Sarah Guo

Sarah Guo’s parents are founders of a software company for wireless and cable networks. At 14, she built the firm’s first website. Although she has described her childhood as “abnormal”, it taught her respect for the grit required to make something real.

After earning four degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in five years, including an MBA from Wharton, Guo joined Goldman Sachs in Silicon Valley. She treated it as a business boot camp. There, she worked on Workday’s IPO and Goldman’s investment in Dropbox, and advised companies including Netflix, Twitter and NVIDIA. The deals mattered less than the questions they raised. What makes a company valuable? And how do early decisions echo years later?

A chance introduction pulled her into venture capital. Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri suggested she spend “a little time” at Greylock Partners. But that soon became a decade. In 2013, Sarah Guo became Greylock’s first female partner, and later its youngest general partner. She helped back companies such as Figma and Obsidian Security, often working closely with founders long before their successes were obvious.

In 2022, Guo launched Conviction, an early-stage venture firm focused on AI. The firm raised $101 million soon after its debut. Conviction has invested in companies including Mistral AI, Cognition and Essential AI. Guo’s interest is practical. She looks for software that lowers the cost of skill, whether in law, security or creative work. One example is HeyGen, where she sits on the board. It allows anyone to produce studio-quality video for a few dollars a minute.

Sarah Guo hosts the podcast No Priors, where conversations with figures such as Jensen Huang and Noam Shazeer focus less on hype and more on how systems actually work. She believes AI is a long shift, not a quick win. “Some money will be wasted,” she has said. “But the infrastructure will remain.”