Ex-Greylock GP Sarah Guo Publicizes Conviction Companions, Her New AI Fund

Guo introduced Tuesday the primary shut of a $101 million debut fund for her new funding agency Conviction Companions. After spending 9 years at Greylock, the place she rose by way of the ranks to change into the Silicon Valley agency’s second feminine basic associate, Guo left the agency in June. With Conviction, she plans to put money into AI startups as much as the Collection A stage with verify sizes between $1 million and $10 million. Guo is beginning out as a solo investor, however plans to construct a staff round her that’s tailor-made to AI’s research-heavy nature.

For instance, she has recruited a visiting scholar to conduct AI analysis, and says she plans to rent extra teachers who would possibly construct new fashions and collaborate on concepts with startups Conviction invests in. “We’re not going to imagine the normal data of what a enterprise agency thinks belongs in home and out of home,” she instructed Forbes in an interview. She identified that for generalist companies, hiring a staff of AI researchers “doesn’t make sense.”

Guo grew up in Wisconsin because the daughter of Chinese language immigrants who labored at Bell Labs earlier than turning into tech entrepreneurs. She turned immersed in know-how as an adolescent, constructing an internet site for her dad and mom’ firm. After graduating from the College of Pennsylvania, she labored two yr stints at broadband community startup Casa Methods and on tech funding banking at Goldman Sachs. She joined Greylock in 2013, and credit the generalist agency for giving her entry to investments in areas like well being tech and crypto.

But it surely was AI that caught together with her most of all. She says she critically thought of quitting Greylock to start out an organization with Google Mind cofounder Andrew Ng in 2016 (additionally the yr she was named to Forbes’ 30 Below 30 record for Enterprise Capital). Nonetheless, like Web3 final yr, AI had a VC hype cycle of its personal which fizzled out as soon as the know-how and income proved to be rising too slowly. “A few very sensible traders requested me over dinner in 2018, within the trough of disillusionment [about AI], what I’d gotten improper about bots and pure language,” she mentioned. “I abashedly admitted that the underlying know-how wasn’t fairly there.”

Now, latest rapid-fire technical breakthroughs from corporations like Hugging Face and Stability AI point out that the tempo of analysis is progressing up an exponential curve, Guo says. As an alternative of blockchain-based Web3, Guo believes the foundational know-how of the approaching years is AI. She says she left Greylock to put money into this kind of know-how according to the “traditional startup story of eager to do one thing that’s actually totally different—usually, that’s a lot simpler to do ranging from scratch.”