She dethroned Taylor Swift as the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. But for Lucy Guo, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of Passes, mornings look nothing like you’d expect from someone worth $1.3 billion. There’s no leisurely breakfast or a slow scroll through the morning papers.
Instead, the co-founder of Scale AI is already sweating through her second workout while most people are still hitting snooze – and that’s entirely by design.
Guo’s daily schedule has attracted widespread attention since Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire following Meta’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI – acquiring a 49% stake and valuing the company at $29 billion – in 2025.
The 5:30 a.m. start and the philosophy behind it
Guo wakes up at 5:30 a.m. and doesn’t clock off until midnight – a schedule she has described, somewhat defiantly, as not feeling like work at all. “I probably don’t have work-life balance,” she told Fortune. “For me, work doesn’t really feel like work. I love doing my job.”
She goes to bed around 1 a.m. and generally wakes up at 5 or 6 in the morning , making it clear she doesn’t prescribe this schedule to others. The limited sleep is a deliberate trade-off – one she makes to protect what she considers the most non-negotiable part of her day: the workout.
Double Barry’s, treadmills at 20 mph, and 3,000 classes
Every morning, Guo has a car waiting to take her to Barry’s Bootcamp, a chauffeur service that is a perk of her apartment building’s amenities in Miami. The class itself is no casual jog. Each interval fitness session consists of 30 minutes of treadmill training and 30 minutes of weights, and Guo says she can run 20 miles per hour on a Barry’s treadmill.
What makes her regimen truly extraordinary isn’t a single class – it’s two consecutive ones, back to back. She likes to kick off the workday with back-to-back workout sessions at Barry’s Bootcamp, saying it keeps her energized all day long.
She reportedly used to push even harder, completing three classes in a row before heading into the office – and jokes that dropping to two feels like going “lazy,” as reported by Entrepreneur. In April 2025, Guo hit a significant personal milestone by completing her 3,000th Barry’s class.
The fitness obsession, she explains, has a direct professional application. “As a founder, you can go a little crazy when you’re putting in a bunch of effort into a project and you’re not necessarily seeing the results. But with exercise, the output you get is the input you put in,” she told Entrepreneur.
From the gym to a 12-hour desk stretch
After her workout, Guo heads back home for a shower before commuting to the office on a scooter – a three-minute ride from her front door. Once there, the day is relentless. She spends the next 12 hours working at her desk, usually eating lunch and dinner there as well. There is no real lunch break; meals are consumed between meetings with design teams and engineers.
The grinding hours aren’t something Guo apologises for or plans to scale back. She has told CNBC Make It that working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, constitutes work-life balance in her view – adding, “You don’t need to sleep from nine to nine.” For Guo, the intensity is the product. She believes founders in early-stage companies have little choice: getting a company off the ground often requires 90-hour work weeks.
Whether or not her routine is replicable – or even advisable – for others, Guo has been consistent in saying it’s entirely personal. For her, these aren’t sacrifices. They’re simply what building a billion-dollar company from scratch looks like from the inside.