Your Brand- A Startup Superpower
Welcome to the Seventy-Seventh edition of Unstoppable Founders!
👑 #Unstoppable Female Founder
Unconventional, unfiltered, and unapologetically ambitious - she is a new generation of tech founder. My next Unstoppable Female Founder is Lucy Guo, Co-founder of Passes and Co-founder of Scale AI.
Lucy Guo’s journey to becoming the US’s youngest self-made female billionaire, a title previously held by Taylor Swift, began with early entrepreneurial instincts. As a child, she sold everything from Pokémon cards to colored pencils, which frequently landed her in the principal's office. By middle school, she was teaching herself to code, building bots and hacking the system selling Nanopets and building complete websites.
After being accepted into the Thiel Fellowship, Lucy left Carnegie Mellon University to pursue hands-on experience in the tech world, despite her parents’ disapproval. This path took her through internships at Facebook and Snapchat before joining Quora, which is where she met Alexandr Wang. Together they founded Scale AI in 2016, transforming a straightforward API for human tasks into an essential company for AI training data for large LLMs. Despite leaving Scale in 2018 following differences in vision with her co-founder, Lucy maintained approximately 5% equity that now has a value of approximately $1.25 billion with Scale’s impending valuation of $25B.
Her exit from Scale exemplifies a concerning pattern in Silicon Valley, where women, particularly Asian American women, often find themselves sidelined or pushed out all together. However this seemed to simply be a minor road bump for Lucy and her next move was to co-found Backend Capital, funding engineering focused projects. In 2022, Lucy got the founder itch once again and launched Passes, a creator platform that blends elements of Patreon, OnlyFans, and Twitch to enable direct fan monetization through personalized engagement. Passes has secured over $66 million in funding, including a $40 million Series A round in 2024, embodying Lucy's vision of creator ownership in an industry where platforms typically control user data.
When she’s not building billion-dollar companies, Lucy's competitive spirit drives her borderline obsession with Barry's Bootcamp. If you follow her on Instagram you’ll have seen just yesterday she completed four back-to-back classes in an attempt to top the leaderboard after 6 days off for Coachella. Speaking of, Lucy also enjoys music festivals and has added DJing to her repertoire what makes her happy rather than convention.
You can follow Lucy’s crazy adventures on Instagram here.
Check out Passes here.
📣 #TheRant
Your Brand- A Startup Superpower
Last week I hosted a workshop for several female founders and we got chatting about the importance of brand for startups. A few questions came up; What does brand even mean? When should I invest in my brand? And what does that investment actually look like?
As a lifelong marketer, the idea of what brand actually means has been grossly misunderstood. Brand isn’t just your logo, color palette or website. It’s your company's reputation, your story, your voice, and your promise to your customers. When done right, it compounds. The impact building brand loyalty amongst your customers can not be overstated enough!
I believe that investing in your brand as early as day one isn’t a luxury, it’s a growth advantage. Founders who treat brand as seriously as they treat product and go-to-market strategy will grow faster, attract better talent, command higher valuations and ultimately deliver more value to the world.
Unfortunately, far too often many founders think about brand late in the game and end up with brand debt. The pressure to deliver immediate results often pushes long-term thinking to the back burner. Brand becomes the output of disconnected campaigns, in-consistent messaging and copy, and we won’t even get into the visual mismatch. The result is your CAC goes up, retention drops, and you’re constantly firefighting instead of building momentum.
So if you’re feeling overwhelmed or unsure where to start, start with building a simple Brand Strategy. You don’t have to start by spending huge budgets or hiring a fancy branding agency right away. You can simply pull out a white board and a few dry erase markers. Laying the foundations for your brand starts with being intentional and deciding what you stand for, who are the customers you serve and how you’ll show up in a way that’s both consistent and compelling.
Simple actions to start building your startup brand today:
Define your brand strategy. Write down your brand’s purpose, promise, and personality. What do you want to be known for? If your brand were a person, what would they sound like, what hobbies would they have, what music would they listen to and most importantly, what's the sentiment you want someone to have when they interact with your brand?
Establish your visual identity. Design your logo, determine your color palette - both primary and secondary colors, and establish your font types. We are visual creatures, the more unique your brand visuals are, the more they will be noticed and the quicker you’ll begin building brand recognition.
Align your team. Share your brand values and positioning with your team eary and bring them in on the conversation. Brand is a team sport and your goal as the founder is to ensure that each member of your team is bought in and maintaining brand continuity across the board.
Pick 1-2 channels. Resist the temptation to set up a brand profile on every single social media platform in existence. You don’t need to be everywhere in the beginning. More channels means more work for you and your team managing them. Choose one or two channels where your audience engages and interacts and then show up consistently.
Measure what matters. Track qualitative feedback from customers, understand brand recall, engagement, and eventually you’ll be able to map your brand efforts to your CAC and retention metrics to see brand impact over time.
So resist the urge to push thinking about your brand to the back burner. It’s a long term investment that will deliver a huge impact for your business.
If you’re interested in learning more about how to build a brand strategy or would like some help mapping yours out, get in touch I'd be happy to help!
💰#HypeCorner
This is where we cover funding rounds raised by female founders and their teams across Europe. With less than 2% of VC funding going to female led startups, the HypeCorner is simply our way of congratulating and celebrating these founders!
🇮🇪 Laura Meredith Co-founder & COO of Tipple
🇫🇷 Marie-Odile McKeeney & Bérengère Henrion Co-founders of H’Ability
🇬🇧 Mandy Birch Founder & CEO of TreQ
Huge congratulations to these founders and their teams. Wishing you all continued success!
🎤 Events for founders
🇦🇹 {Vienna} FFX {formerly LTST25} hosted by Female Founders is back May 8th & 9th and this years theme is ‘The Real Deal for Founders’ Early bird tickets on sale now! Grab your tickets now!
🇬🇧 {London} SXSW lands in London June 2nd - 7th taking over the city merging creativity, culture and technology. SXSW London are now taking applications for musicians, film makers and speakers!
🇪🇸 {Madrid} South Summit Madrid - June 4th - 6th brings together global innovators, bold entrepreneurs, leading corporations, and visionary investors. Early bird tickets now available.
🇫🇷 {Paris} VivaTech - June 11-14th- is the world's rendezvous for startups and leaders to celebrate innovation. It's a gathering of the world's brightest minds, talents, and products.
🇳🇱 {Amsterdam} European Women in Technology is a must for your calendar, happening June 25th & 26th. 5,000+ women in tech, diversity advocates, allies and change makers for Leading the Digital Revolution!
🇬🇧 {London} Sifted Summit is back 8th & 9th of October, bringing together 3,000 founders, startup and scaleup operators and investors to celebrate the resilience of the ecosystem and how its leading players are preparing for the long-haul.
🇫🇷 {Paris} UnlockVC (formerly WVCE) is hosting its annual Summit from the 13th - 15th of October. This event brings together ambitious investors, trailblazing thought leaders, and industry pioneers for two impactful days of networking, learning, and growth.
Thanks again for taking the time to read another edition of Unstoppable Founders! If there’s a particular topic or female founder you’d like to see featured, drop me a note and let me know!
☀️ Have a wonderful weekend! ☀️
Jen
PS- Are you fundraising? Looking to boost your customer acquisition? Just looking for some guidance and advice? I’m now taking on clients for May & June and have a few open spots - drop me a note and let’s chat!