Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sarah Guo: SaaS market is in early innings of market cap creation
“I think we're just gonna see a lot of market cap creation, so I fundamentally think we're, like, in the early innings of that.”
Assertion Supported
Sarah Guo: Growth-stage startup valuation multiples have skyrocketed
“Everything is a multiple more expensive than it used to be but at the mid-stage and at the growth stage, when you begin to see more and more data about how a company is doing, and these models are better and better understood, that multiple has skyrocketed, be…”
Disclosure
Guo: Greylock maintains a single fund rather than multi-billion opportunity vehicles
“Unlike many of our you know, colleagues in the venture ecosystem, we have not raised, An extra ten billion dollars and, like, spread it into different funds. We have one fund.”
Prediction Held up
Sarah Guo: Cybersecurity software will outgrow cybersecurity services
“And I think the other interesting thing for us to think about is, like, I think the software piece of that is going to grow faster than the services piece.”
Assertion Partly supported
Guo: Most of 2019's $40B security software spend remains on-premise
“Most of the, call it, 35 or forty billion dollars of security spend today, it really is still, like, on-premise tooling in a few known categories, the largest of which happen to be, like, network and endpoint and some areas like that.”
Insight
Sarah Guo: Cybersecurity is fundamentally a data inspection problem
“I think of security as a data problem. Right? I think of it as, like, basically, like, you can either re-architect something, or you can constantly inspect mass amounts of data to understand what is actually happening in your environment.”
Insight
Guo: Cybersecurity leads machine learning adoption due to massive data volume
“Security is actually like a, Sort of forefront industry for machine learning in some ways because you have a massive amount of different types of data where you have too much data to go inspect manually. And you want to be able to infer a bunch of different be…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sarah Guo predicts AI value will come from automating labor-heavy services
“I think a lot of the business value is gonna come from Traditionally very, like, manual labor heavy service industry.”
Opinion
Sarah Guo considers Uber a machine learning company
“I'd argue Uber is an ML company because they use it for demand management and pricing and everything else.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Guo: B2B software has not been a profitable industry in China
“B to B software has not actually been very profitable a industry in China so far.”
Insight
Guo: Sophisticated enterprises aren't looking to cut security budgets or headcount
“Especially for, you know, medium and large companies that are more sophisticated in security nobody's, like, necessarily trying to bring their overall security budget Down or cut headcount. They're just trying to figure out, like, am I doing things that are im…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Guo: Tightening regulations will force companies to re-architect for data residency
“I feel pretty strongly like we're gonna move in one direction here, and companies are going to be asked to know much more about their data and have better controls and architect it differently, including in terms of you know, data residency, which people are j…”
Disclosure
Sarah Guo: Greylock operates with under 10 investors and under 40 total staff
“Greylock is a fifty-plus-year-old venture firm. We have less than 10 investors, an entire team of less than 40, actually based entirely in the Bay Area”
Disclosure
Sarah Guo: Greylock invests out of a $1B fund focused on early-stage startups
“We have billion dollar fund, and we largely invest in early stage companies and then put more and more capital into them over time as they progress.”
Disclosure
Guo: Half of her personal startup portfolio is outside the Bay Area
“Half my personal portfolio is not in the Bay Area entirely”
Opinion
Guo: Shopify is an extraordinary example of SaaS expanding market width
“Shopify's an extraordinary example of this, but you can have companies that enable entirely new customer bases to do new things, and they've figured out, like, web distribution, Basically, to make a different price point work for different customers”
Assertion Contradicted
Guo estimates the 2019 cybersecurity market at $75B to $80B
“Like, let's say in 2019, you can call it a 75 or eighty billion dollar industry, half of which is software and half of which is services.”
Disclosure
Sarah Guo: Greylock's cybersecurity investment thesis centers on hybrid cloud and AI
“I think Matt can probably summarize our, like, investing thesis around security very simply in, like, two things. It's basically like hybrid cloud and AI, right?”
Disclosure
Guo: Five of her six active portfolio companies rely on ML
“I think five of the six companies that I am involved with actively today would say, like, machine learning is a core tenet of, like, what makes your product work.”
Disclosure
Guo: Greylock portfolio companies account for adversarial threats to AI models
“I definitely think that there are companies in the portfolio that think very carefully about what it will mean to have adversaries for their models, right?”
Disclosure
Guo: Greylock seeks investments in GDPR and CCPA compliance tools
“If somebody says they make it easier for Companies to deal with GDPR and CCPA and be compliant, understand what data they have. Like, I'm listening. I think we would actually welcome more of that in the portfolio.”
Sarah Guo