‘I don’t think it’s a bubble’
By Tim Crino | Published: 2025-10-29 20:01:00 | Source: Inc.com
Perhaps for the first time ever, it is now possible to scale a startup to unicorn status with less than 10 employees. So says Lucy Gu, co-founder of Scale AI, a multi-billion-dollar data classification company, and founder and CEO of Passes, a fan engagement platform for the creator economy.
Last week, Guo joined Alfonzo Terrill — the former head of social media and editorial at Twitter, and co-founder and CEO of Black-owned social media platform Spill — on stage at the 2025 Inc. conference. 5,000 in Phoenix for a panel discussion, moderated by Inc.’s editor-in-chief. Mike Hoffman.
The panel examined the ways in which new innovations such as artificial intelligence, robotics and quantum computing are disrupting industries and reshaping the future of business – and economies of scale.
“Everyone always asks me: ‘Do you think[AI]is a bubble?’ And I actually don’t think it is a bubble. The reason is that for the first time ever, it’s possible to have a unicorn with less than 10 employees, right?”
Instacorns happen, Jo says, because with AI, “every employee is a 10X employee.” As a result, valuations rise dramatically. But Joe believes these valuations are reasonable, and not a symptom of a bubble.
Terrell agrees with Joe: “There’s a huge opportunity now, with the cost of construction coming down, to be able to serve larger and larger audiences without the infrastructure that you needed 10 years ago. And I think every businessman should take advantage of that.”
Within about two years, Spill had reached $1 million in revenue and 200,000 active users. In the last quarter, it reached profitability for the first time.
On the investor side of the table is where Guo often finds herself as an early-stage founder Backend Capital Investment FundIt is important to be selective about which AI companies get funding.
“It’s just a matter of being smart about the companies you invest in. Are they defensible?” Do they have private data? Don’t invest at very high valuations on something that was just built on top of a model.
For entrepreneurs looking for funding, she recommends building something unique, or building a solution that would take a copycat company years to replicate.
The speed and scale that can be achieved with AI also means that the pace of innovation must keep pace with the pace of construction. Striking this balance often comes down to your team.
“Talent is everything,” Joe says. She always recommends hiring people who are smarter than you. “If you have a bad idea, but you have a talented team, I think that talented team will help you turn it into the right idea. But as soon as you hire people who aren’t as talented, the bar goes down.”
With the permits, Jo says, she chose to hire young people who were really willing to get their hands dirty. This includes hiring a competitive programmer to be its CTO, because “competitive programmers are the best.” They were completely cracked
For Terrell, balancing growth and innovation meant ditching old frameworks, going back to basics, and staying close to the customer.
He said the first order of business when creating Spill was to understand problems that couldn’t be solved in a large organization, like Twitter. “We’re all aware of social media, kind of the ills, the hate speech, the harassment — but we’re also aware of the lack of credit and rewards for creators, which has been a huge problem across all platforms, frankly, for a long time. And so we looked first and foremost, how do we build for communities?”
The Spill team started by tackling the biggest issues first — hate speech and harassment, something Twitter has tried to fix, but never fully resolved in the pre-Elon Musk/X days. The Spill team worked with “the best trust and safety experts in the industry” to design what Terrell calls the most advanced community guidelines in the industry. We call it you won’t do it Harassment of black people and gay peopleOr women, or immigrants, or just generally don’t be an idiot. How about that? This is just kind of a basic guideline
From there, Spill built large language models for content moderation — technology that didn’t really exist two decades ago at the dawn of the social media age. Compared to those older platforms, Spill has 66 percent fewer hate speech or guidelines violations, Terrell says.
The end result of Spell’s creativity is the next generation of social media – a paradigm shift that should allow Terrell and his team to go beyond solving problems and spend more time building things customers want. Among these features is a feature called Tea Party – the ability to start a live group conversation about a trending topic.
“I think these communities were always showing up on every platform out there. They weren’t built for them, they weren’t protected, they weren’t given credit. And that’s where we started,” Terrell says.
So what’s next for these young innovators?
Guo is bullish on AI, and with Passes, he sees the technology as beneficial to individual creators, if not the creator economy as a whole.
“I think the future of AI for creators is licensing their likes. Because what AI does best is help humans scale their time and be more efficient. Right now, if a creator wants to work with a brand, it’s a full production. They might have to travel and spend a week and the brand has to spend money on cameras, hair, makeup and editing.
She argues that if creators license their images to brands, both creators and brands save time and money.
As for the future of social media?
“Obviously the old ones are cracking up,” Terrell says, noting that legacy platforms are hemorrhaging users. He argues that these platforms lack the vitality and energy needed to create new culture, trends and identities, and in fact people crave the “social connection” of social media – real human connection – more than the content and the “media” part. “In some ways, what is old becomes new again,” he says.
And for readers who want to step into one of the most ripe eras of innovation in modern history? Start building.
“I think the main lesson, which has been from the beginning since I’ve been hacking things, is that you should just do things and build them,” advises Guo. “I think what I’ve learned is that people, if they want to use something, if it’s buggy, that’s OK. It doesn’t have to be perfectly designed. You have to design it 90 percent. And then, if it works, just iterate on it and make it better
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