Uncapped #5 | Sarah Guo from Conviction

I was pumped to chat this week with Sarah Guo. Sarah is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. Some of her investments include Harvey, Mistral AI, Sierra, Cognition, HeyGen, and Cartesia, among others. Prior to 2022, she spent nearly a decade incubating and investing as a General Partner at Greylock Partners. Sarah co-hosts a podcast with Elad Gil called No Priors where they discuss the AI revolution. We covered: Compounding qualities of enduring firms Brand building in the current market Taking risk by having an opinion Learnings from her time at Greylock AI discourse compared to previous cycles --- Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:11) What a VC firm is at its core (2:27) Compounding qualities of enduring firms (6:44) Intentionality behind building Conviction’s brand (13:01) Correlation or causation between brands and returns (16:33) Shape of the current VC market (27:15) Learnings from experience at Greylock (32:06) Market vs founder driven (33:55) AI conversation shifting from inputs to outputs (36:28) More billion dollar companies than ever before (42:44) Agency being the last human resource (44:40) Important skills for kids to learn --- Linktree: https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Twitter: https://x.com/jaltma Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jack Altman?

  All right. So thank you for doing this. I realize that you've been spending more time being the interviewer than being interviewed, but I appreciate you doing this and it's nice to be doing it in your office.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, any excuse to hang out with you.

• 0:11Jack Altman?

  The first thing I want to ask you about is what a VC firm sort of is. And the thing I've been thinking about a bunch is when I was doing Lattice, I kind of knew what a company was, like, you know, you build a product, you sell the product, like, there's like a sort of a very tractable thing. And then over the last year doing Venture full-time for the first time, it struck me that it's a much more sort of flimsy concept. And, you know, there's obviously like a fund that owns shares, but then there's like a brand and there's people and there's these other parts. And as I've been thinking about building a VC firm, I've realized that thinking about what it actually is is sort of like a wispy idea. And so I would love just to hear from you as you've thought about, you know, you've been at one, like a very substantial longstanding one.

• 0:55Jack Altman?

  Now you've built your own. How do you think about what a VC firm is?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  We've taken like two steps toward building our own.

• 1:02Jack Altman?

  You've done something now.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  It's an interesting question. Like, the way we think of it internally is, and it's not like the most flattering view, but Venture is a bundle of like money. I'm thinking about the value props of the customer, right? The customer is the founder. Venture is a bundle of money where like everybody's money is approximately green, right? You can have like lower and higher quality LPs, but generally that's not how founders make their decision. Then you have people and beliefs that you are associated with as a founder. And then you have advantage, right? Like what can, like, can, and I wouldn't do the job if I didn't figure like that the last piece could matter at all.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  But help you can give companies and to try to make things happen faster or make ideas like more possible to actually make real. It is a weird way to think about Venture as a business because for all tech investors love to talk about like,

• 2:04Speaker 01

  You know, like moats and differentiation and sustainable advantage. I think venture, like when you think about those components, money is the purest commodity. The rest of it is pretty squishy. It's a lot of like brand and individuals that feel quite fragile or like point in time. But you know, some of the great venture brands, they've been around for a long time. And I think it's still possible to build it in during institution, so.

• 2:27Jack Altman?

  Yeah, and some of those brands do, something is compounding there. And I guess maybe that's an interesting sort of way to pull on the thread is like, what is compounding at Sequoia or Greylock or these firms that have been successful for decades? What's the thing that is like hard to knock off balance? Like, what is the thing that's making, is it like, is it the brand? Is it the network of founders? Is it something about the way they do business? Like, what is holding on through different years and teams and cycles?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I would start by saying like, I actually like really want to try to live like this. And I think your entire like personality expresses this, but like this is, this doesn't feel like a particularly zero sum environment. I think you can try to build a new thing without saying we're like completely after somebody else. But in terms of durability, I think you have, you have like ethos, right? Like what matters to the people in a firm that goes from generation to generation and different investors. You have like some tribal knowledge and that is like what has worked in the last generation of companies. Good and bad biases, like the history of technology, right? Like, sure, it's how Apple or Google or Nvidia did it, or Facebook for that matter.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  And then you have, you have brand, which is just obviously what founders think of the place, how much success you've had. And then you have network. And I think those are, I think those are the things that are harder to replicate very quickly. I think you also, if you are at a platform venture firm, you have. A lot of capital available to you, but there's also just a lot of capital in the world.

• 3:59Jack Altman?

  Yeah, I want to come back to what you said about sort of the whole, the zero sum nature of it all and to what degree, you know, more value gets created versus, you know, venture capitalists are sort of, are capturing. I've heard some people say that they think that great founders select, like the truly great founders are actually selecting for a different thing than other founders when they're thinking about their VCs. I can't remember, but you know, who all but one name that comes to mind. I know Parker at Rippling has said that like, brand is the most valuable thing that he can get from a VC because it makes it easier to recruit, easier to get the next customer, et cetera. And like, he's going to do the work anyway. And so at least he can get a brand. Do you think, like, as you've experienced sort of working with companies and founders,

• 4:42Jack Altman?

  do you think that there are different attributes in a venture firm that different founders prioritize? And does that impact at all the way that you want to build? When you think about, you know, your founder is the customer, but obviously you're looking for certain founders within, within that customer set?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I definitely think we don't have to appeal to everybody. I think if you are going to go to the sort of highest prestige brand, like you want to buy, I don't know, I want, I was going to say like IBM, but I mean this in a flattering way, like you want to buy like the known winner.

