Sarah Guo

Was thinking about early warning signs things are going sideways in startups today. “Code smells” aren’t bugs per se, they’re early warnings and startups have them too. Some that make me nervous 1/ The “god object” in code, one class that knows everything, shows up as the founder who must approve everything. Early on this protects taste. Later it throttles throughput. The trick is to export your “taste” into principles, examples, and defaults so others can act like you 2/ Premature optimization in code is provisioning six regions for an app with five users. It’s yeti brand level of overengineering. The company version is heavy process, big …

We are growing our talent team @conviction! If you (engineering, research, product, design) have ever been successfully recruited by someone you think is great, please refer them 💜

You’re not allowed favorites in venture but I sure do love when some of my favorite companies work together 💜

New drop of @NoPriorsPod with @jaredkushner. Topics: - @BrainCo_AI (new startup with @eladgil @ericwu01 @LVidegaray @ClemensMewald & team - Affinity’s investing thesis on undervalued countries (and country management) - What he learned from diplomacy - Going outsider -> insider https://t.co/4jkWvCZYko

@FlintCasey @dianalokada @beffjezos So SF’s repressive association of beauty cannot get to me. Let’s do it

@FlintCasey @dianalokada @beffjezos Please ignore whatever is in the water here that gives people the prior that paying attention to beauty or self-expression is trivial or unworthy. I’m “overdressed” most of the time. It hasn’t, as far as I can tell, made me dumber.

if we’re all rebranding literally https://t.co/prfTwFL5fz

How ask for help navigating a big org: - provide clear context about exactly what you want - what you’ve already tried, any blockers and timeline, name who you’ve already spoken to, if an exception is required - name who *can* make the decision, if you know “hey do you know anyone at” is not a useful query to get what you want done fast. you’ll be stuck in the hooli pass-the-buck game yet again

An upside to reading in the age of AI — at any point you can look up a claim (“does the research say that, though?”) and immediately understand the credibility of a work

Unless you seize the day, it flees. Even though you seize it, it still will flee; therefore you must vie with time's swiftness in the speed of using it, and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not always flow, you must drink quickly. (Seneca)

congrats to the very special team @cognition (@ScottWu46 @stevenkplus1 @walden_yan) on their newest fundraise -- and their big deployments turns out competitive programming (and density of intelligence) does translate well to company-building

discipline isn’t unambitious

Daniel Nadler, CEO @openevidence is a unique thinker. I loved having him as this weeks @NoPriorsPod interview, talking about how his team's app has reached almost 50% of US doctors in ~2 years(!) by treating them as consumers, and building them something great. https://t.co/DM0mCelWuz full episode on YouTube and anywhere you get podcasts: https://t.co/PHN33JD8Vu

Baseten “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” -- Alfred North Whitehead Turn on a faucet, and water flows. Flip a switch, and the lights come on. Open a laptop, and you’re connected to the internet. Each advance takes something essential and makes it effortless, so we can focus on what comes next. @basetenco is doing that for machine learning. From day one, their mission was to make ML effortless, so more people can use it to build useful things. Since inception, the “deployment gap,” the problem of turning trained models into production grade application …

Congrats to my partner @mvernal on leading this Series A investment — and to @vijayeraji on building an amazing team, very cool product, and their acquisition by @OpenAI!

recruiting is a skill — and one that can’t be outsourced. founders are either naturally good at it, find a partner/leader that’s great at it, learn to be good at it fast, or fail.

Was lucky enough to have breakfast with the inimitable @dannieherz and friends this morning — love having this trustworthy, ambitious, thoughtful killer on team @baseten 💥

next steps for the big labs feel analogous to being oil barons after the easy wells have been tapped. early capability gushers made fortunes (won markets like consumer asst, code), now the remaining oil requires deep-sea rigs or fracking: still possible, but a slow/costly grind

big opportunity for aggressive tech M&A. the AI step change in what you can build catching many companies flat footed (see: "death of SaaS" meme) as they lack the talent/organizational will to adjust quickly...but customer value creation is large enough to justify acquisitions

Healthcare AI is the most underrated story: adoption is outpacing other “early adopter” industries, it leapfrogs systems that couldn’t realistically be upgraded, and it’s not about squeezing costs — it’s tackling the shortage of people that’s already blocking access to care also: scribing is just one slice there’s taking notes…and then there’s providing care: making good decisions, communicating with patients, navigating admin to get treatment/meds modern medical care is sometimes already great, but it is not evenly distributed

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears

open source is the best. so many video editors and yet ffmpeg remains unrivaled

who should we interview about nuclear on @NoPriorsPod?

some of my favorite people for the early stage “haven’t scaled well.” eg first sales folks, recruiters. they’re worth their weight in gold and are gluttons for punishment doing repeat early, high agency problem solving work. in the age of AI, maybe they get to do that at scale why does it usually break? they’re doers, but they don’t create systems to manage lots of people, or they don’t manage the communication complexity, and imperfect and indirect incentives of big companies well venture firms like to talk about hiring “stage specific leadership” I think this will evolve. seeing lots of SaaS execs struggle within the super high growth an…

what to do with 12 hours in Rio?

Big companies tend to reward the best politicians, not performers.

my longtime friend, AI legend @AndrewYNg joined me and @eladgil on @NoPriorsPod this week -- he thinks AI can really help with investing, but it can't get at some of the people judgement or transparency borne of relationships (yet) https://t.co/iaYwkxLR5w full interview anywhere you get your podcasts, and on youtube https://t.co/o9gTmefcf3

The era of superintelligence is here. Didn't predict the medical field would be first. Amazing work by team @openevidence in scoring a perfect 100% on the US Medical Licensing Exam https://t.co/9J8vOYGzHy the average human doctor scores in the 70s without AI assistance. care is about to get a lot better https://t.co/HI4tFgCBJK

https://t.co/ba5MdfbDsL

.@conviction team giving @eladgil a run for his money with darts vibe check on investment https://t.co/whnejUEvcV