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: 

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

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod

Twitter: https://x.com/jaltma

Email: [email protected]