Uncapped #5 | Sarah Guo from Conviction

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 --- 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: [redacted email]