Sarah Guo

Who they are

Sarah Guo is founder and GP at Conviction — co-hosts the No Priors podcast and backed Harvey, Mistral AI, and Fractile out of a $230M Fund II.

Person

Sarah Guo founded Conviction in October 2022 as a solo GP focused on AI-native companies — at the time GPT-3 was barely a year old and most institutional VCs were still circling the space. She educated at Wharton and the Lauder Institute, the dual-degree program signals genuine international fluency; she's also fluent in Chinese. Before starting Conviction she spent years at Greylock, backing ML infrastructure and enterprise software, then left to go narrower and earlier on AI. In January 2025 she brought in Mike Vernal, former Sequoia partner, as a second GP — converting Conviction from a solo act to a partnership ahead of Fund II. The through-line is high-conviction concentration: she picks a thesis early, goes deep, and builds the fund structure to match it. She co-hosts No Priors with Elad Gil, covering AI governance, mechanistic interpretability, and founder stories — and she uses the platform actively, interviewing guests like Satya Nadella on ambition, trust, and what AI startups should do next. She also codes in JavaScript, which is an unusual background detail for a GP and probably shapes how she evaluates technical founders.

Company

Conviction's most active recent move is Fund II — $230 million in capital commitments, more than doubling its debut fund of $101 million, closed in early 2026. The portfolio has been busy: in March 2026 Conviction participated in Harvey's $200M Series B at an $11 billion valuation, and in May 2026 joined the $220M Series B for Fractile, an AI chip company. The portfolio now includes 8 unicorns and 3 acquisitions, with Mistral AI, OpenEvidence, and Harvey as marquee names. Mike Vernal joined as GP in January 2025, formalising the partnership structure that Fund II is built on.

Market

Conviction sits in a crowded field of AI-focused early-stage VCs, where Sequoia Capital is both a co-investor in several portfolio companies and a competitive reference point. AI funding rounds jumped 50% in 2025 to a new high of 7,646, driven by agentic AI and enterprise use cases — a tailwind that has both validated Conviction's thesis and raised the bar for differentiation. Conviction's edge is exclusivity — it invests only in AI-native companies and intelligent enterprise software — which makes it a specialist in a market that generalist funds are rapidly entering.

Network

Sarah's most visible relationship is with Satya Nadella, whom she interviewed on No Priors in 2026. On the portfolio side she holds board director seats at Latent, Onyx Security, and Distributed Spectrum, and is an early investor in Nova Intelligence, Collate, Sierra, and Baseten. Mike Vernal, former Sequoia partner, joined as GP in January 2025 and is her key internal partner at Conviction.

  • Mike Vernal· General Partner, Conviction (former Sequoia partner)
  • Satya Nadella· CEO, Microsoft — interviewed on No Priors

How they likely show up

  • Founded Conviction as a solo GP in 2022 before bringing in a second partner three years later → comfortable operating alone with high autonomy, but pragmatic about building structure when scale demands it.
  • Active LinkedIn poster and podcast host covering AI governance, mechanistic interpretability, and founder strategy → comfortable being visible and using public presence as a signal of taste.
  • Backs companies at the infrastructure and application layer simultaneously (Fractile for chips, Harvey for legal AI) → thinks across the stack, not just one layer.
  • Dual Wharton/Lauder education plus fluency in Chinese → likely brings an international lens to market sizing and cross-border dynamics.
  • Codes in JavaScript alongside a full GP role → probably has higher technical tolerance than most investors and will engage on implementation details, not just business model.
  • Moved from Greylock (large multi-stage) to building a concentrated solo fund → values depth and focus over breadth; likely impatient with meetings that lack a clear thesis.

Conversation tips

  • → Come with a specific thesis, not a category — she runs a conviction-based fund by design and will test whether you actually believe what you're saying.
  • → Reference a specific No Priors episode or her Nadella interview — she invests in public intellectual work and will know if you've listened versus name-dropped.
  • → If you're technical, go deeper than surface AI talk — she codes and has backed chip companies; she can tell the difference between a founder who has thought through the stack and one who hasn't.
  • → Ask about the solo-GP-to-partnership transition — bringing in Vernal is a deliberate structural choice worth discussing, and she'll have clear reasoning behind it.
  • → Her Chinese fluency and Lauder background suggest genuine interest in international market dynamics — relevant if your company has cross-border ambitions.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on the Harvey investment — Conviction participated in Harvey's $200M Series B at an $11 billion valuation in March 2026; it's a high-profile bet that legal AI is infrastructure, not a feature.
  • Reference the Fractile round — Conviction joined a $220M Series B for an AI chip company in May 2026, which is an unusual move for an early-stage VC and signals she thinks about hardware constraints, not just software.
  • Bring up the Nadella interview on No Priors — she described the conversation around ambition and trust in AI startups, and it reveals what she's actively thinking about at the GP level.

Discovery questions

  1. Fund II is more than double Fund I — how does the portfolio construction change when you go from $101M to $230M and you're still deliberately staying early?
  2. You backed Fractile at the chip layer and Harvey at the application layer — how do you think about where infrastructure risk sits versus application risk in the current AI stack?
  3. You brought Mike Vernal in as GP in January 2025 — what did moving from solo GP to partnership change about how Conviction makes decisions?

Avoid

Don't pitch generic 'AI-native' positioning without specifics — she coined that framing herself and will immediately probe whether you actually mean it or are just using the vocabulary.

Make it yours

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on June 5, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →