Good morning! Women’s Health Initiative no longer being defunded, U.K. Chancellor Rachel Reeves discusses tariffs with the U.S., and there’s an investor you need to know in AI.
– Intelligent investing. Sarah Guo’s venture capital firm Conviction has backed some of the hottest companies in AI: the legal AI startup Harvey (last valued at $3 billion), French open-source AI startup Mistral (last valued at $6 billion), inference platform Baseten (last valued $825 million), and ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor’s conversational AI platform Sierra (last valued at $4.5 billion). That makes the 35-year-old a fitting subject for the fourth and (for now!) final piece in our special series about women in tech.
My colleague Allie Garfinkle, the author of Fortune’s Term Sheet newsletter, dives into Guo’s path to AI investing in a profile here.
Guo was raised around a startup; her parents ran a cable and telecom infrastructure company called Casa. In her 20s, she was named a partner at Greylock—one of the youngest partners ever in venture capital. She considered leaving the firm to launch an AI-driven language learning startup with famed AI researcher Andrew Ng in 2016, but decided the technology wasn’t there yet. (She says Duolingo got it right.)
FORTUNE BRAINSTORM AI 2024
Tuesday, December 10th, 2024
San Francisco, CA, USA
11:10 – 11:35 AM
BEYOND HYPE: SEEKING AI’S ENDURING VALUE
Amid an AI frenzy, every investor is asking one question: Where will long-term value in AI accumulate? During this session, we will explore the answer with three investors whose backgrounds span investing, operating, and working with large language models and practical use cases. You’ll hear what makes them want to bet big—and what they’re avoiding.
Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner, Kleiner Perkins
Sarah Guo, Founder and Managing Partner, Conviction
Rebecca Kaden, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures
Moderator: Allie Garfinkle, Fortune
Photograph by Stuart Isett/Fortune
The technology is certainly there now. While ChatGPT was launching, Guo was looking for office space for Conviction, Allie writes.
“The joke was that you have this AI hammer, and that’s not the way you should go looking for companies to invest in,” Guo says. “And I’m like, well, it kind of depends: How good is the hammer? AI is a great hammer. So, what are the interesting nails out there in the world?”
Read the full profile here and subscribe to Term Sheet here for more from Allie.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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