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I'm a startup investor partnering with entrepreneurs from idea to IPO. I’m excited about…
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Sarah Guo reposted thisSarah Guo reposted thisMy first podcast, with my friend and investor Sarah Guo. We talked about what we're building at Sequence Holdings, why now, and the opportunity we see ahead. https://lnkd.in/gaDqSrpkRe-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael LeeRe-Founding Incumbents for the AI Era with Sequence Holdings Co-Founder and CEO Michael Lee
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Sarah Guo shared thisI'm a little biased, but I can't wait to listen to this! Vidit somehow conned Mike Vernal into doing a podcastSarah Guo shared thisEp #281 is now live! Re-imagine a high flyer with someone who joined Facebook very, very early, worked closely with Mark Zuckerberg to help build its products and platform, then became an investor at storied VC firm Sequoia Capital — and is now backing the next generation of technology at Conviction. Meet Mike Vernal, General Partner at Conviction. In a rare in-depth interview, Mike joins Vidit Agarwal to share: ▪️ Growing up the youngest of four in an immigrant family in New York ▪️ Why he decided at 11 that he would go to Harvard ▪️ What Microsoft taught him about the danger of being “too strategic” ▪️ Joining Facebook early and helping shape its products, platform and engineering culture ▪️ The Dustin Moskovitz dinner that changed how he thought about ambition ▪️ Why shipping software every day became a Facebook advantage ▪️ Why great companies fight the natural tendency to slow down ▪️ Leaving Facebook after 8+ years to learn venture at Sequoia ▪️ What Sequoia taught him about what makes a great business ▪️ Why ambition matters so much when backing founders ▪️ What pulled him back into venture at Conviction with Sarah Guo ▪️ Why he believes the cost of creating software is heading towards zero ▪️ Why speed, taste and product quality matter even more in this tech wave ▪️ Why he sees his role as helping the people around him become better 🎧 LISTEN HERE: https://lnkd.in/g_ss9VHp Mike's re-imagined "high flyer": David Treadwell Thx for the research help: Pranav, Sarah, Vijaye, Matt People mentioned: Noah, Ivan, Parker, Michelle, David, Christina, Bryan cc: Isabella, Lauren, Alfred, Pat, Elad, Kareem, Varun, Nicolae, Aaref, David, Venky, Scott, Fidji, Ellen, David, Bowen
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Sarah Guo shared thisThrilled to finally talk about Watney. Sean Cheong and I spent 90 minutes the first time we met talking about why ~every robotics startup has died to date. The priors were very bad. And yet I came out of that meeting a believer, and asking if there was *any way* we could invest. Ryan Gannon and Sean exemplify how I hope to operate. They are so good they overwhelm the priors: 1. Choose worthwhile missions 2. Free yourself from the prison of the mind 3. Make contact with the coal face 4. Maintain both belief & paranoia 1. Increase the speed and capacity of American industry, starting with data centers. 2. Decide you can, in fact, be a vendor to hyperscalers as a 10-person company. If you were right about problem importance and urgency, and you solve that problem, much conventional wisdom about big customers can be ignored. 3. Identify whatever problem prevents progress — model, data, security, networking, contracting, hardware, ROI math, politics, and attack it furiously. As @Alfred_Lin would say, they know how to be “heat-seeking missiles for pain.” 4. Ryan is exceptionally good at continually testing his own beliefs, and then is (or at least seems) very comfortable being unreasonable and contrarian. From building a mock datacenter in a week, to convincing people to leave their jobs and homes for an international supply chain tour-of-duty, to taking non-consensus technical bets — I trust no one as much to figure out what needs to be done, assume it is possible in the next two weeks, and then convince the team to do it in one. The guy has a screw loose. CC: my partner Pranav ReddySarah Guo shared thisWe’ve raised $80 million in Series A funding, co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, with continued participation from Conviction, Abstract, A* and Grant Gordon. This brings our total raised to over $100 million. We started Watney by asking a simple question -- what can a robot enable in industries where the work remains valuable on an infinite horizon? We found an answer in the fundamental inputs to civilization: energy, matter, and intelligence. A robot will never be as charming as a barista or as personable as a housekeeper, but it can be more exacting than a surgeon. And, a breakthrough in one quickly becomes the capability of millions. We don’t imitate human motions or processes. We care about the new, differentiated capabilities robots can unlock. We work on problems where our choice of embodiment gives us an order of magnitude advantage, whether through precision, reliability, or scale. Compute is just beginning to transform society, but it’s constrained by execution. Since 2025, Watney has been serving the largest hyperscalers in the world, helping accelerate their compute rollout through an end-to-end deployment model. Across hundreds of thousands of hours in customer facilities, our systems have achieved more than four nines of reliability. They’ve enabled our customers to build data centers faster, at larger scales, and with more ambitious architectures. Today, we operate the largest fleet of dexterous robots running 24/7/365 across the United States. This is all to say, it's an exciting time at Watney. We’re all here because we want to see more ambition in the physical world. We are hiring across all domains. Join us.
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Sarah Guo posted thiswho is the most talented Chief People Officer for hyperscale out there?
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Sarah Guo shared thisThe Latent network has grown rapidly to 60+ leading healthcare systems. The bigger the network, the better our ability to execute against the company’s mission: get every patient on the right therapies. Super excited to start talking more about what we’re doing with autonomous agents that understand patients and drugs — an unequivocally pro-human use of AI. High quality healthcare is a “good” that society can’t get enough of.Sarah Guo shared thisToday Cleveland Clinic, AdventHealth, Cincinnati Children's, Keck Medicine of USC, UNC Health, UnityPoint Health and WVU Medicine officially join Latent. With these incredible additions, Latent now serves 60+ leading health systems caring for ~70M patients. We also announced new autonomous agents that help our partners manage high-demand therapies like GLP-1s and complex specialty therapies in immunology, rheumatology and cardiology. This is a special milestone for us because alongside these leading US health systems, we are building a new future where life-changing treatments reach the people who need them, faster. We are honored to build that future with them. Full announcement: https://lnkd.in/gg9CExzz PS: We've grown a lot this year, and so has our vision for a better future for patients. That is why we are also excited to reveal the new Latent brand. It's live on our site now, and there's much more to come.
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Sarah Guo reposted thisSarah Guo reposted thisWe started Sequence Holdings with a clear conviction: the holding company of the next century will be a technology company that owns and operates businesses. That conviction led us to build Sequence, bringing together frontier engineering, operating expertise and patient capital to help scaled companies reimagine themselves for the future. Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Sequence, along with the Dell Family Office (DFO Management, LLC) and the Baldwin family and management team, have agreed to take The Baldwin Group private. Baldwin is an exceptional business led by a world-class team with the ambition to shape the future of insurance. Trevor Baldwin and the broader team have built a remarkable company, and we’re excited to partner with them for the company's next chapter. In the following letter, Alexander Rubin and I share more about why we built Sequence, our vision for the opportunity to bring frontier technology to the service economy, and the concept we call “refounding” that sits at the core of our approach. We’re continuing to scale the Sequence team as we bring this vision to life, and we’re expanding our technical team across engineering and deployment strategy. Refounding the companies people depend on takes extraordinary people. We are also excited to welcome Affinity Partners and the Dell Family Office as new partners in Sequence, and grateful for the continued support of our existing investors, including Lux Capital, Conviction, 8VC, Factory, Definition, Avenir Group and others. You can read more about today’s announcement here: https://lnkd.in/gmHfNsGG
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Sarah Guo shared thisSequence Holdings + DFO in the biggest AI transformation deal ever. Just getting started Michael Dell Dan Bitar Michael J. Lee Alexander Rubin and our friends at Lux, Affinity and 8VC
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Sarah Guo reposted thisSarah Guo reposted this“When will Baseten offer sandboxes” has been a common customer question. And we’ve taken a huge step in answering it: Baseten has acquired Blaxel. The nature of the median inference call has changed in the past year. Models stopped just answering questions; they act now. A coding agent writes a patch, runs the test suite, reads the failure, and tries again, dozens of times to close a single ticket. Every one of those loops needs somewhere to execute code. And the agent itself needs its own runtime. And so do RL rollouts. The list goes on. Running some code in a container isn’t hard. The hard problem is storage (state), networking (milliseconds-long cold starts), and security (VMs). That's what Blaxel has built: stateful, pause/resumable, VM-isolated sandboxes that scale to thousands of instances in seconds. Zooming out, tomorrow’s cloud isn’t one of inference, training, or sandboxes. It’s one where these 3 primitives come together cohesively to meet users where they are and to unlock value that’s greater than the sum of the parts. That’s been the north star that Baseten and Blaxel share (they were in fact going to build inference and training). I couldn’t be more excited to do it together with Paul Sinai and team. Welcome 💚 https://lnkd.in/gVEF68bGBlaxel is joining Baseten to build the future of agentic infrastructureBlaxel is joining Baseten to build the future of agentic infrastructure
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Sarah Guo reposted thisSarah Guo reposted thisWe’ve raised $550M at a $15.5B valuation, co-led by Diffusion and Lightspeed. Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, a16z, Coatue, Conviction, Elad Gil, Evantic, GIC, Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Whale Rock, WndrCo, Sapphire, and Verified Capital also participated. We’ve crossed $400M in ARR and serve over 3,000 customers, including 80% of the top 100 law firms, 20% of the Fortune 500, and half of the Fortune 10. We are investing the capital from this round into our two most important resources: people and compute. On people, we're hiring aggressively across product, engineering, research, and go-to-market as we expand into new verticals and build more specialized solutions for contracting, litigation, deals, and compliance. On compute, delivering frontier intelligence for these specialized use cases means investing heavily in both our harness and own model training. Tenet, our first post-trained open-weight model, was the start, and this round lets us scale the compute and data behind the generations that follow. We believe the most successful application-layer companies will become full-stack AI companies, building across applications, agents, and models. For our customers, that means owning more of their own intelligence and having a partner to help them build frontier legal organizations. Thank you to our customers, team, and investors for supporting this vision.