• 5:13Jack Altman?

  Apple, let's say.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Apple, you buy Sequoia, right? And like, you know, number of challengers in the established tier. But I think a lot of people make decision, like founders are not a homogenous set. And like, let's just use examples here. I, I think a lot of people make decisions very individually, right? If they know, and you know, we also want to back first time founders who've never met anybody in venture capital. And we talk about how you build that trust and those relationships. But Brett Taylor, when he builds his third company, he's just calling people he wants to work with. He does not care where they work, right? I don't think he like particularly cares about the brand of the firms. He is working with firms with nice brands, but he is picking individuals,

• 5:58Speaker 01

  probably because he doesn't feel like he particularly needs the halo. I think if you asked Parker, because I have, like, I'm pretty sure he called Mike, actually. Because there's, and maybe that's also a symptom of him also being a third time founder. I think his specific words here were like, if I were ever to build another company, please God, no. But I'd call Mike. And so I think that at some point, like the things that you feel like you want help with or support on, on how much brand matters to you, change as a founder.

• 6:29Jack Altman?

  For sure.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  And so we want to attract a particular set. And I think our brand does stand for something. We're trying to make it stand for something now, but it doesn't have to be like the most established prestige. We actually can't go back in time and do that.

• 6:43Jack Altman?

  Totally. Yeah, okay. I want to shift to brand now because this is, it's something that you've done notably. I promised you I wouldn't like ask like a question that was like rooted in flattery, but like you've done a good job branding the firm since you started. And actually, in some ways, I would say, you know, the last sort of really great firm to be built that I can think of, you know, that also launched with what I think was a very strong market presence was Andreessen. This is like 2009. And like, all of a sudden, they were like everywhere. They did many things. They like dominated PR. They were like, you know, investing in great companies at what seemed like then high prices. Many of them, you know, were actually still really good investments from there. But like, there were a bunch of things that let them get this brand very quickly. And then they scaled

• 7:26Jack Altman?

  rapidly and all of that. And in some ways, there was not, you know, another firm that did that. And, you know, at risk of flattery, you've been, you've built a very good brand very quickly. And you've kind of been everywhere. And, you know, people see you in a lot of different places, in high value places. They see you on good cap tables. They see you at good events. They see you, you know, they see you just like frequently. To what degree is that just what's been happening by a product of you sort of working hard, having a clear view and whatever? Or to what extent is this all like wrapped around like an intentional goal, building the firm in a particular direction? And this is part of the story?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  There's a founder that we both know, who has like a medium scale SaaS business now. And at one point, I lost an investment at my prior firm to Andreessen. It was a Series A for this company. This lovely founder was like, hey, love you guys, but they're paying more. And like, let me, like, I was, and I was like, oh, well, like, it doesn't matter. Like, all of these other things matter. And we sat down in a bar for like, three hours, and he explained to me like, how he saw the firms. And he basically was like, ah, these things like, they look pretty similar, except they look bigger and like, they're better at PR and they're willing to pay more. And I was like, oh.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  That's bummer. I took this like list that this founder gave me and like stuck it on my office door at my old firm for a number of years. I was salty about it or wanted to like try to solve the problem. And so one of the things that I think you just like think about when you start a company and you've worked on early stage companies for a while is like the, who said this originally? Like it's such an important thing. Like, nobody cares. Nobody cares about Jack or Sarah or their firms or your new startup. And so like you have to make them care. The other thing that like we thought about was just if we think we are good partners to entrepreneurs, like why should they know? We have to like solve an information asymmetry for them. And one of the things that this founder said

• 9:30Speaker 01

  to me is like, you say you have a good network. They say they have a good network. It all kind of looks the same. And so one of the things that we wanted to do and like all this stuff is like, I don't know, you can just like try stuff and then see what sticks. But one of the things that we thought would be important would just be like demonstrate who the network is to founders in ways that are like accessible to them without us like man to man combat, women to women combat proving it. And so we did a bunch of what you would consider to be if you were in a company, it's like a, you know, SaaS founder of Lattice, be like partner marketing.

• 10:06Jack Altman?

  Yep.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Right?

• 10:07Jack Altman?

  That's the way to look at it.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  And we just were like, if it was a business, it would be a funnel as part of marketing. Like, what can we do that is efficient with people who have the distribution that we want that like us? Like, okay, let's go show up with Nvidia and Snowflake and OpenAI and whoever it is that like is part of the community we want to be part of.

• 10:27Jack Altman?

  I mean, there's also the reality that you doing, you know, to the Parker point, there's reality that you doing the brand work actually also helps the companies in some ways. Because, you know, you doing branding can help your, at least at the early stage companies, there's value to it. So you talked about, so there's like partner marketing, which is sort of like express the network.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:44Jack Altman?

  You also touched on something before, which was like, stand for something and then like, you know, share that. Is that like an essential part of it? Is that like the center of it is like believing something in the world? Like that's what the marketing is about like, you know, I know like this was like a Steve Jobs thing was like, you know, we stand for something at Apple and like, that's what Apple's brand is, is we believe in like, you know, we believe in, you know, X, Y, Z things. And I think like that, that could be the analogy here. But do you think of it, you know, is it network? Is it stand for something? Is there a third pillar? Like, what are those components in your mind?

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Be willing to take risk on having an opinion is an important one for us. I think a number of founders choose to work with us because they believe that like the firm is AI native in terms of understanding of these sets of things that the companies are trying to do. And then some is access to network, some is understanding of the research itself, some is just like company specific challenges. I also think that maybe entrepreneurs like if you, if you like, want to go one level deeper, like, I don't know what the world looks like 20 years from now. I really hope that like conviction as an institution exists. But if you think about the like name we chose as well, it is like have an opinion.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Maybe we're in the like post AI abundance age and like venture is irrelevant, or like we're on to the next big technology thing. And I hope the people at the firm, and maybe it's me, like are on to the next big thing too. But part of the core ethos for me about venture is like, I want to understand the new thing. And then like, we take risk on it. Like we published our LP letters recently. Some of those beliefs and predictions are going to be wrong and look very stupid. But for a generation of entrepreneurs right now, where everybody is in like a very dynamic environment, and I think people are unwilling to like make any claim about understanding or about prediction. I think that can be like very grounding of like, well, at least these people have an opinion and I can decide if I have that worldview or not.

• 12:37Jack Altman?

  It's actually funny that you said that because about conviction, before you said that I had been thinking of the brand as AI native. And now that you say it, I actually can immediately re-understand it as have strong conviction. And what we believe right now is that AI is the most important thing. But if in 10 years that's solved and now it's about space travel, like conviction could be about space travel. And that actually, that resonates. That makes sense to me. Do you think that in venture, do you think like brands typically like need to follow returns? Or do you think like, do returns follow brand to some extent? Is there a strong correlation or causation between these two things?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I think the most important part of brand should be success. And success for a venture firm is like the quality of the companies. I actually don't even think that most founders have that much visibility into like how early you are, or like how much of the companies you own. And like, you know, sometimes I think like that would be

• 13:32Jack Altman?

  Totally.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  useful to founders to have more transparency around where like, hey, that person that like says they're part of this journey bought secondary at the Series F, right? And that's like probably different than working on the company for eight or 10 years. But I think like year zero, you gotta do something.

• 13:47Jack Altman?

  It also brings up a funny point, though, of like, from a founder's perspective, what is a VC being successful? What does that mean in the way they care about? Like, should they care more that you partnered with important companies? Or that you deployed a lot of capital? Or should they care more that you got crazy returns in companies they never heard of? And didn't play a role? You know, so it's, it's not so obvious. And I do think that there are firms that, that can kind of impact the direction of capital flows and firms that are working with the most important companies that maybe don't have as good of returns as firms that are, you know, not doing those things. And so I do also, you know, as we're talking about it, wonder from a founder's perspective, which type of success is actually important? You know, like I joked recently that somebody was talking about like, oh, why should a founder want to work with that company?

• 14:30Jack Altman?

  You know, they're, they're, they're huge and they don't have big returns. And I was like, if I'm, you know, thinking from a founder lens, I'm like, low returns for them means that that was less dilution for me. So that sounds great. You know, it's, but it's, it's not so one to one.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think it's a really good point of like, I actually don't know that founders should care about the quality of our multiple. I think that is a proxy for like something founders should care about, which is taste. I, I do think some of the very best people, if you ask them, like when they say they're choosing brand, they care about association with quality and with success.

• 15:03Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And so if you do a small number of companies and the hit rate is high quality and the people is like a set of people that you'd be excited to learn from, I think that is attractive, right? And there, there is often a debate about whether or not you learn more from success or a failure. I believe you learn more from success.

• 15:23Jack Altman?

  Me too.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  And so I think people want the tribal knowledge, going back to like, what is a venture firm really? Of like, what is working at like, the handful of companies that are really working in this era? And so I think we want that to be, you know, part of the value prop and then part of the brand. But to your point of like, should founders choose the same thing? And are the incentives fully aligned? I like, I think not, like, there's a whole range, right? And I think it is, I actually joke with my, my partner, Mike, of like, I think it is very reasonable. If you think about if a bunch of VCs can argue about whether or not they're good operators. But once they've been investors, like, how might they raise money? They might raise money from their friends.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  They might raise money from the like, highest taste people and people who are most helpful. They might also raise the most money they can at the least dilution possible with the least control. It really depends on what you're looking for and like, what your view is of what you're looking for from your investors. And so I, I also think it's like very stage specific. I, I don't think that founders should be optimizing for our returns. I think that's just a proxy for other things they might care about.

