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Lucy Guo advocates 90-hour workweek
30-year-old entrepreneur Lucy Guo’s net worth has risen to an estimated $1.3 billion following Meta’s significant investment in ScaleAI, the company she co-founded, placing her ahead of pop icon Taylor Swift.
Who is Lucy Guo?
She is an American social media influencer and engineer who co-founded Scale AI, a data annotation company,in San Francisco in 2016. In 2022, she founded her second start-up, known as Passes.
Guo has often been noted for her disciplined lifestyle.
She attributes her success to a tightly regimented daily routine that begins at 5:30 am with back-to-back fitness sessions at Barry’s Bootcamp.
The woman entrepreneur has mentioned deliberately avoiding lunch to sustain her pace through the working day.
Speaking to CNBC, Lucy Guo said: “Most people could have work-life balance if they cut out what they waste time on after work—like doom scrolling or watching TV.”
Her schedule, however, extends well beyond ordinary office hours.
The American CEO frequently works until midnight before socialising until around 2 am, yet still insists on maintaining her early morning start.
Guo attributes her ability to thrive on minimal sleep to an expanded working window, to get more productive hours than her peers.
In the interview, she specifically advocated that startup founders should work extremely long hours in the early stages of the business, recommending a 90-hour working week as a necessity to create momentum.
“When you’re first starting your company, it’s near impossible to do it without doing that,” she said.
Her work style resembles the controversial “996” culture of working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, which is commonly observed in the Chinese tech industry.
A section of people admired her work philosophy and dedication. However, her comments received widespread criticism from mental health advocates and several startup veterans.