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Congrats Peter!!
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Sarah Guo liked thisSarah Guo liked thisFor the past 16 years, I'm pretty sure I've had the best job in all of tech. But an opportunity has come up that forced me to ask the question, "Considering my stage of life and career, will I regret it if I pass on this?" The answer I came up with was "Yes," and so I've taken a big leap and decided to retire from Microsoft. Working at Microsoft, having the privilege of leading Microsoft Research, and most recently serving as President of Microsoft Science, has been an incredible experience, full of personal growth and the satisfaction of positive global impact on people and on Microsoft. My colleagues, every day, created a working environment that felt like living in the inevitable future. In my view, Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, Judson Althoff, and the entire senior leadership of Microsoft have created the modern-day equivalent of Camelot, seeking to align Microsoft's business with the goal of global empowerment and prosperity for all. I've been proud to be a part of it all. As for what I'll be doing next, what I can say at this point is that it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join an elite team, fulfilling a dream I've had since childhood. It's a major detour from what I've been doing over the past 2+ decades, but rest assured that I'll be able to continue my participation with Mayo Clinic, Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, Seattle Children's, and other great organizations that seek to improve and advance healthcare delivery and medical science.
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Sarah Guo liked thisSarah Guo liked thisFrom day one, our ambition in building Sequence Holdings has been to forge the next generation of leaders across industries in the service economy. Today marks an important milestone in that journey. We’re excited to announce that Sequence, along with the Dell Family Office (DFO Management, LLC) and the Baldwin family and management team, have agreed to take The Baldwin Group private. Baldwin is an exceptional business, led by a world-class team with the ambition to shape the future of insurance, and we’re thrilled to partner with them for the next chapter. In the following letter, Michael J. Lee and I share more about why we built Sequence, our vision for the future of the service economy, and our approach behind this work. I’m deeply grateful to our team, our investors, and our partners for their conviction and for the work that makes this possible. We are also excited to welcome Affinity Partners and the Dell Family Office as new partners in Sequence, and grateful for the continued support of our existing investors, including Lux Capital, Conviction, 8VC, Factory, Definition, Avenir and others. Read more about today’s announcement: https://lnkd.in/gSpVszxd
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Sarah Guo liked thisSarah Guo liked thisI’m excited to share that I’ve joined N Ventures, NVIDIA's venture capital arm! The past two years at Adverb Ventures have been an incredible chapter. Jessica Verrilli and April Underwood taught me how to distinguish the good from the great, and the great from the exceptional. Above all, they showed me that understanding the unique alchemy between founder and market is everything. The intersection of the two are businesses after all. I’m deeply grateful to the founders I had the privilege of working alongside, and I can’t wait to see all that they continue to accomplish. As I begin this next journey, I’m thrilled to partner with founders pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI across stages.
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Sarah Guo liked thisSarah Guo liked thisSome news: I've left Scale AI and joined Reflection this week. At Scale, I got to build alongside people who are very good and nimble, through a stretch where the entire data and AI market rearranged itself. To that team - thank you. Reflection’s mission is to make intelligence open to all, and I’m excited to be a part of it. I’m joining a team I admire; it’s time to roll up my sleeves and dig in. Let’s get to work.
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
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Mentor
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) Entrepreneurs
- 2 years 11 months
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E145 (Technology Entrepreneurship), Guest Lecturer
Stanford University
- 4 years
Science and Technology
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Chinese
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Python
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