Sarah Guo
Founder & General Partner, Conviction. On 6 shows, 173 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderhost@saranormous ↗LinkedIn ↗sarahguo.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Sarah Guo is the founder of Conviction, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on AI-native startups, and co-hosts the technology podcast No Priors. Previously, she was a General Partner at Greylock Partners, where she invested in companies including Figma, Coda, and Neeva.
6shows
173appearances
234statements
32resolved
26supported
3contradicted
81%fully supported
54said about them ↓ Everything Sarah Guo said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
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: Ignore AI doom scenarios; prioritize near-term fraud and disinformation
“There's no linear path from here to there. And so when people ask me about like the doom scenario, like I am much more concerned about abuses we actually do understand. So for example, like what if people don't understand what information is true or not, or li…”
Guo: Daron Acemoglu fundamentally misunderstands AI scaling and technology
“Darren's arguing about something he doesn't understand. Like he, his claim is, you know, how do we know scale works? More data won't make customer support reps better. I think like that's just a fundamental, like misunderstanding of the technology and also obj…”
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.”
Sarah Guo: AI making human skill irrelevant is complete nonsense
“I think the idea that human skill is no longer relevant in the world of superhuman AI, just as a product of the technology itself is nonsense.”
Guo: Researchers have predicted ASI is 18 months away for five years
“The data I have is that a number of very smart and even very self-aware research scientists have felt that, you know, there was some knee in the curve on recursive self-improvement or ASI, 18 months away, every 18 months for the last five years.”
Guo: Compute and complex data are bigger AI limiters than algorithms
“The question of, like, how you are going to go gather that data for less verifiable, more complex domains, or do you run into the actual constraints on the, like, physical compute accessibility side? Like, I think that's probably more of a limiter than this be…”
Guo: High-status engineering tasks can be surprisingly easy for AI agents
“One thing I've seen is that if you have An engineering identity that's based on that, like a value based ranking of difficulty or skill, like the specific types of engineering that are considered, you know, impressive or high status can actually be like less h…”
Guo: Unreviewed AI-generated code introduces fragility into production codebases
“If you can generate an enormous amount of code and no one is reading it, you don't know the quality of the code. Nobody deeply understands the code base and there's more fragility, right? It's like the slop problem, but instead of it being like vibe coding slo…”
Guo: Someone Will Make Hundreds of Millions Trading Markets With LLMs
“From a prediction standpoint, personally, I think we're going to see somebody make a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars, trading markets with LLMs next year. It's inevitable.”
Guo: Sentiment Will Collapse Around Small-Scale Humanoid Robotics Startups
“One is there's going to be like some collapse of sentiment around a set of robotics companies next year, not because it like actually isn't as a field going to progress, but because, you know, people are beginning to project timelines and you know, not everybo…”
Guo: Model Optimization Software Will Commoditize, Making Infrastructure the Differentiator
“In the end, a lot of the model optimization performance layer is open source, and it's a commodity And it will end up being like a fight at the infrastructure level, actually.”
Guo: DeepSeek app surge driven by curiosity and hype, not capability
“And there's a competing view, which is just like, well, like this whole drama is quite interesting and people are trying it as much because like they want to see what the leading Chinese AI model is like, if it's as good as open AI and anthropic and such. I de…”
Guo: 2025 will bring robotics breakthroughs, but not deployments
“I think we're going to see technical proof of breakthroughs in robotics and in generalization this year, though not deployments.”
Guo: Cheaper AI code generation will increase software volume, not replace developers
“If we take the cost of software and high quality software down two orders of magnitude, we're just gonna end up with more software in the world. We're not gonna end up with fewer people doing development.”
Guo: Incumbents lack the reasoning trace data needed for AI automation
“And then one disappointing learning that we found in our own portfolio is no one has the data we want. In many cases, right? So imagine you are trying to automate a specific type of knowledge work and what you want is the reasoning trace all of the inputs and …”
Guo: Small video AI startups are producing models competitive with Sora
“You could argue now that you have a handful of companies that are showing really amazing video generation capabilities, where it's not actually, like, a bunch of smaller players are step function behind there between runway and Pika. And even you know, if you …”
Guo: Legacy GTM software infrastructure will lose relevance in the AI era
“I think that there's a prior generation of go-to-market infrastructure that will become less relevant. Because it doesn't support, like, the scale, intelligence of, like, okay, I want all these first and second and inferred third-party signals.”
Guo: ElevenLabs is the only independent voice API startup doing $10M+ revenue
“There's like exactly one independent voice API business and tens of millions of revenue, and that's 11.”
