Venture capitalists Elad Gil and Sara Guo discuss the risks and benefits of funding AI: ‘Our biggest threat in the short term is other people’

Image credits: Slava Blazer/TechCrunch

Last week, at the first StrictlyVC night of the year, prominent AI investors Elad Gil and Sarah Guo joined us in San Francisco to discuss what they think about AI investing in a world where deals were hotly bid up two months ago. We talked about what we were thinking. According to reports, some startup teams are now considering selling due to the cost of building the software.

We discussed some of the companies’ deals, whether valuations are significantly ahead, and how the two co-hosts of the popular AI podcast are operating. Ta.

For example, Gill has reportedly raised more than $2 billion from investors over the past few years, and has invested that money almost single-handedly. He said at the event that he always collects some support, although he declined to say how much. For example, after his former chief of staff started his own company, Gill hired several “highly skilled” people to understand some of the new technology that was emerging. One of them is Shreyan Jain, a former software engineer at Lamp Corporation who earned two degrees in computer science from MIT. He “built an embedded playground” with another engineer in Gil’s orbit, “allowing us to exchange basically any fundamental vector.” [database] It can be built into any embedded framework, so you can experiment with different tools,” says Gill.

Gill, who is putting his own capital into the deal despite raising significant amounts of outside funding, is careful to create clear guidelines with his own investors to pre-empt any appearance of a conflict of interest. He also emphasized the importance of “Being clear about how you act makes a huge difference. It removes ambiguity, removes uncertainty, [bad] Feelings,” he said.

Image credits: Slava blazer /

At his year-old company, Conviction, Guo takes a more traditional approach. Mr. Guo calls it a “small $100 million fund” compared to the billions of assets managed by Mr. Gill, and it already has two other investors, a talent partner and an administrator. He said that he is welcoming. She also said she has enough skin in the game to not take any decisions lightly in the “relatively focused portfolio” the team is building. “I’m a big investor in my own fund,” she said. “The reality is that companies need to take the time to do this.”

If you’d like to hear more about their respective approaches to funding deals (both companies have invested in Harvey and Mistral, among others), read How to protect yourself if you fund AI technology and then it’s misused. What are the biggest questions related to today’s foundational models such as GPT-4 and why Gils? So If you’re interested in “French values,” be sure to check out our conversation.

Unsurprisingly, during this discussion, Gil points out that defense technology company Anduril has probably made the most investments to date. Trey Stevens, co-founder of Anduril, is speaking at our conference. Next StrictlyVC event held in Los Angeles on February 29th.

If you want to see it for yourself, you can find out more here. The San Francisco event was sold out (and a lot of fun). We expect the next time to be sold out, so if you’re interested, please hurry.

(Special thanks to Cloudflare for allowing us to use their beautiful San Francisco headquarters.)