Uncapped #5 | Sarah Guo from Conviction
Episode description
I was pumped to chat this week with Sarah Guo. Sarah is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. Some of her investments include Harvey, Mistral AI, Sierra, Cognition, HeyGen, and Cartesia, among others. Prior to 2022, she spent nearly a decade incubating and investing as a General Partner at Greylock Partners. Sarah co-hosts a podcast with Elad Gil called No Priors where they discuss the AI revolution.
We covered:
- Compounding qualities of enduring firms
- Brand building in the current market
- Taking risk by having an opinion
- Learnings from her time at Greylock
- AI discourse compared to previous cycles
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(0:11) What a VC firm is at its core
(2:27) Compounding qualities of enduring firms
(6:44) Intentionality behind building Conviction’s brand
(13:01) Correlation or causation between brands and returns
(16:33) Shape of the current VC market
(27:15) Learnings from experience at Greylock
(32:06) Market vs founder driven
(33:55) AI conversation shifting from inputs to outputs
(36:28) More billion dollar companies than ever before
(42:44) Agency being the last human resource
(44:40) Important skills for kids to learn
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