20VC: In AI Who Wins? Startups or Incumbents? What Happens to Wealth Inequality? Why Will $10BN+ Companies Only Have 10 People | Why Defensibility in Startups is BS & Speed is Everything? Why Large Groups Worsen Decision-Making with Sarah Guo
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2023
⏱️ 45 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sarah Guo is the Founding Partner @ Conviction Capital, a $100M first fund purpose-built to serve “Software 3.0” companies. Prior to founding Conviction, Sarah was a General Partner at Greylock where she made investments in the likes of Figma, Coda, Neeva and many more incredible companies. Sarah also hosts her own podcast, No Priors with the wonderful Elad Gil.
In Today's Episode with Sarah Guo We Discuss:
1. From Large Multi-Stage Firm to Founding Conviction:
- Why did Sarah decide to leave Greylock?
- What are 1-2 of her biggest lessons from her time at Greylock? How did they impact her mindset when building Conviction today?
- What does Sarah believe are the most surprising or hardest elements of firm building?
2. The Future for AI: The Opportunities and the Challenges:
- Why does Sarah believe AI is the most foundational technology of our lifetime?
- Why did Sarah decide to centre the entire fund around AI? Is AI not an enabling technology that will power all sectors in technology?
- Is Sarah concerned by the further wealth inequality that AI and billion dollar companies created by 10 people, will inevitably bring?
- How does Sarah think about the potential for malicious AI use? What can be done to prevent this?
3. Startup and VC Principles That Are BS:
- Why does Sarah believe that defensibility is BS?
- Why do Sarah and Harry both believe that reserves in venture funds are a suboptimal use of funds?
- "Great founder, bad market, market wins". Does Sarah agree? How does Sarah prioritize the centrality of founder vs market?
4. Sarah Guo: The Investor
- How has Sarah changed most significantly as an investor over the last 5 years?
- What is Sarah's biggest miss? How did it impact her mindset today?
- What is Sarah's biggest win? How did that alter her risk appetite?
- How does Sarah see the future of venture?
- If Sarah could invest in one multi-stage firm and one seed-stage firm, which would it be?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | AI is the biggest value creation opportunity in our lifetimes. Like I'm quite confident that we're |
| 0:04.9 | going to have 10 and 20 person teams building billion dollar businesses. The only real advantage |
| 0:09.9 | startups have is speed. And speed actually might matter more than ever when the environment |
| 0:15.2 | seems to be moving at warp speed. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And last time we had this |
| 0:20.2 | guest on the show, |
| 0:20.9 | it was an incredible seven years ago, so much has changed since then, and given everything in |
| 0:25.2 | AI, this episode could not come at a more important time. And so I'm thrilled to welcome back |
| 0:29.8 | Sarah Guo, founding partner at Conviction Capital, a hundred million dollar first fund, |
| 0:34.9 | purpose built to serve software 3.0 companies. Prior to founding |
| 0:38.5 | conviction, Sarah was a general partner at Greylock, where she made investments in the likes |
| 0:42.4 | of Figma, Coda, Neva and more. But before we move into the show today, you've heard me talk about |
| 0:48.1 | Coda. Coda is the doc that brings it all together and it helps you and your team run smoother |
| 0:53.0 | and be more efficient. |
| 0:54.3 | I know this because Coda is central to 20 VC in our research. The amount of research we do before |
| 0:59.6 | every show is insane and done by many different people on the team. They all use Coda and it allows |
| 1:04.4 | them to work seamlessly all in one place. This makes them so much more efficient. By putting |
| 1:09.3 | all these different data sources in one centralized location regardless of format, it eliminates so many roadblocks for your team, which really stops teams in their track. |
| 1:17.6 | With Coda, you'll never ask, where are the latest project updates? Is there a report about licenses I can see? |
| 1:22.6 | This is what slows down productivity and collaboration. |
| 1:25.6 | With Coda, there is one place to get projects across the finish line faster, help your team run smoothly, more efficiently with Coda. |
| 1:33.3 | Get started today for free, head over to coda.io slash 20VC. |
| 1:38.3 | That's Coda.i.o and get started for free, coda.i0 slash 20VC. |
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