On Tuesday, just weeks after returning from maternity leave, Sarah Guo officially started her role as general partner at Greylock Ventures — a storied Silicon Valley venture capital firm best known for successful investments in major public companies like Dropbox and Facebook, as well as companies like AppDynamics and LinkedIn that got acquired for billions of dollars.
General partner is a huge accomplishment for Guo, who just six years ago was finishing up her MBA at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
She spent a year after grad school as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, investing in Dropbox and taking WorkDay public at a $4.5 billion valuation. Then, impressed by her work on its IPO, Workday co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri introduced Guo to the team at Greylock.
Guo, whose forté is early stage enterprise tech companies, has spent the last five years supporting other people’s investments, first as an associate and then as a principle.
“The first question I asked when they promoted me is if there a secret handshake,” Guo told Business Insider. (To her dismay, there was not.)
The biggest change, Guo said, is that as a general partner she has more responsibility than ever to discover the next decacorn company.
“There are some people who are claiming that the SaaS revolution is over. I think that’s ridiculous,” Guo told Business Insider, referencing the Software as a Service model popularized by companies like Salesforce. “You see $10 billion companies being grown rapidly in SaaS today.”
Life, death and data
Longterm Guo said she believes that the companies both inside and outside of tech will find that using data well and being “algortihmically driven” will help some companies succeed while others die. But you don’t have to look too far into the future to see what’s next.
“There is a new generation of SaaS companies, and I think there are some obvious success stories already,” Guo said. “Everything from a Shopify to Atlassian to Slack — I’m pretty confident that people who figure out a design-first, end-user workflow are going to build massively valuable companies.”
Though her new role will mean taking more ownership over Greylock’s strategy and investments, Guo’s plate is already full.
So far she’s led two series A, and she’s the director of three different boards — two of which are still in stealth mode. The third, Obsidian Securitiy, was valued at $27 million in a $9.5 million funding round last summer. She plans to take on a few more board seats down the road.
Asheem Chandna, a partner at Greylock, described Sarah as a “thoughtful investor with intellectual rigor and a differentiated point of view.”
“Founders gravitate towards working with Sarah because they see her as a trusted entrepreneurial partner, coupled with clear judgment, work ethic and the highest commitment to helping our companies win,” Chandna said in a blog post. “We believe she is uniquely great.”
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