Last week, at our first StrictlyVC night of the year, prominent AI investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo joined us in San Francisco to talk about how they think about AI investing in a world where deals are on the rise feverishly two months ago and where According to information, some startup groups are now looking to sell due to the cost involved in building their software.
We talked about some of their deals, whether valuations have outdone themselves, and how the two — who host a popular AI podcast together — they work.
Gil, for example, has reportedly raised more than $2 billion from investors in the past two years, money he invests almost exclusively himself. At the event, he declined to confirm that amount, but said he’s always pulling for support of some kind. For example, after a former chief of staff started his own company, Gil hired some “highly technical” hires to help him understand some of the new emerging technologies. One of them is Shreyan Jain, a former software engineer at Ramp who has two computer science degrees from MIT, and who has “built an embedded playground” with another engineer in Gil’s orbit so they can “basically trade in and out of any underlying entity [database] in any integration framework so we can play with different tools,” Gil said.
Gil — who also throws his own capital into deals despite having raised so much from outsiders — also stressed the importance of establishing clear guidelines with his own investors to prevent perceived conflicts of interest. “If you have that clarity about how you’re going to act, it makes a huge difference. Get rid of ambiguity, get rid of uncertainty, get rid of [bad] feelings,” he said.
Image Credits: Slava Blazer /
Guo takes a more traditional approach with her company, which for years, Conviction. Calling it a “$100 million baby fund” compared to Gil’s billions in assets under management, Guo says she has already brought on board two other investors, a talent partner and an operations officer. She also said she has enough skin in the game that she doesn’t take decisions lightly in the “relatively concentrated portfolio” her team is building. “I’m a big investor in my own fund,” he said. “Like, I really need companies to work over time.”
If you want to know more details about their respective approaches to financing deals (they have both invested Harvey and Mistral, among other companies); how they protect themselves in the event that they fund artificial intelligence technology that is later misused. what they see as the biggest questions related to today’s foundation models like GPT-4 and why Gils is So about ‘French values’, check out our chat.
For what it’s worth, Gil says during this discussion that he’s probably invested the most over time in defense technology company Anduril, whose co-founder Trae Stephens talks to us. Next StrictlyVC event in Los Angeles on February 29.
If you want to check it out in person, you can learn more here. Our event in San Francisco sold out (and was a lot of fun). We expect this next one to sell out too, so don’t wait too long if you want to come.
(Special thanks to Cloudflare for allowing us to use their beautiful headquarters in San Francisco.)