• 16:33Jack Altman?

  As you think about the current market landscape, and you'd been investing, you know, professionally through the teens and then you got to, you know, live through sort of the, the ZERP escalation and like, sort of late-stage SaaS before AI and all this other stuff. You know, for me, on the founder's side, what I remember in 2020 and 2021 was all these crossover firms that I just thought were hedge funds, like, came and were, you know, doing all these crazy market distortions and as founders, everyone was like, cool. But like, that was what was going on. Then everybody kind of went away in 2020, 23, and now, back in 2025, we have what looks to me like a similar but different dynamic,

• 17:16Jack Altman?

  where the crossovers don't seem to be back in a, you know, particularly important way at least. But you have the sort of bulge bracket institutional VCs that have gotten as big as those firms were. And they're now, you know, three or five or nine billion or whatever. So you've got that going on.

• 17:33Jack Altman?

  Other thing that I think is interesting that you sort of were the maybe the first of the most recent set. But there's like a number of now successful GPs that have left multistages, started their own firms. So now there's going to be, you know, there's always new firms being started, but there's now a set that is sort of like ostensibly going to be slightly more institutional over time. Probably smaller, but so you have these two sort of ends of the market going on at once. And you have, you know, AI mania, which, you know, as we know from, you know, internet in 1999 could be, could be undervalued still, could be overvalued. Who knows? What do you make of the shape of this market right now? What does it mean for where you think people can successfully play? What do you think it means for you and where you want to be playing?

• 18:16Jack Altman?

  But like, what's your read on that sort of market map?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Starting a venture firm has like made me slightly more cynical about the answer. I'm like a, I'm the opposite of a cynic in many ways. Like I'm a deep optimist about technology. I like working with really earnest people. I try to be an earnest person, but it is clear to me that raising money, like the capital markets are really deep. And raising money is an awful lot easier than making money in venture from a returns perspective. I think like, if you actually think about the economics of a venture firm to the investors, there's a crossover point of like, you could be a like a best in class in any vintage investor delivering, let's say like respectable eight to 10 times multiple returns on a small fund.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And make not that much more money than somebody who is charging traditional venture fees on a fund 10 plus times your size. Right? And so I think there's a very rational thing happening in the maturation of certain asset platforms where it is very easy to unconsciously be attracted by growth. Because like, you know, you've built a company, growth feels good. Growth is not a natural state for venture. It changes your ability to invest, right? But people are growing their firms. It's also like a natural organizational thing, right? If you hire young people and then you hire 10, then you hire 50, like they got, they gotta go somewhere.

• 19:37Jack Altman?

  Yep.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And that also means like, that means opportunity, that means comp, that means agency. So I think that like a very natural thing has been happening where these things that were little boutiques are acting like businesses. The businesses naturally grow, there's capital available to them. The feedback loop for whether or not the returns are supported are also distorted by the fact that lots of people. See the backwards looking multiple of the best funds of the vintage right before Zerp and were under invested in venture and are still trying to invest in venture. And I like the outcome of all that to me is there's obviously secular increasing opportunity

• 20:21Speaker 01

  in technology over time and that's the thing we index as venture investors. And so I think there should be some growth in the venture industry. I think this is like a skew from that and it will not end well in terms of returns for folks, but it is also just maturation of the asset class. And so I don't know that it goes away. If you like take private equity as an asset class prior or those platform businesses, it is very hard to make money in private equity at a top tier and people are not moving money out of the asset class.

• 20:52Jack Altman?

  Does it skew the ability for small firms to make money because these big firms though are going to play at every stage? And in the same way that, you know, the crossover's got into late stage growth and sort of were sort of starting to do non-economic things, do the venture firms that are huge, or is it rational for them to do non-economic things at seed because, you know, it fills a pipeline and they know that they're just going to play, you know, a different game on the winners and take sort of like a different IRR on that? And does that impact the whole ecosystem in a big way?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  I think it does. And so I think the, like, if you ask me, what is a, what could I be wrong about in the whole like strategy or the ecosystem? I think there is a point of view of like, you can't make money in venture anymore in terms of like an outsized multiple in early because it's just a sourcing funnel for the late-stage firms and the expectation on multiple, like the cost of that capital is lower.

• 21:51Jack Altman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Right? And so like, and you could just spend resource on it subsidized by the growth firm to, you know, be more competitive at early.

• 22:00Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  Right? In terms of like marketing or people or whatever. We have eight people today. We had six people until last week. I guess like I would. Pause it until proven wrong? Like, I think in the very early end of the ecosystem. Like, we're not trying to win everyone. We only have $200 million of capital. We need to have a couple really important companies to have a hugely winning fund in every cycle. You don't need that many people and that much money to compete because people are looking for different things. And the experience of working with you or working with a, like, a very specific set of people that have an opinion and have some certain understanding is quite different than working with a very large business. And, like, people choose different things. It's not a homogeneous market.

• 22:43Jack Altman?

