E39: “Angel” Podcast: Sarah Guo, General Partner at Greylock Partners shares insights on Greylock’s “Zero to One” investment thesis, sharpening her decision-making skills, ranking team, market & product as investment criteria & the changing landscape of VC

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 25 March 2020

⏱️ 80 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:52 Jason intros Greylock's Sarah Guo
3:37 How did Sarah wind up at Greylock?
5:45 Sarah explains Greylock's "Zero to One" thesis & typical term commitment of a VC
11:53 How does Sarah measure her personal performance and her portfolio's performance? What are her biggest strengths as an investor?
16:12 How does she sharpen her decision-making skills?
17:53 Ranking her investment criteria: People, Markets & Product
20:26 Balancing intensity & life outside of work, the commitment of early-stage startups
27:26 Work-life balance & how the venture landscape changed over time
35:36 Greylock's structured & what was Sarah's first investment & how did it play into her investment thesis?
43:38 Sarah's investments in work-enabling software
48:00 Sarah recommends Dylan Field of Figma join the show - episode dropping Friday!
49:22 Identifying subtle flashes of brilliance in early products
58:28 Female founders being held to a higher standard
1:02:35 Anti-portfolio: Zoom
1:10:06 Sarah turns off her virtual background and reveals her location

Transcript

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0:51.0	slash Angel.
0:52.1	Hey everybody, it's Jason Calicanus and we're here on another episode of the angel podcast
0:56.8	We're having an amazing season. So many great guests have been on the pod and
1:01.6	Today will be no different except we're doing a remote and you should not
1:06.8	know that I know a lot of podcasters do only remote but you never know that they're not in the same room as the person. In fact, I think the person who's best at this is Sam Harris. He's like, hey, it's great to see you and I think he basically must tell people pretend you're in the room.
1:23.8	Don't say that we're on the phone because, and he says it's great to meet you and
1:28.9	sometimes people were like, yeah, it's great to virtually meet you or it's great to meet you
1:31.8	over the phone. And we're getting a really
1:34.4	major lesson because of the coronavirus or as the president likes to call it the
1:40.4	woohan virus trolling the Chinese who today declared that the US
1:46.4	created it the US military created the coronavirus really crazy it's crazy
	...

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