Lucy Guo was fired from the company she helped start, in 2018, two years after it began. She was one of two founders. The other, Alexandr Wang, is the one the world remembers, and in 2025 Meta paid more than $14 billion for 49 percent of the thing they built.
Wang was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Chinese immigrant parents who were both physicists at the national laboratory. He went to Los Alamos High School and reached the finals of the Math Olympiad program and the US Physics Team. As a teenager he worked as a programmer at Quora, then took a software engineering job at the wealth-management firm Addepar in Silicon Valley. He also spent a stint at MIT, with an internship at Hudson River Trading, before leaving.
Wang was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, to Chinese immigrant parents who were both physicists at the national laboratory.
Guo came from Pleasanton, California, where her parents, also immigrants, were electrical engineers. As a teenager she made money writing bots for Neopets and selling in-game assets. At Carnegie Mellon she studied computer science, but in 2014 she took a Thiel Fellowship, $100,000 to skip college. She interned at Facebook and became Snapchat's first female designer, helping on Snap Maps, before landing at Quora, where she and Wang met.
In 2016 they went through Y Combinator together. Wang has said he saw Nvidia leading on compute while nobody focused on the data AI would need. In 2019 Peter Thiel's Founders Fund put in $100 million and the valuation passed $1 billion.
Then the partnership broke. Guo was fired in 2018, and the sources do not say why. She later founded Passes, a creator platform. Wang stayed, owned about 15 percent by 2021, and became a billionaire at 24 when a round valued Scale at $7 billion.
The work was never as clean as the valuation. Remotasks, its contractor platform, drew criticism for pay cuts, late payments and for obscuring its link to Scale. Lawsuits in 2024 and 2025 alleged wage theft and psychological harm from disturbing content. In January 2023 Scale cut 20 percent of its staff.
Still the bet paid. Scale was named OpenAI's preferred partner for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 in 2023 and deployed a language model called Donovan on a classified US Army network. Revenue was $870 million in 2024. In June 2025 Meta agreed to take 49 percent, and Wang left to join it as chief AI officer. Jason Droege took over as CEO.
For a founder, the story cuts both ways. The idea that data would matter more than anyone thought was early and right. The credit did not stay evenly split: one founder became a household name, and the other left in 2018 and built something else.