Guo: Healthcare AI startups hit $5M to $10M ARR in year one
“That's why you get actually a series of companies that are democratizing capabilities and really more on the prosumer side, but, you know, beginning to see things even in, for example, healthcare, traditionally really slow industry where you go zero to five or…”
Sarah Guo notes overtraining LLMs past optimal compute continues to improve performance
“And if you are meta and you have Somewhere between, you know, 22,000 GPU clusters and 350,000 GPUs available then continuing to train past, like, supposedly optimal points, like, does improve performance apparently and doesn't just fully asymptote as soon as m…”
Guo: Microsoft's Inflection Deal Is a Strategic Hedge Against OpenAI Reliance
“Now, they're clearly still working with OpenAI, given, like, direct statements from both companies and the Stargate Data center effort, but it's also hard from the outside not to see this as somewhat of a hedge, right? Not in a criticism of OpenAI, but you kno…”
The other half of the tape: Sarah Guo's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 49 times in 28 episodes across the shows. 5 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 17Alex Duffy 5Lenny Rachitsky 4Tamar Yehoshua 3Alessio Fanelli 3Sam Parr 2Pat Grady 2Max Altman 2
Statements about Sarah Guo, by other people (5)
Huang: No laws of physics limit scaling superclusters to 1M GPUs
“Nothing is, yeah, no laws of physics limits but everything is going to be hard.”
Dolgov: Consumer and community trust is the main bottleneck to scaling Waymo
“Primarily it's the latter. So we've always, you know, our playbook has been to you know, go about it responsibly and gradually and earn trust every step of the way and have this transparent dialogue. Again, this is a very new thing, new technology, new product…”
Papermaster: AMD rejects proprietary walled gardens in favor of open source
“Sarah, the point is, we're not about locking in someone with a proprietary wall garden software stack. What we want is we want to win with the best solution, and we want, or we're committed to open source and we're committed to giving our customers choice.”
Weinberg reveals OpenAI, Sarah Guo, and Elad Gil as Harvey's first investors
“So our first investor was OpenAI and then our first two angel investors were Sarah Guo and Elad Gil.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 25
Lenny's Podcast 11
Latent Space 11
My First Million 2
2026 4 mentions in 1 episode
2025 23 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- ⚡️Launching AI Diplomacy: the hardest LLM Game Benchmark yet - Alex Duffy
- 2024 Year in Review: The Big Scaling Debate, the Four Wars of AI, Top Themes and the Rise of Agents
- Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody
- “I deliberately understaff every project” | Leadership lessons from Rippling’s $16B journey
- 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster
- a16z's David George on the Most Controversial Bet at a16z & Do Margins and Revenue Matter in AI? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- BVP Partner, Byron Deeter: The Future of Venture - Why Chanel vs Walmart is BS · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Why Apple Needs a Management Overhaul & Why Google is Catching Up with Hyperscalers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Lessons in product leadership and AI strategy from Glean, Google, Amazon, and Slack | Tamar Yehoshua
- Pat Grady: Sequoia Partner on Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin | E1174 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mark Goldberg: Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | E1219 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Production AI Engineering starts with Evals
- Arthur Mensch: Open vs Closed - Who Wins and Mistral's Position | E1146 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 2 mentions in 1 episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Greylock's David Sze on His Biggest Lessons Working with Mark Zuckerberg and Reid Hoffman, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, How To Think Through Price Discipline Today and How Truly Strong Venture Partnerships Function
- 20VC: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu on The Art of Great Leadership Today, Why The Best Give All of the Credit and Take All of the Blame & How DoorDash Have Won The Best Talent Against the Toughest Competition
- 20VC: How To Deliver Feedback with Compassion and Clarity, WTF Are Values Really and How To Instill Them & Raising $50M+ From Index and Greylock but Remaining in Stealth for 12 Months with Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO @ CommonRoom
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Lime CEO Brad Bao on How Lime Assess The Micro-Mobility Landscape and Competition Today, What It Takes To Launch and Win A New City & Why Lime Have Spent $0 on Marketing To Date
- 20VC: Brex Founder Henrique Dubugras on Why Being Mission Driven Is Not The Only Way To Build A Massive Business, Why You Should Not Associate Fundraising with The Cash Needs of Your Business & Why You Don't Have To Follow Startup Theory When It Comes To
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Elad Gil on Becoming One of Silicon Valleys Top Angels, Why Most People Get Market Sizing Wrong & Should VC Services Always Be Bundled Together?
- 20VC: Sequoia Partner, Pat Grady on Why Data Is The New Oil, Why We Will See The Return of The Apprenticeship Model in VC & The Defining Characteristics of The Next Generation of Great Software
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sarah's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NO PRIORSLEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Convictionhost | 165 | 134 | 86% 18/21 | full record on No Priors → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Conviction | 3 +1 | 57 | 100% 4/4 | full record on 20VC → |
 MADLEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Conviction | 1 | 21 | 50% 2/4 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| MY FIRST MILLIONLEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Conviction | 1 | 15 | 67% 2/3 | full record on My First Million → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Conviction | 2 | 7 | — | full record on Latent Space → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder & General Partner, Conviction | 1 | 0 | — | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |