The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 57 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Guo: Tiger Global's index-style early-stage strategy will perform poorly
“Short on a multi-stage fund. I think early in growth investing is more different than it appears. And so I think there are firms that like, you know, tried the early stage investing route with like a blanket based approach. And like, I don't know if that's goi…”
Guo: Raising larger funds for higher fees does not drive returns
“I think the pressure to like raise bigger funds and like collect larger fees and do more things is real. It's just like, doesn't matter. Right? Like, will that generate returns? I don't think so.”
Guo: Looking for defensibility at the seed stage is a mistake
“Yeah, it doesn't exist, right? Like quite literally you're starting with nothing. And so I think that it is a like I think investors are wrong to look for it. What you are investing in is trajectory, right? And the ability for founders to navigate a market and…”
Guo: Most LPs lack individual conviction and blindly follow big brands
“But the LP landscape overall is very clubby, right? And I'm sure you experienced this. Much like venture, a lot of investors they lack individual conviction. They simply follow bigger brands.”
Guo: Incumbent data moats are overblown in the AI race
“Much ado has been made about this idea of a data moat, but honestly, there's a lot of data out there, and entrepreneurs are incredibly creative about collecting it, and increasingly about generating it, and I don't think it's, ah, the incumbents are gonna win …”
Sarah Guo: AI Is the Largest Value Creation Opportunity in Our Lifetimes
“So AI is the biggest value creation opportunity in our lifetimes.”
Guo: 10- to 20-person teams will build billion-dollar AI businesses
“Like I'm quite confident that we're going to have 10 and 20 person teams building billion dollar businesses.”
Guo: Society will not have decades to adjust to AI capabilities
“And so I think the thing that is different today may be the speed of change, right? Like, I don't think we have decades to adjust to these capabilities in society.”
Guo: Very few AI startups can wisely spend $100M upfront
“I think that a vanishingly small number of AI companies can spend a hundred million dollars up front well, and, like, constraint is, is the name of the game in startups, right? It, like, breeds discipline and creativity”
Guo: Fewer than 10 AI startups should train foundation models
“The thing that is really expensive I mean, there are many things that can be expensive, but one of the things that is really expensive is I want to train a model from scratch that is very large and it's going to take me you know, low tens of people, probably 2…”
Guo: Conviction capped debut fund at $100M despite $500M demand
“I could have raised half a billion dollars, and I thought that doing this was, if I believe constraints breed discipline and creativity for founders, like, They also do for investors.”
Guo: AI can perform first-year legal associate work end-to-end
“We can do a lot of the work that a first year legal associate does end to end with these large models, and it's like, that's very valuable, right?”
Guo: Product engineers, not researchers, will build most AI software
“I think over time, actually, we spent, you know, we spent a lot of time with the research community, but I think the vast majority of companies, like, software is going to end up being built by, with love and respect, like, run-of-the-mill product-oriented eng…”
Guo: AI will not eliminate software engineering as a profession
“That doesn't mean I think engineering as a profession goes away. I think they just, like, leverage these tools much better.”
Guo: Incumbent data moats are overrated against creative founders
“Much ado has been made about this idea of like a data moat. I'm sure you've heard this term, but honestly, there's a lot of data out there and entrepreneurs are incredibly creative about collecting it and increasingly about generating it.”
Guo: Generative 3D modeling carries zero market risk and high value
“The world is built on three models from everything from entertainment to the physical world around us. It is an open research question as to whether or not you can generate three D models that are usable in these use cases, but it's like, ah, there's no market…”
Guo: VC Returns Are Dominated by Few Individual Investors
“Returns in most firms are dominated by a few good investors, even when the partner group might be 10 or more.”
Guo: Most tech startup macro pain is yet to come in 2023
“Assuming you're talking about the macro, like, it's, you know, I think most of the pain is yet to come. We'll still be ugly.”
Guo: AI's primary opportunity lies in services, not software
“It may be it may not be very well understood that a significant part of the opportunity for AI is services, not software markets, right?”
Guo: Subscale, undifferentiated seed funds will struggle to persist
“I think that it will be a hard time for subscale seed stage funds without a differentiated strategy to persist. I think like it was not hard to raise 10 to fifty million dollars for a couple years and it just will become more because LPs are going to become mo…”
Guo: Conviction will not reserve capital for follow-on investments
“Like we are going to invest in the early rounds of a company and we're going to leave money on the table in the later rounds. And it's an explicit decision, but what it means, it's like very focusing, right? Like we make the bets we make with them. We're align…”
Guo: AI is an enabling technology, not a distribution platform
“AI is the enabling technology, but people are talking about AI itself as a platform, but it's not distribution and ecosystem.”
