Sarah Guo: On Her New $101M Fund; How AI Impacts Inequality; AI Startups vs Incumbents | E1007

If you can do code generation, you can do malicious code generation, right? And just like other nation states and hackers are going to use every other tool out there, if they write code, they're going to write code with AI tooling. (instrumental music)

Sarah, I am so excited for this. We just looked beforehand, it was the 25th January 2017 when we last did the first show. So thank you so much for joining me, Sar, after, uh, an incredible six years.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Harry. Um, you were 20, which is amazing, and, uh, the episode was Why Conversational Will Be The Next Big Thing, which was, I think, like, a shade early.

Uh, s- slightly a shade early. The importance of market timing has never been more prescient. But, uh, the most exciting thing is you've started a new fund recently with Conviction. And so I want to start on this. I obviously spoke to many friends and mutual friends before, um, and many of them said that I had to start on this. So why did you decide to leave Greylock first?

Yeah. Greylock is like this, um... I mean, we have many mutual friends there, some of my dearest. It's a seven-year-old platform with extraordinary history and people, and, like, I played for the team for 10 years, right? So amazing place, super grateful for the opportunity, like, lots of mentors there, Aneel Bhusri, Ashim Channa, Reid Hoffman, David Zih, Jerry Chen. I love the people. I really wanted to focus on early-stage investing. Zero to one's just magic, right? Uh, and I, I wanted to be an entrepreneur again. You can't rationalize that, right? It's a great job being a GP at a big VC firm. It's crazy to leave. But I wanted to operate differently. I had a few ideas for how a small team could do venture, um, how to, how you could change the founder experience, and, and the biggest thing was believing that AI is a breaking change.

It is a great fucking job being a GP. This is what I've learned, like, starting a fund. You don't have to do any of the shit behind the scenes. Like, being a fund manager and being, like, a GP are very different things. Has there been anything surprising for you making the switch from GP at the hailed fund to being fund manager and founder?

Yeah, uh, I mean, like, I, you know, have a lot more existential dread than I used to.

(laughs)

(laughs) So that's one thing. But as you said, like, also, you know, a fund is a business like any other, right? Like, I run Rippling Payroll now. Like, we have an office, like these sort of administration and, um, you know, we have two sets of customers, entrepreneurs and LPs. Uh, you think about strategy for your business. You do recruiting. We were just talking about that. Uh, and so, like, there is, you know, I did recruiting at Greylock too, but it's not, it's not a job, right?