  We talked about how, like, there's a certain type of round that is obvious. Sometimes obvious is Brett Taylor at the seed, but, you know, maybe more often it is Cursor or something like that, like a company that is really working, you know, and there's things in the middle, there's things past that. But as you think about, you know, these types of companies ranging from completely not obvious to extremely obvious, and you think about where money is most likely to be made, and sort of line that up against sort of the dynamic we've talked about with, you know, Sequoia is able to sort of play a dominant strategy of like, they can go win the obvious things at a very high rate, you know, small firms can do different things. Where do you think that that leaves?

• 23:25Jack Altman?

  If you had to, you know, take your best guess of where in today's market, like, the most alpha exists? Like, is the winning strategy right now to become able to win things? Because to this recent point, there's the non-obvious feeders, but there's more money to be made at doing the first obvious round. Is it sort of the much later stage stuff where actually the $10 billion companies look much better than the $1 billion companies because, you know, we now live in this world where things are going to get way bigger than we thought? Like, what is your current read on where the pockets of value are at the moment?

• 23:58Speaker 01

  I think it's a super interesting question, but I don't spend that much energy on this question in particular because my orientation is actually just like, my taste is my taste. I'm an early-stage person. I actually think my taste is, like, pretty mainstream in many ways, right? Let me contrast this. I think we will have opinions on companies that other people will not have, and like, we might choose to be earlier or make, like...

• 24:23Speaker 01

  It's very hard for me actually to tell what the mainstream opinion is, right? Because if you remember like the GPT rapper era where like, nobody's gonna make any money in the application layer. And now it's like, you're only gonna make money in the application layer.

• 24:34Jack Altman?

  It was crazy how that flipped very quickly.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And so, one thing is like, I don't think a lot about, I think great investors do this, but not me. I don't think a lot about like, where is the risk reward and like, you know, a lot does, like, where's the risk reward and like, the mid-stage, the late-stage, the early-stage? Because I'm like, well, I'm only good at the-

• 24:51Jack Altman?

  Doesn't matter. I've got my game. It doesn't matter what-

• 24:53Speaker 01

  I am pretty sure being great at early is gonna be valuable no matter what. And I'm not like globally optimizing, right? And then, um, I think your, your point of view on product and people just is what it is. I do think that, um, if you think that, uh, like, you, let's say you just want to be able to, uh, win whatever opportunities you wanna work on, then you have to like, build your ability to win, right? So brand does matter to us. I think there are like, uh, seemingly very effective alternative strategies, right? You can own a particular community. He'll hate that I even mentioned his name out loud, but I think Zach Frankel is very good at this, right? He works with a really small number of people. He has good taste. He does well.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  If you look at, um, uh, what Matrix has done, the quality of some of Ilya's companies, I think what he would say is like, hey, we're not here to compete in the like, general brand game and put a lot of energy toward that. It's not really me, but-

• 25:48Jack Altman?

  But he's in incredible companies.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  But he's in incredible companies and like-

• 25:51Jack Altman?

  And did them in times when they were not obvious.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Absolutely. There is definitely, um, alpha in choosing to be controversial on purpose. And like, I look at some of his investments and I'm like, flock, safety, like, good on Garrett. That's amazing. But like, that didn't make any sense to me when I met it. Shame on me, right? I was just like, this is such a weird company. Like, cool guy, weird company. I think like, your taste is what your taste is. And we are probably more willing to take technical bets and then like, go further down the thread of like, hey, we have a thesis around this particular area, um, or we'll take a- Bigger slug at something than I think one of the benefits of being an early firm versus a multi-stage firm is a specific framework for one of the best growth firms

• 26:37Speaker 01

  out there is we want to invest in the most important companies of tomorrow as early as it's clear that they're the emerging market leader. But that means you could do it like as soon as the company's in traction or like right before the IPO, right? And because we do not have this luxury of like waiting until the market has panned out and all the co-gen companies have like fought it out and one is waiting at the end and then like maybe you're paying a $20 billion entry price for it. We're like, we're just gonna choose, right? Like whenever we think that company like enterprise value can be built, we'll just take the competitive landscape as it is.

• 27:15Jack Altman?

  On this point about, you know, you're now running your own thing, you can sort of, you have the luxury of now investing the way you want to invest.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Figuring it out.

• 27:24Jack Altman?

  Figuring it out as you go, but you have, you know, you get to adapt as you see what you like and what you think. I want to sort of reflect on your learnings because you were investing very differently at Greylock, but they're objectively very successful. And you worked closely with Ashim.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:39Jack Altman?

  Who, you know, as you know, you know, is like really different style of investing, where, you know, I saw that, you know, people talking about this recently that he's like never lost money. And this is like also not, you know, somebody who's just making safe investments. He obviously, he did great stuff with that, but it's a certain type of investing. To me, in some ways, what you're doing now is, you know, maybe opposite is too dramatic, but it's like quite different where, you know, if that was very linear, very clear, you know, he could probably name, you know, several companies that ought to exist that don't yet and how they might be built. You know, you're operating in sort of like the most shifting of, you know, sort of sands underneath, you know, the space. And so I'm curious what you, you know, what your reflections are going from that experience to now investing this way.

• 28:22Jack Altman?

