Sarah Guo always knew he wanted to do it in Silicon Valley. Now, she has tips for others who want to do the same.
On a recent trip to San Francisco, we sat down with Guo, an Alum Goldman Sachs and Greylock Partners who now runs its VC Fund focused on it, Punishment. Guo and her team have made early investments in a number of bold beginnings of him, including the legal beginning of that Harvey, who was alone rated at $ 3 billion In a final round of financing, and French generation AI Company Mistral, which was last appreciated $ 6 billion.
She shared her views to discover the possibilities of him, making her in technology, the future of San Francisco and more.
This interview is edited for clarity and length.
Business Insurance: How did you start your start in the capital of entrepreneurship?
Sarah Guo: Accidentally. I worked at Goldman Sachs for a short year. I happened to work with Aneel Bhusri and Reid Hoffman, the founders of Workday, and Paypal, and Linkedin, and they are great. And when I was aiming to go to a start after Goldman, Aneel said, ‘Why don’t you come to work on the day of work?’ I said I wanted something that is an early stage, higher risk. I think I’ll start with a company. And he said, ‘Well, I have a night job. You need to come to Grylock for a while. And so, you know, one time it was 10 years. So I ended up making ventures investing. It took me a few years to decide that I wanted to make investments, but I love it now.
Business Insurance: When you were in Goldman, how were you thinking about the QV world?
Sarah Guo: I went out to Silicon Valley knowing that this is the center of the universe for technology. I thought I would try to work in Goldman (in the Gulf area) as a business camp. I am very grateful for that experience. There is a great network and I have learned a lot, but I am an entrepreneur. I would never stay. I tried to start a business. It wasn’t very good. And that was a way for me to be like, ‘what makes a company valid’. That was the thing I wanted to answer.
Business Insurance: If you could talk to your own college today, or someone else in college now, what would be your advice on their first steps to find a company?
Sarah Guo: I would say, if you already feel like you understand something that other people do not, and you have to do it, then just do it. And then, if you are not obsessed with a particular problem or idea, I would say, go to work with the most talented people you can make a kind of early or scaling company.
Business Insurance: So you wouldn’t go to work, say, in the bank?
Sarah Guo: No, I’m very grateful for the experience. But I’m from Wisconsin. I had to be able to afford to live here. I had to get into the ecosystem. And so it depends only on where people come from.
Business Insurance: How many bullies are you in him really changing the world?
Sarah Guo: I have just done the next two decades for this being a secular change, and I think it’s changing the world. This is not to say that people will not lose money along the way, in terms of the amount of money spent by a large number of companies in training now.
Business Insurance: Is this a loss of money, or is it just the basic blocks of building an industry?
Sarah Guo: If you have the internet bubble, then get wide -waist infrastructure at the end, right? And so some of those ideas will eventually work. You have food online, and then you have Instacart. And so it is difficult for me to say what the waste is when it is a function of markets. And I think the exploration will be really valid for the end users at the end.
Business Insurance: Which industries are more mature for breaking from it?
Sarah Guo: One of the ways we look at it is like a massive democratization force. You can get a number of skills and tasks and make them cheaper. And this may be anything from lower -level legal skills with companies such as Consume and other parts of professional services (obedience is an investor in Harvey). I think this will happen in tax, audit, consultancy, etc. But also, when I think about democratization, I think you will get more law practiced at a higher level for less money eventually.
But another version of this democratization is in creativity. I think the ability to create high quality writing, high quality research, images, audio, songs, videos. I’m on board a company called Heygen. Instead of getting thousands of dollars with a studio and an agency to create a speaking head video, she is looking like $ 2 a minute now. You can do it in your home. It takes as 20 minutes to settle. And so I think that the possibility of using the quality of creativity for the last users is a really great democratization function. We will continue to invest in this. People want to express themselves.
Business Insurance: How is it to work in San Francisco now? Is the place to be if you are an entrepreneur, or can you still be anywhere with distance work?
Sarah Guo: There is a massive advantage of being in real life in San Francisco. I travel four or five days a week. We do a ton of work personally, and part of it is like the recognition of the collective tribe of engineers and scholars and product people in San Francisco is where the rest of the world is generally. It is clear that there are smart scientists in many different fields, including China, but is not distributed equally. And so, if you want to understand the state of art, which is more important than ever, I think San Francisco is where it should be.
Business Insurance: What is your opinion on Deepseek?
Sarah Guo: I think Deepseek is amazing test that there is a ton of space and efficiency for him and people are not focused on it. The availability of border class models that are cheap, small and widely available in a competitive market means more economic surplus for users and beginnings, for which I am really excited. I also think it’s a awakening call. There are a number of policies that we could implement to ensure that much better talent works here and that our industry is competitive, but the limiting of NVPI network gangs at the Nvidia has not been enough.
Business Insurance: Advice what other advice would you have for someone in the middle career that could seek to pass and explode in him?
Sarah Guo: Companies say they are looking for the engineers of him, people who know how to manipulate these models in useful applications and write ratings whether they are working or not. The essential flow of work for the construction of products today – I think smart engineers can understand this. This will become part of the practice of software engineering. It’s not another role. And there is a great opportunity for anyone who is ready to invest time and curiosity to simply become good in working with the state of art.