women leaders can bring out what is much more collaborative and much more creative skills than have been associated with leadership in the past.
