INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Sarah Guo didn&t necessarily set out to become a venture capitalist
She certainly didn&t imagine she would become one of the first general partners at one of the oldest venture firms in the country
Yet Guo is both of these things today
Indeed, the venture firm Greylock Partners, which Guo joined five years ago as a principal, is announcing her promotion this
morning.
Greylock, which closed its current, 15th, fund with $1 billion in October 2016, now has 12 general partners altogether.
For Guo,
the appointment caps a lifetime spent in the world of startups
Before joining Greylock, she worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, where she led much of the bank coverage of business-to-business tech
companies and advised public clients, including Twitter, Netflix, Zynga, and Nvidia.
A graduate (for both her undergraduate degree and MBA)
of the University of Pennsylvania, Guo also worked previously at Casa Systems, a 15-year-old tech company that develops asoftware-centric
networking platform for cable and mobile service providers and that — in a twist that we think is pretty neat — was founded by her
(Her father, CEO Jerry Guo, took the companypublic earlier this year.)
In a conversation earlier this week, Guo said that growing up around
entrepreneurship gave her an &understanding of how difficult& starting a company truly is
It also occurred to her early on that &something related to company building was what I wanted to do in the future.&
Guo also said that not
much will change with her promotion
Broadly speaking, she focuses on B2B applications and infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI, AR, and healthcare
She already sits on the boards of several companies, including the security startup Obsidian, which was founded by ex-Cylance and Carbon
Black execs last year and quickly raised $9.5 million led by Greylock.
She said she does hope to mentor more up-and-coming investors like
herself, however.
Guo first became acquainted with Greylock through Aneel Bhusri, a partner at Greylock and the cofounder and CEO of the
The two talked occasionally when Guo was covering internet and software startups at Goldman, and he&d encouraged her to meet some of his
venture partners, she said
&I came in, not necessarily ready to be in venture forever
But I&m now very excited about it obviously,& she added with a laugh.
Guo other deals to date include Aware Networks, a 15-year-old, Buffalo
Grove, Il.-based company thatdevelops collaboration applications for mobile communities, and a still-unannounced company.
We didn&t talk
about the fact that Guo just became one of Greylock first female general partners, but it very much worth mentioning, considering the firm
was founded in 1965.
Greylock had lost another senior female investor — Sarah Tavel — to Benchmark last year
Tavel was the first female general partner at Greylock; she went on to become Benchmark&sfirst female GP.
Altogether, women still represent
just 15 percent of decision makers at Silicon Valley major venture capital firms
Their ranks are growing slowly however.
Meanwhile, many other investors are choosing to launch their own female-founded venture firms
Among the newest of these is Breakout Ventures and a fund we reported on last night that being created by life sciences investor Beth
Seidenberg, long of Kleiner Perkins.
Correction: This story briefly mischaracterized Guo as Greylock first female GP
Based on the nomenclature used by Greylock, we were under the impression that Tavel was a partner but not a general partner — a seemingly
small but important distinction within venture firms
Tavel had been hired at the GP level at Greylock, we&re told.
