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Today on Forbes, Sarah Guo bet everything on AI pre-ChatGPT. Now she's one of the world's top investors. In 2014, Australian entrepreneur Touheen Shrivastava had scored a meeting with Sarah Guo, then the youngest partner at storied VC firm Greylock. He was pitching her on a healthcare startup that used machine learning to analyze a person's medical history. Guo was impressed, not by the idea, which was what she called \{quote\} generic, but impressed by him and his co-founder. Five years later, he tried again, this time with something far more promising. Tools that make it easier to build and run AI applications.
It was years before the stunning launch of ChatGPT, which mainstreamed artificial intelligence, but Guo was already confident that more businesses would soon turn to AI and need cheap and efficient ways to use it. She wrote a $1.5 million check into what became Base 10, co-leading the startup's $3 million seed round in 2019. Shrivastava says, \{quote\} all we had was some idea of a company on scratch paper. For the first 4 years, the company made no money. AI tools weren't being rapidly adopted back then. The best thing to do was to wait for the market to come around. Almost overnight, it did.
Today, Base 10 is valued at $5 billion with revenue growing over 10 times in the past year. It's now reportedly in talks to raise at an $11 billion valuation. Guo invested in every round, first from Greylock, and then from her own VC firm Conviction, which she launched in October 2022. Today, she says her stake is worth 10 times its initial value. The 36-year-old Guo says, \{quote\} we owned the most from day zero, and it's clearly going to be a winner company.
Her stakes have grown more than tenfold in other portfolio Crown Jewels, legal AI company Harvey, chat GPT for doctors Open Evidence, AI-powered customer service firm Sierra, AI coding startup Cognition, and open-source AI developer Mistral. Combined, these six startups alone are worth $62 billion. Of all of Guo's prescient bets, her most notable one is on artificial intelligence itself. She says she realized early that the rise of AI would upend beliefs long held by large VC firms, that robotics would never work, that it's difficult to sell software to lawyers and doctors, that you shouldn't do scientific research in venture-backed companies.
Guo tells Forbes, quote, "There are a lot of priors that come from traditional venture about both markets and how you build companies that we thought would be challenged." In 2022, she wagered her entire career on that thesis, leaving her cushy job at Greylock to launch AI-focused early-stage VC firm Conviction with a $101 million inaugural fund, 1 month before ChatGPT made AI's potential obvious to the masses. Now, that gamble has clearly paid off. This year, Guo makes her debut at number 56 on the Midas list of the top 100 venture capital investors, and returns to the Midas seed list for the second time.
Both 2026 lists were released this past week. In an era of spray-and-pray investing, Guo decided to go the other way, making fewer, more targeted bets. At Conviction, Guo has invested in just 27 startups and taken board positions at only six of those in the last 3 years. She says, quote, "When you work on early stage, you make a concentrated commitment to a person and an overall idea, and then you suspend disbelief and work on the company for a long time. It's satisfying to see the people grow and be right. Making fewer, more targeted bets allowed her to be more involved with the startups she backs. That doesn't just mean being available for strategy phone calls or instantly replying on email.
In one instance, Guo flew across the country to help keep one of Base 10's customers from ditching them for a rival. In another, she convinced Nvidia to pour $150 million into the company as part of its $300 million Series E round. No wonder Base 10 CEO Shrivastava fondly calls Guo a co-founder of the company. Harvy CEO and co-founder Winston Weinberg says after he'd sent thousands of cold messages to law firms on LinkedIn, it was Guo who introduced him to a lawyer at A&O Shearman, which became the startup's first client. Weinberg says, "Quote, I don't know if we even would have gotten that customer without her. Because she's so plugged in, she's just very, very early with this stuff. And she has personal relationships with all
of these founders, and it's not arms length. She's actually friends with them." For full coverage and to see the Midas list, check out Rashi Shrivastava's piece on forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
