Reactions from ranked influencers
5 posts
Conviction is a remarkable firm...intense, curious, insightful and bold when they believe. @saranormous and @mvernal are building something special. We are very proud to be working with them.
Sarah runs Conviction more like a startup than an investment firm. She’s more in the operational weeds than typical investors, but has also been very early to many of this generations (so far) defining companies. Maybe the simplest point is: she’s at the top of LP’s wishlist, and her competitors respect the hell out of her. Our profile of her and her firm:
I've known @saranormous for over a decade, working with her directly since Baseten's inception. She has shown up in full force for us every single day, in good times and bad. Few investors commit themselves so intensely to the companies they back. Sarah exemplifies that kind of conviction!
In 2018, Sarah Guo became the youngest general partner in Greylock's 60-year history. She was 28. Four years later, she quit to launch Conviction, a firm staked entirely on AI. Before ChatGPT shipped, she seeded Baseten and Harvey; each is now worth over $11 billion. In Conviction's first year, she wrote early checks into Sierra, Cognition, and Mistral; those three companies are now worth, together, $54 billion. Andrej Karpathy worked out of Conviction's office until Anthropic hired him in May. Guo has been close to Jensen Huang for over a decade. Her first two calls after starting the firm were to Sam Altman and Nat Friedman. And yet the investor closest to the AI frontier is betting against its biggest companies. The two big frontier labs, worth close to a trillion dollars apiece, no longer just want to build the models. They also want to build every product and company on top of them, leaving nothing for anyone else. The market is paying as though they might succeed. Of the $300 billion in venture capital deployed in the first quarter of 2026, the biggest quarter in the history of the trade, 65% went to only four companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Waymo. Guo is betting the labs can't build everything, and she spends her days making sure of it. She won Harvey its first client. She flew across the country to take a single Baseten candidate to a four-hour lunch. On one wedding anniversary, she spent the whole weekend on back-to-back calls, keeping two founders on the line so they couldn't speak to rival firms. Twice a year, she flies the world's brightest young founders to San Francisco and inducts them into the fight. In the months @domcooke spent reporting this piece, @saranormous had her fourth child, walked the Met Gala in 45 pounds of chainmail, and still answered her founders' texts within minutes. Guo's parents arrived from China in 1987 with $50, built a company, and took it public at $1.2 billion. Then it went bankrupt. Guo grew up inside that startup. She built its first website, did her homework in a cubicle, and slept over for bug bashes. She loved it. If two labs build everything, no one gets to do that again. Welcome to Sarah's Wager. Read it below.
Sarah is three things that rarely coexist in one person: intense, dogged, and fun It’s a great profile worth your time
we gave @colossusmag a look at what @mvernal @pranavreddy @igarciacamargo me & team @conviction are trying to do — find and arm the most extraordinary founders at a moment when technology molds a malleable future feels like a mission! but yes, acting with belief is also a wager https://twitter.com/colossusmag/status/2079169545705525510
So lucky to have you since the beginning of our journey! @saranormous
we gave @colossusmag a look at what @mvernal @pranavreddy @igarciacamargo me & team @conviction are trying to do — find and arm the most extraordinary founders at a moment when technology molds a malleable future feels like a mission! but yes, acting with belief is also a wager https://twitter.com/colossusmag/status/2079169545705525510
This profile gets @saranormous exactly right. It's the relentless operational hustle. When we were only 20 people, Sarah flew to LA to run customer calls with us for a full day. She's helped us land key hires. And she follows through on what she says. That's not a typical investor. Lucky to build with her.
In 2018, Sarah Guo became the youngest general partner in Greylock's 60-year history. She was 28. Four years later, she quit to launch Conviction, a firm staked entirely on AI. Before ChatGPT shipped, she seeded Baseten and Harvey; each is now worth over $11 billion. In Conviction's first year, she wrote early checks into Sierra, Cognition, and Mistral; those three companies are now worth, together, $54 billion. Andrej Karpathy worked out of Conviction's office until Anthropic hired him in May. Guo has been close to Jensen Huang for over a decade. Her first two calls after starting the firm were to Sam Altman and Nat Friedman. And yet the investor closest to the AI frontier is betting against its biggest companies. The two big frontier labs, worth close to a trillion dollars apiece, no longer just want to build the models. They also want to build every product and company on top of them, leaving nothing for anyone else. The market is paying as though they might succeed. Of the $300 billion in venture capital deployed in the first quarter of 2026, the biggest quarter in the history of the trade, 65% went to only four companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Waymo. Guo is betting the labs can't build everything, and she spends her days making sure of it. She won Harvey its first client. She flew across the country to take a single Baseten candidate to a four-hour lunch. On one wedding anniversary, she spent the whole weekend on back-to-back calls, keeping two founders on the line so they couldn't speak to rival firms. Twice a year, she flies the world's brightest young founders to San Francisco and inducts them into the fight. In the months @domcooke spent reporting this piece, @saranormous had her fourth child, walked the Met Gala in 45 pounds of chainmail, and still answered her founders' texts within minutes. Guo's parents arrived from China in 1987 with $50, built a company, and took it public at $1.2 billion. Then it went bankrupt. Guo grew up inside that startup. She built its first website, did her homework in a cubicle, and slept over for bug bashes. She loved it. If two labs build everything, no one gets to do that again. Welcome to Sarah's Wager. Read it below.