Guo: Startups Using Public Internet Data Face Incumbent Risk From Big Tech
“If your plan as a company is to take internet accessible data sets and do something interesting with them on the machine learning side and productize them, if it's an area that Google and Facebook care deeply about, you're on dangerous ground, right? They, tho…”
Guo: Most VC firms are fragile and fail to scale partners
“Most venture firms are pretty fragile. And They don't scale past a certain number of partners historically, and they need to go through constant reinvention.”
Sarah Guo: Speed Is the Only Real Advantage Startups Have
“Classically, the only real advantage startups have is speed, and speed actually might matter more than ever when the environment seems to be moving at warp speed”
Sarah Guo: Incumbent Data Moats in AI Are Overhyped
“On the incumbent advantage side, much ado has been made about this idea of a data moat. But honestly, there's a lot of data out there and entrepreneurs are incredibly creative about collecting it and increasingly about generating it.”
Guo: Average VCs do not spend time studying computer science research
“I think your average venture capitalist does not spend a lot of time in computer science research”
Sarah Guo: Investing in AI Without Understanding Is Perilous
“Buying access to investments without some level of understanding sounds perilous.”
Guo: $100M-$200M rounds at $1B valuations will not move the needle for a $100M fund
“I think it is unlikely that if somebody wants to raise a hundred or two hundred million dollars at a billion dollars out of the gate, like, that is hard for us to, it's hard for me to imagine that making an impact on the fund.”
Guo: Google, Amazon, and Apple are not leading the AI race
“I think you'd be hard pressed to say that, like, Google or Amazon or Apple is, like, leading the field here.”
Guo: Amazon and Apple must invest heavily to catch up in AI
“I think that Amazon and Apple will have to make more investments over time in these technologies than, like, they don't have labs doing cutting edge work when, like, They have the skill to support them.”
Guo: Don't dismiss founders operating in tough markets
“My view is you don't just turn away from all problems because, like, the space has traditionally been hard, but it should, like, it should educate you as to, like, does the founder recognize that, and can they navigate out? Are they doing something to uniquely…”
Guo: $5B funds lack skin in the game on $5M checks
“To me, fundamentally, I think it's like very hard for a five billion dollar fund to have skin in the game on a five million dollar investment.”
Guo: Large Investment Committees Risk Poor Decisions From Groupthink and Politics
“And so I think there's real risk to good investment decision making in big groups. Groupthink, seniority overriding, like, positioning in politics.”
Guo: Early-stage startup outcomes and market trajectories are inherently unknowable
“I am increasingly convinced that, like, it's not knowable what the outcomes are from, for companies, like, at the very beginning, and specifically, like, how markets play out is unknowable, because, like, there are actors with agency determining how the market…”
Guo: Building Company-Specific Models with Internal Data Is Defensible AI Opportunity
“I also think an interesting opportunity that we will see is building sort of company specific models with internal data. There's a question of how custom software like and services like these companies get, but if you are building a model that works in a speci…”
Guo: Startup launch costs have dropped, but scaling costs have risen
“The cost to start one that really matters has come down dramatically in many areas, right? AWS increased seed capital, a cultural shift where it's okay to drop out of school and start a company, three D printing, a bigger sort of supportive ecosystem, you name…”
Guo: Nation states and hackers will use AI tools for malicious code
“If you can do code generation, you can do malicious code generation, right? And just like other nation states and hackers are going to use every other tool out there. If they write code, they're going to write code with AI tooling.”
Guo: AI funds will eventually become general horizontal software funds
“I think it's eventually just a horizontal software fund, but right now, I think it's also useful for us to be specialists, right?”
Sarah Guo: Applied CS research matters now more than ever before
“Applied research matters in a way that has never before, right?”
Sarah Guo: AI driving biggest UX redesign in two decades
“We're rethinking a lot of user experience in a way that hasn't been true in two decades.”
Guo: Most companies will apply existing AI models rather than train custom ones
“The vast majority of companies are going to figure out actually how to apply these models that other people have built that are offered by APIs or in the open source or fine tune them or like build some other part of the stack.”
Guo: Validating demand matters more for AI startups than training capability
“I think a much bigger question than, like, can you train a large model is, like, does anybody want it, right? Like, is it going to be useful? And, like, you could answer some of those questions up front.”
Guo: Conviction will deploy $1M-$10M checks with high portfolio concentration
“They're seed and series A investments, and we're putting a million to like eight or ten million dollars to work, and we'll, we're gonna be more concentrated than most seed funds”
Guo: Robotic process automation software will be reborn with AI
“RPA, big category of software, is gonna be obviously reborn.”
Guo: AI coding tools will soon handle end-to-end software creation
“Like, I think we're gonna get much more end-to-end stuff soon.”
Guo: Satya Nadella and Kevin Scott led Microsoft's AI transition brilliantly
“I mean, how could you not, right? I think Satya has done an amazing job making a, making Satya and Kevin Scott have done an amazing job championing, like really believing in this set of technologies, taking a bunch of bets, open AI and otherwise, using it as a…”