  And maybe more interestingly, is there anything that despite how different they are, is there anything from that that you take to this that somebody who hadn't had that Greylock experience wouldn't have?

• 28:32Speaker 01

  So much. I mean, like I learned to be an investor at Greylock. It is one of the great firms. I think Ashim is one of the greats and I think having his hit rate on both capital, both, all three of capital preservation, doubles and home runs is like, you know, that's, that's fucking amazing, right? What to learn. So I think that there are. Patterns of investing that are like, we were talking before and you're like, oh, it's nonlinear. I appreciate like, linear thinking is clear thinking, right? You can follow somebody's pattern of logic. And one thing that is like characteristic of traditional firms that I think is a very valuable

• 29:15Speaker 01

  thing is your understanding of how an existing market works. I think a pattern that's worked really well for some investors that spend more time on traditional markets is they know the talent base in that market. You could take security or storage as an example. Mike Spicer is also amazing at this, right? And then you, or Aneel Bostrom, when he was a full-time investor, right? And it would be like objectively true that for any point in time, like the dominant markets are incumbent existing markets, right? And you just look at what the transitions are that are macro technology and then you make the bets on the right types of people, given that transition in an existing market. Three checkboxes, right?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  I don't know, like you have amazing intuition for investing, but like maybe you didn't practice the specific thing, seeing the pattern of it. And like, let's take an example. If you look at the biggest categories of security spend, you might say, you know, category one of security spend, given the shift to the cloud, how does that change? Category one of storage, given the shift to flash and the quality of consumer flash and the ability to manage that with software, how does that change? And then who are the right people? A lot of those people work at the incumbents. I'm not saying that's like all of traditional venture investing, but I think there are patterns that are really powerful where the existing network and the understanding of how those businesses work, like I'm really glad I got to learn a little bit of it and

• 30:45Speaker 01

  try to replicate some of it. I do not think that what I'm doing now is the opposite of that, but again, like venture is like such a You know, companies are an expression of the like personalities and taste of founders to a great deal, right? And I think venture investing is also a very personal thing. Even when you're responding to customer needs, it's still like, you know, Lattice, it was a lot about you. I'm curious about like the things that change most, right? And one of the things that made me believe that there was actually an opportunity for a new firm was that the like AI technology shift would actually mean that the the most interesting markets were not necessarily the markets that already existed, right? Like, let's

• 31:29Speaker 01

  say enterprise infrastructure and like systems of record in the high end. And I love businesses that look like that, by the way, but some of the categories of company that we are lucky to be a part of, like, they attack markets that are not traditionally software markets. Harvey in law, Sierra in like actual support work. Heijan is doing the work that, you know, SMB video agencies did before or just creating new capability. And so I think if you were very traditionally market focused, you might not, you know, might not have the time to see them in the same way.

• 32:06Jack Altman?

  Are you trying to bring some of the like equivalent market linearity to being like, you know, you're spending all this time understanding AI right now, and you obviously, you know, have spent a lot of time just knowing regular business markets. Are you trying to intersect those and think like, you know, I'm still going to be founder driven, but this year I want to find a company doing, you know, something in XYZ vertical because like my triangulation is that this should be happening soon? Do you do it that way? Or are you like following founders and networks?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  We do both. There are a lot of people out there with really good ideas. And I think it's like better use of your energy as a venture capitalist in general to listen to founders' ideas, right? And just like be educated by them and be able to make the right decision when you see it. That being said, like, you spend a lot of time talking to customers. Out in the world, like, let's say you've ever been an idea person. We made one investment in the portfolio we haven't announced yet where I like carry around my little like set of PowerPoint slides trying to convince founders to start this company for five years.

• 33:07Jack Altman?

  No luck?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Um, well, we finally found the company.

• 33:09Jack Altman?

  Oh, you got it?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, we didn't convince them to start the company. They'd already started the company. But I, I was just like so thrilled to meet them because I was like, no, no, no, stop your presentation. Let me show you like, like we, we believe, right? Um, and so I think there were like, uh, one of my partners now, um, our friend of Mike are, are working on like a space where they want something to exist. And so I think we'll actively go hunt for people that we think would be great to start the company, just be like, you should start this company.

• 33:38Jack Altman?

  The couple of times that I've done that and put like a little beacon out in the world, I have found that like, it does help attract the people who are some, it somehow makes the people who are working on that more likely to come find you. And you're a much more prepared man when you do it. So I do always think I should be spending more time doing this.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:54Jack Altman?

  Than I have been.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:55Jack Altman?

  I kind of want to shift into like AI and not necessarily prognosticating about the future, but like you do spend your time here.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:01Jack Altman?

  And so like, I want to try a little bit, or at least to sort of like hear your thoughts on some recent commentary. Um, there was like a good quip recently that I was like, that's a good reframe from Satya talking about like, you know, this AGI stuff is great and we should think of it that way, but like, I'm looking for like seven to 10% growth. And I think it was like a soundbite that sort of, it, it did something where I think it sort of changed the conversation from like inputs to outputs, basically. I think it in many ways gets at the overall question of just like, is this market big enough for, you know, the tens of billions or hundreds of billions that's going in from the hyperscalers? And the hundred billion that's going to go in from VC and all this other stuff. When you think about where we are and how you'll see the signs that like the outputs are following the inputs.

