On Tuesday, Sarah Guo announced on Twitter and LinkedIn that she is stepping down as a typical associate at business-focused Greylock Partners to focus on building something new while continuing to invest in startups. According to sources who spoke to Axios, Guo is preparing to start her own fund.
Guo joined Greylock as the agency's first lady associate in 2013 and can now advance to the role of board associate. She invested in several firms over her decade as a multistage VC, including health tech Cleo, online metaverse startup Portals, and meeting transcribing software product Reduct. She is also a board director at Thriller and 0x Labs.
A request for comment from Guo went unanswered. Guo is the most recent woman to leave a long-standing business position to become a rising supervisor, part of a wave of women launching their businesses. Yet, according to the non-profit All Elevate, women still make up only 14.3 percent of check-writing roles in the industry.
Sydney Thomas announced her retirement from Precursor Ventures, a firm that concentrates on first-time founders, only last week, six years after becoming the agency's first hire. She wouldn't reveal many details about her new venture, but she did tell TechCrunch in confidence that she plans to invest in companies in the pre-seed stage earlier than doubling back in the seed round.
Many of these new female rising managers have also found fundraising success in the past year.
Julie Wroblewski (formerly Pivotal Ventures) and Joanna Drake (previously Core Ventures Group) closed a $52 million fund focused on the healthcare financing system in Could. In March, Kathryn Haun (formerly of Andreessen Horowitz) raised $1.5 billion for Haun Ventures' first cryptocurrency fund.
This new group follows in the footsteps of trailblazers like Aileen Lee, who founded Cowboy Ventures in 2012 after 12 years at Kleiner Perkins, and Mary Meeker, who broke off of Kleiner Perkins in 2019 to found BOND.
More About Sarah Guo
Sarah joined Greylock in 2013 as an investor and rose through the ranks to become a board partner in 2022. 0x, Baseten, Cleo, Common Room, Demisto (bought by Palo Alto Networks), Mystery, Portals, Remotion, Shortcut, Sqreen (acquired by Datadog), and Utmost were among the companies in which she spearheaded Greylock's investment. 0x, Baseten, Cleo, Shortcut, Common Room, Mystery, Obsidian, Remotion, and Utmost all have her on their boards. Avi Networks (bought by VMWare), Awake (purchased by Arista), Coda, Figma, Postscript, Snorkel, and earlier SkyHigh are among her clients (acquired by McAfee).
Sarah worked at Goldman Sachs before joining Greylock, where she invested in early-stage Internet startups like Dropbox and advised pre-IPO technology companies like Workday (as well as public clients including Zynga, Netflix and Nvidia).
Sarah previously worked at Casa Systems (NASDAQ:CASA), a publicly traded technology firm that creates software-centric networking platforms for cable and mobile service providers.
She is a strong supporter of STEM education for women and underprivileged groups. She has taught Marketing in the Wharton Undergraduate Program and worked as a teaching fellow for the Philadelphia World Affairs Council in low-income secondary schools. Sarah graduated from the Wharton School and the University of Pennsylvania with four degrees. She has been named in Linkedin's Next Wave and Forbes' 30 Under 30 lists.
