Sarah Guo

Guo has recounted that her father immigrated from China to Wisconsin in 1987 at age 24, her mother joined him a year later, and she was born shortly after; both parents worked at Bell Labs/Alcatel-Lucent out of graduate school and are engineers turned entrepreneurs. She says she “quite literally grew up inside their tech company,” building the company’s first website at 14 under the supervision of its head of hardware engineering; this experience gave her a deep respect for the courage and resilience required to build an enduring company and shaped her view of founders and startups.⁠[1][1][1][1]

Guo holds four degrees from the Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania, has taught marketing in the Wharton Undergraduate Program, and served as a teaching fellow in lower-income high schools for the Philadelphia World Affairs Council. Before joining Greylock, she was at Goldman Sachs, where she invested in growth-stage technology startups such as Dropbox and advised pre-IPO technology companies such as Workday as well as public clients including Zynga, Netflix, and Nvidia; she also worked with Casa Systems, a publicly traded technology company that develops a networking platform for cable and mobile service providers.⁠[2][2][2][2]

In 2013, Guo joined the venture capital firm Greylock as an investor and later became a partner. She has said that during nearly a decade at Greylock she incubated and invested in startups, first in her familiar areas of infrastructure and security and later across consumer, enterprise, fintech, and crypto; at the time she focused on opportunities in B2B applications and infrastructure, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and the future of work and communications.⁠[2][2][1][1][2]

As of early 2022, she had led Greylock’s investments in Cleo, Clubhouse, Common Room, Demisto (acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019), Portals, Remotion, Sqreen, and Utmost, served on the boards of Cleo, Shortcut, Common Room, Obsidian, Postscript, Remotion, and Utmost, and worked with companies including Awake, Coda, Figma, and SkyHigh, which was acquired by McAfee. She was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 and LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry’s Next Wave list, and advocates for STEM education for women and the underserved.⁠[2][2][2][2][2]

In 2022, after nine years at Greylock, Guo left to found the early-stage venture firm Conviction because she believes AI is the most important technological advancement of our lifetime. She said Conviction is purpose-built to serve “Software 3.0” companies, with a $100 million first fund whose limited partners include about 50 founders, CEOs, and COOs of today’s most important companies; she argued that machine learning’s shift from classification to generation and the striking effectiveness of large transformer-based general models mean that AI’s impact is still underestimated, and said Conviction would invest in chips, data infrastructure and developer tools, research labs, and AI-native applications in every vertical.⁠[3][1][1][1][1][1][1]

The first fund, Conviction Partners Fund I, L.P., was organized in Delaware in 2022 and made its first sale on September 16, 2022, with a total offering amount of $105 million, $100,995,000 sold, and 70 investors; Guo signed the fund’s Form D filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on September 30, 2022, as Managing Member of the General Partner.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4][4]

On July 29, 2024, Conviction Partners Fund II, L.P. filed a Form D, signed by Guo, with a total offering amount of $230 million and no sales yet at the time of filing. On August 6, she appeared on episode 383 of Invest Like the Best, hosted by Patrick O’ShaughnessyPatrick O’ShaughnessyPatrick O’Shaughnessy is an investor and podcast host who has hosted the interview show Invest Like the Best since 2016, founded the early-stage investment firm Positive Sum in 2020 and serves as its CEO, and is also founder and CEO of the media company Colossus.Open the full entry, discussing the challenges and rewards of leaving an established investing firm to start her own, the experience of building and recruiting for a new venture firm, and her view that the investment opportunities in AI applications dwarf those of previous technology cycles.⁠[5][5][5][5][3][6][3][6]

On March 25, 2026, Conviction Partners Fund III, L.P. filed a Form D; the fund was organized in 2026, its total offering amount was listed as indefinite, no sales had yet occurred at the time of filing, and the filing was signed by Guo as Managing Member of the General Partner.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

On September 1, 2026, episode 489 of Invest Like the Best interviewed Guo again, introducing her as founder and managing partner of Conviction, often the first check into the companies defining the AI frontier. The episode covered what she has learned from studying the 250 most important AI builders, why compute independence matters in a world of fragile supply chains, why some of the field’s best researchers are wrestling with their own sense of purpose, how close we are to robots in the home and an acceleration in scientific discovery, and how she raised a fund by promising to “execute like hell” rather than selling a polished story; at the center of the episode is her conviction that no single company will own the future of AI. Colossus managing editor Dom Cooke also wrote a profile of her, “Sarah’s Wager.”⁠[8][8][9][8][8][8]

As of October 2026, Conviction positions itself as a venture firm purpose-built to serve AI-native “Software 3.0” companies, writing checks of $1 million to $25 million; it likes to invest early and is often the first investor, and Guo is listed first on its team. Its portfolio includes Baseten, Cartesia, Cognition, Harvey, HeyGen, Mistral, Open Evidence, and Sierra, among others, and it runs programs including Embed, a grant program for early-stage AI founders; No Priors, a podcast with AI researchers and builders; and Commit, a fellowship for early-career AI builders.⁠[10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10][10]

Conviction: Official website: https://www.conviction.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

X: Public account: https://x.com/saranormous (opens in a new window)⁠[10]