Sarah Guo

“Conviction's Sarah Guo is betting that the largest AI opportunities will sit above foundation models, despite capital concentrating heavily in a few model companies.”

“Sarah Guo built Conviction around a simple thesis: the biggest AI opportunities lie above the foundation models, not inside them. Inference is sold by the token the way power is sold by the kilowatt-hour, which makes a lab a metered input to other people's businesses rather than a competitor for end-user preference.”

“It is so clear that people, they want to acquire human skills, even when the machine can outperform them. And they want to watch, they appreciate exceptional human skill, even when the machine could do much better.”

“We had three companies roughly go from close to zero to a trillion dollars in market cap. Anthropic basically didn't exist five years ago. OpenAI was still quite early... Usually it takes 20 years, right? SpaceX actually took since the early 2000s and Google took since the 90s. You know, these are usually 15, 20 year arcs. And then we had this weird five year inflection.”

“You need a hundred billion of revenue or 50 to a hundred billion pretty easily. And so then the question is, where are the 50 to a hundred billion dollar revenue streams for single companies?”

“What companies should do — I think Ben Horowitz wrote about this once — basically do a pre-planned once a year board meeting where the discussion topic is in a non-emotional way: should we consider exiting this next six months period?”

“If you're Anthropic, you shouldn't sell.”

“If you look at the markets that Harvey or Open Evidence or Decagon or any of these folks at Sierra entered, you know, four or five years ago, three or four years ago... it was big, big markets that could be in the roadmaps of these labs.”

“It was originally all around El Segundo because that's where SpaceX was and then Anduril. SpaceX and I think part of Tesla and stuff moved to Texas.”

“Minecraft was like five people, 10 people and it was bought for billions of dollars by Microsoft.”

“Google took since the 90s. You know, these are usually 15, 20 year arcs.”

“Janssen from Janssen Pharmaceuticals. You know, he's considered one of the best drug developers of all times. He has these great videos on YouTube where he's interviewed 30, 40 years ago talking about regulatory capture in pharma.”

“I'm an investor in a company called Sunday... one thing that we deeply believe in this company is you can't imagine the distribution. As soon as you make contact with the physical world, you're like, man, if we're trying to do the dishes, why is a cat in the dishwasher?”

“Many people now that I know are hiring people more in their 30s, 40s, 50s because they're used to managing teams. And I think that transfers directly over to managing agents.”

“Sarah Guo directly challenges this: she 'challenges the belief that only dominant infrastructure companies remain investable in the current market cycle. The argument centers on capabilities and advantages that cannot be easily replicated through scale or training data alone.'”

“Represents the vertical AI application opportunity Sarah Guo alludes to.”

“You started Evolutionary Scale and you'd raised venture and you were making progress in your models. What was the pitch from Mark and Priscilla where you said, like, that's actually the right way to go after the mission?”

“There are companies like Open Evidence. I think that is happening.”

“Building an AI Guardian for Enterprise with Onyx Security CEO Maxim Bar Kogan”

“Your co-founder, Gil, came out of building synthetic data and working at NVIDIA. Like, how do you characterize the talent at Onyx as particularly good at?”

“Sarah Guo built Conviction's brand around demonstrable network (strategic associations with Nvidia and OpenAI), a published worldview (LP letters, public positions), and partner visibility rather than institutional brand.”

“Participants: Andrew Feldman, Elad Gil, Sarah Guo”

“Participants: Adano Priors, Jacob Helberg, Sarah Guo”

“Podcast episode from No Priors featuring Elad Gil and Sarah Guo, interviewing Tuhin Srivastava on AI inference.”