Lucy Guo has spent her career building and investing in companies.She’s now added DJ to that résumé, and by her own account, it’s the role that makes her happiest.
Ad 0:00 Click for sound 0:00 / 0:00 Guo has been building technology since she was a kid.She dropped out of Carnegie Mellon on a Thiel Fellowship, the program that pays high-achieving young people to skip college and build companies.
Back in 2016, she co-founded Scale AI, an artificial intelligence infrastructure company that is now valued at $29 billion after raising $14.3 billion from Meta last summer, before exiting the company two years later.Thanks to her 3% stake, Guo in April 2025 dethroned Taylor Swift as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire, per Forbes.
Luana Lopes Lara, co-founder of the prediction betting platform Kalshi, took the title in December later that year.She now runs Passes, a creator monetization platform whose roster includes superstar DJs like Kygo.
Adding electronic music to her plate wasn’t part of the plan until recently.Layered on top of a demanding career in tech, that kind of ambition raises an obvious question: why? Guo isn’t the only powerful business executive who’s answered it by stepping behind the decks, joining the likes of EDM-loving founders and CEOs like Elon Musk and the late Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh.
The parallels, she says, reflect a shared desire to tap into a different side of the brain.“Everyone needs a creative outlet, and your brain works in such a different way when you’re DJing,” Guo tells EDM.com.
“It’s an escape for everyone.If I have a problem, it’s similar to writer’s block.
You might not be able to solve it while you’re completely focused on it.But when you’re doing something else that you love, using a different part of your brain, the solution might just come.
Ultra has this thing where everyone’s united with music, ...