She's a Silicon Valley success. Here's her advice for how you can make it too.

Sarah Guo always knew she wanted to make it in Silicon Valley. Now, she has advice for others who want to do the same.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, we sat down over breakfast with Guo, a Goldman Sachs and Greylock Partners alum who now runs her own AI-focused VC fund, Conviction. Guo and her team have made early investments in a number of buzzworthy AI startups, including legal AI startup Harvey, which was just valued at $3 billion in a recent funding round, and French generative AI company Mistral, which was last valued at over $6 billion.

She shared her views on spotting AI opportunities, making it in tech, the future of San Francisco and more.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Business Insider: How did you get your start in venture capital?

Sarah Guo: Accidentally. I was working at Goldman Sachs for a brief year. I happened to work with both Aneel Bhusri and Reid Hoffman, the founders of Workday, and PayPal, and LinkedIn, and they're wonderful. And when I was intending on going to a startup after Goldman, Aneel said, 'Why don't you come work at Workday?' I said I wanted something that's an earlier stage, higher risk. I think I'm going to start out with a company. And he said, 'Well, I have a night job. You should come hang out at Greylock for a while. And so, you know, a while became 10 years. So I ended up doing venture investing. It took me a number of years to really decide I wanted to do investing, but I love it now.

Business Insider: When you were at Goldman, how were you thinking about the VC world?

Sarah Guo: I came out to Silicon Valley knowing that this is the center of the universe for tech. I thought I would try working at Goldman (in the Bay Area) as a business boot camp. I'm very grateful for that experience. It has a great network and I learned a lot, but I'm an entrepreneur. I was never going to stay. I tried to start a business. It wasn't very good. And this was a way for me to be like, 'What makes a company valuable.' That was the thing I wanted to answer.

Business Insider: If you could talk to your college self today, or someone else in college now, what would be your advice for their first steps to found a company?

Sarah Guo: I'd say, if you already feel like you understand something that other people do not, and you have to do it, then just do it. And then, if you are not obsessed by a particular problem or idea, I would say, go work with the most talented people you can who are doing some sort of early or scaling-stage company.

Business Insider: So you wouldn't go work, say, in banking?

Sarah Guo: No, I'm very grateful for the experience. But I'm from Wisconsin. I needed to be able to afford to live here. I needed to get into the ecosystem. And so it just depends on where people are coming from.

Business Insider: How bullish are you on AI really changing the world?

Sarah Guo: I just committed the next two decades to this being a secular shift, and I think it is changing the world. That doesn't mean people are not going to lose money along the way, in terms of the amount of money spent by a large number of companies on training right now.

Business Insider: Is that a waste of money, or is it just the basic building blocks of an industry?

Sarah Guo: If you have the internet bubble, then you get broadband infrastructure in the end, right? And so some of those ideas are eventually going to work. You have internet grocery, and then you have Instacart. And so it's hard for me to say what's a waste when it is a function of the markets. And I think the exploration is going to be really valuable for end users in the end.

Business Insider: Which industries are most ripe for disruption from AI?

Sarah Guo: One of the ways we look at AI is as a massively democratizing force. You can take a number of skills and tasks and make them cheaper. And that could be anything from lower level legal skills with companies like Harvey and other parts of professional services (Conviction is an investor in Harvey). I think that will happen in tax, in audit, in consulting, etc. But also, when I think about democratization, I think you're going to get more law practiced at a higher level for less money eventually.

But another version of that democratization is in creativity. I think the ability to create writing of high quality, research of high quality, images, audio, songs, video. I'm on the board of a company called HeyGen. Instead of it taking thousands of dollars with a studio and an agency to create a talking head video, it takes like $2 a minute now. You can do it at your home. It takes like 20 minutes to set up. And so I think that the accessibility of the quality of creativity to end users is a really big democratizing function. We're going to keep investing in that. People want to express themselves.

Business Insider: What's it like working in San Francisco now? Is it the place to be if you're entrepreneurial, or can you still be anywhere with remote work?

Sarah Guo: There's a massive advantage to being in real life in San Francisco. I commute four or five days a week. We do a ton of in person work, and a part of it is like the collective tribal knowledge of engineers and researchers and product people in San Francisco is ahead of where the rest of the world is generally. It's clear there are smart scientists in many different areas, including China, but it is not evenly distributed. And so if you want to understand the state of the art, which is more important than ever, I think San Francisco is the place to be.

Business Insider: What's your take on DeepSeek?

Sarah Guo: I think DeepSeek is amazing proof that there's a ton of room and efficiency for AI and people have not focused on it. The availability of frontier-class models that are cheap, small, and broadly available in a competitive market will mean more economic surplus for users and startups, which I'm really excited about. I also think it is a wake-up call. There are a number of policies that we could implement in terms of making sure that the very best talent works here and that our industry is competitive, but limiting network bandwidth on Nvidia GPUs has not been enough.

Business Insider: What other advice would you have for someone mid-career who might be looking to switch and break into AI?

Sarah Guo: Companies say they're looking for AI engineers, people who know how to manipulate these models into useful applications and write evaluations for whether or not they're working. The core workflow of building products today — I think smart engineers can figure this out. This is going to become part of software engineering practice. It is not a different role. And there's huge opportunity for anybody who's willing to invest the time and curiosity to just get good at working with the state of the art.