Back in April, I was commissioned by the New York Post to make some fashion/lifestyle portraits of tech entrepreneur and angel investor, Lucy Guo.

At just 27 years old, Lucy recently made the Forbes “2022 List of America’s Richest Self-Made Women”. And although she has a net worth of approximately $440 million, Lucy was a surprisingly down-to-earth and generous collaborator (which is more than I can say for a few other millionaires and billionaires I’ve photographed).

Since she had just moved into her condo, located in the 1000 Museum building in downtown Miami, designed by world-renowned architect, Zaha Hadid, and had very little furniture or decor set up yet, we had to get a bit creative. We used the corner of her condo, over-looking Museum Park and Biscayne Bay, to set up her Pokemon collection- complete with slippers and her “Pikachu Loves Money” artwork by Gal Yosef. For the rest of the photography set-ups, we utilized the gorgeous and futurist-looking 1000 Museum pool deck.

“In December 2020, she was lured to Miami via Tweets from friends like Delian Asparouhov, a principal at Founders Fund and co-founder and President of Varda Space Industries; Keith Rabois, co-founder of Opendoor and general partner at Founders Fund; and Jack Abraham, founder of investment fund Atomic, who were leading the charge for Miami becoming the next Silicon Valley.

She learned how to code when she was in second grade in her native San Francisco. Guo’s parents, who immigrated from China, were both electrical engineers, but they dissuaded her from the profession — with her mother saying it was too hard for women to be successful in the field.

In middle school, Guo created one of the first Twitter bots, which allowed users to auto-follow based on specific hashtags. She started competing in hackathons — interactive events that bring computer programmers together to improve upon or build new software — in high school, and was accepted to Carnegie Mellon for college. 

After two years, she applied to and was awarded the $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, created by entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to incentivize students 22 and younger to drop out of school and create a startup or pursue scientific research.” - Jacquelynn Powers Maurice, New York Post