• 34:46Jack Altman?

  Are you thinking of this in a, I just want to see, you know, more companies that are at a, you know, 50 or 100 million that are durable? Are you thinking about something on the intelligence layer? Or like, what is your frame of mind when you see like that kind of thing from Satya?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I think it's a super like rationalist decision from Satya. I think it is a statement that he does not believe that owning. A particular lab or research effort that gets to a reinforcing fast takeoff is going to lead to a lot of economic value capture, or that the probability of that is not worth spending many billions of dollars, right? But I think the view of like, hey, we're just not seeing enough revenue adoption to make $50 billion of capital outlay into model training every year worth it for us is completely reasonable, right? He's responsible to public shareholders. I have like a much easier problem, which is I am quite sure that there's going to

• 35:44Speaker 01

  be enough economic value created to return a best-in-class venture multiple on $200 million. The way like we try to stay rational about it, but like I think if you wanted to back up the truck and and just like only do CapEx-heavy foundation model companies, you just raise a lot more money than we had.

• 36:02Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Right? The signals we look for are like actually going back to like, what do you take from traditional venture? I'm like, I really like to see revenue. One of my companies talks about EBITDA. Do you remember EBITDA? It's a very, very exciting concept. There are companies that are creating user value very rapidly, and they're not spending a lot of money to do it. I think you can be more or less expensive as a business to grow, like we'll do both. But it's really nice to see that some companies are being capital efficient about it.

• 36:28Jack Altman?

  One of the things that I think is interesting is that we're back in sort of like 2021 in a way where like 100 times error rounds are like not particularly uncommon on things that, you know, are growing fast and, you know, have a reasonable base and whatever. I remember in 2021, sort of the kind of the general wisdom was, hey, we all thought there were going to be X number of $10 billion companies, but there's actually going to be like 10X, and there's going to be a lot more $50 billion companies than we thought, and so on. And, you know, we all just had like the wrong idea of the size, and it now looks like that was like mostly wrong. And I think in some ways now we're back to thinking that in a way that You know, at the moment, at least, you know, feels feels more right, you know,

• 37:12Jack Altman?

  that could change in the future. But like, are we still investing, even at the early stages, in ways that require there to be a lot more $10 billion companies than there like ever have been? And like, are we collectively betting on that?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think it will be true. Like, let's talk about the mechanism of action when like, people thought this in the SaaS world, right? I think some of it ended up being, and like, speak up because you actually did this, but you know, as a as an analyst, right? Some of it ended up being true. More people than ever before, like, in businesses got to consume software for their business because it became cheaper to use, because you didn't have to like, buy packaged software and operate it, because it filled many more functional gaps, right? And because you had internet distribution, right? You got cheaper to actually sell to people. That's how I like, think about,

• 38:03Speaker 01

  like, oh, why should we have more SaaS? The thing that I think the market got wrong, or one of the things that the market got wrong, was there was not infinite ability to like, cross-sell more software into the organization in any segment of business, right? SMBs, mid-market, enterprise businesses.

• 38:23Jack Altman?

  Enough became enough at some point.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  Enough became enough. And like, they didn't want to buy any more darn SaaS. And there was just a limit to budget and a limit to consumption. And like, that seems rational, right? Like, in contrast, well, that seems rational in retrospect.

• 38:40Jack Altman?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  I'm sure we're wrong about something else with AI now. In contrast, I like, I have poo-pooed on generally working in healthcare tech for a long time, not because of lack of interest, but I'm just like, okay, I was one of like, three people at Greylock that 10 years ago got staffed to like, go look at digital health. And we looked, and it was like, not, it was not a good look, right? You want to sell to providers, it was slow, there wasn't much budget, it just didn't change the business that much. I now sit on the board of a healthcare provider tech company, and it's growing really fast. And there are other companies that are growing really fast. I think that people just didn't build stuff that was worth buying enough for a long time. And

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Um, like, you know, it's sort of memetic now to say like AI eats services. But I think if you just like, think about the value provided, it is not necessarily like service industries, it's just technology does way more. And your willingness to pay as a consumer or as a business for these things that you like, um, again, like, could have been part of your job being done for you, could it could be a legal service, could be like, these skilled to be creative, could be education, like, those were different budgets.

• 39:56Jack Altman?

  Yep. What's interesting on that point, that makes sense to me now, why it's happening, but I'm not sure how it plays out over time, is at the moment, agents, for lack of, you know, different term, are replacing labor instead of software. And so the price that they're comping to is labor.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 40:15Jack Altman?

  And so instead of SaaS being, you know, a hundred bucks a year, two hundred bucks a year for a person's seat, an agent can be like, oh, it's forty K a year, which is way cheaper than your software engineers, or way cheaper than your accountants. You know, you're gonna save seventy K a year by just giving us forty per agency. And so there's this very strong pricing potential that you can have.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:39Jack Altman?

  And that seems, at least at the moment, like it could be rooted in sort of the existing paradigm, but in the future, does that pricing stay, you know, as competition goes? And so that's one thing that I, you know, and I say this to somebody who's like investing in companies, building agents, but I'm like wondering how that ought to play out because it's like, will this eventually price relative to like, cost and like, an appropriate margin? Or like, it happened to used to be done by people, so we're just gonna kind of peg to that forever?

• 41:07Speaker 01

  I think generally, there'll be like, absolutely very strong pricing pressure. Um, and I, I really think about like, what is the basis of competition some number of years from now? If you have a unique offering, where the customer really wants what you are offering, and I think like, people don't really know what like, the most with agents will be, but like, let's assume, you know, there is uniqueness in some set of offerings, like... If you're Figma, pricing pressure is different than if you are one of many different companies. Like, people just want specifically Figma. There's nothing quite like it, right? And your team is in it, and you're going to use it. So I think there's some set of companies that will end up with that dynamic, and they will be able to retain some sort

• 41:49Speaker 01

  of value-based pricing. And then I think, like, the majority of companies will probably gravitate toward, like, you know, cost of compute, or energy, or intelligence plus.

• 41:58Jack Altman?

  Yep.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  But like, I have no idea how long that takes. Right now, like, I basically think a lot of it ends up getting pushed to consumer and business surplus, as it should. Right now, it's just like, wow, the surplus is so good, even in if it's, you know, a third the cost of an engineer.

• 42:12Jack Altman?

  It's sort of interesting, because it felt to me like, for a while, you know, before AI, it felt like, in order to come up with a good idea, you had to be like, kind of non-consensus. At the moment, it feels like there's actually a lot of ideas that are both like consensus and right. And then the reality is, then you get like, you know, a lot of competition, and it floods, and they kind of all do really well. So I'm curious to see how it like, plays out. But there's a few of these spaces, like, support and code gen and these things, where it's like, everybody knows it's working, they are indeed all working, and, you know, that's just not even close to the market demand yet. The last topic I was curious to get your thoughts on are, there was a good post about like, agency being more important than intelligence now. And, you know, intelligence

• 42:53Jack Altman?

  is like abundant, and so like, the thing that's left is agency, which, I want to believe this, you know, that like, that's the model of the world, and that like, you know, they'll never come for our, like, you know, agency. And we'll see if that's true or not. But I'm curious, as you've talked, you spend a lot more time, you know, than you probably ever have with AI researchers, and you think about this. So I guess, do you see it that way? Do you agree that like, agency is going to be the sort of like, last human resource? And then like, do you think if so, does that like, impact the way that you think at all about like, the types of founders you're investing in?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  I'd focus on being hot and funny.

• 43:28Jack Altman?

  That's good. That's high agency.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  I don't know if I have like a... A good answer to this question. I guess I never particularly thought like intelligence was enough anyway. Right? And so like when, like, it sure helps, right? When you think about the founders that we select, like, without being over a particular bar, like, all other things considered, like, of course, we're going to back people who are really, really smart. I was on this campaign at my prior firm to try to be more specific about how we talk about people. Because it's like very easy to say like, oh, the person is special. What does that mean?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  The thing that we most look for is, besides intelligence, is kind of like force of will and the ability to like take a point of view and be right. Right? And so I don't know what that is. Like, maybe AI is going to have better predictive power than founders about the future of different markets at some point. Like, the ability to generally navigate the world and shape it to what you want. Like, I don't know if that's how you think of agency, but like, that doesn't feel in grasp of pure intelligence anytime soon.

• 44:40Jack Altman?

  You have three kids like me. Are you thinking about their education at all? Or what you think they need to learn? Or what you're teaching them? You know, in this, as you're thinking about what's obviously happening now?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Of course I am. I don't know if I'm doing anything about it. Our kids are young enough that I think about like behaviors as much as like knowledge for now. Right? Like frustration management, the ability to concentrate, right? The ability to upskill yourself in something. I think those are going to be important, no matter what. For now, like, maybe if you just assume that like information retrieval will get better. Andre Karpathy, like, is very convinced that you still want to build like certain types of reasoning pathways in kids' brains before they get too much older. And the like purest forms of reasoning are essentially like STEM reasoning.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Which is funny, because we seem to be making like very good progress on coding and STEM reasoning in these models today. But I still think like The ability to like, structure a logical problem, decompose it and debug it, like that, that seems useful. And your ability to use even all of these tools will be better off for your ability to do structured reasoning. And that seems like, you know, there's a reason mathematicians don't tend to prove a lot, like, after the age of 25, or some really sad number. Like, those pathways get built. I guess I like, subscribe to that pretty mainstream view. But I also think, like, I am willing to be, like, very flexible about what education

• 46:15Speaker 01

  looks like for them 10 years from now. Like, if it's not Stanford, it might not be, you know, traditional education. Right?

• 46:23Jack Altman?

  All right, well, Sarah, thanks for doing this. I really appreciate it.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  It was so fun to hang out.