In 2018, Sarah Guo became the youngest general partner in Greylock's 60-year history. She was 28. Four years later, she quit to launch Conviction, a firm staked entirely on AI. Before ChatGPT shipped, she seeded Baseten and Harvey; each is now worth over $11 billion. In Conviction's first year, she wrote early checks into Sierra, Cognition, and Mistral; those three companies are now worth, together, $54 billion. Andrej Karpathy worked out of Conviction's office until Anthropic hired him in May. Guo has been close to Jensen Huang for over a decade. Her first two calls after starting the firm were to Sam Altman and Nat Friedman. And yet the investor closest to the AI frontier is betting against its biggest companies. The two big frontier labs, worth close to a trillion dollars apiece, no longer just want to build the models. They also want to build every product and company on top of them, leaving nothing for anyone else. The market is paying as though they might succeed. Of the $300 billion in venture capital deployed in the first quarter of 2026, the biggest quarter in the history of the trade, 65% went to only four companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Waymo. Guo is betting the labs can't build everything, and she spends her days making sure of it. She won Harvey its first client. She flew across the country to take a single Baseten candidate to a four-hour lunch. On one wedding anniversary, she spent the whole weekend on back-to-back calls, keeping two founders on the line so they couldn't speak to rival firms. Twice a year, she flies the world's brightest young founders to San Francisco and inducts them into the fight. In the months @domcooke spent reporting this piece, @saranormous had her fourth child, walked the Met Gala in 45 pounds of chainmail, and still answered her founders' texts within minutes. Guo's parents arrived from China in 1987 with $50, built a company, and took it public at $1.2 billion. Then it went bankrupt. Guo grew up inside that startup. She built its first website, did her homework in a cubicle, and slept over for bug bashes. She loved it. If two labs build everything, no one gets to do that again. Welcome to Sarah's Wager. Read it below.

Scott Wu is the co-founder of Cognition AI, one of the fastest-growing companies in history. He’s also the greatest competitive programmer the US has ever produced. You may have seen him doing impossible card tricks and mental math. You’ve never seen him asked about weed, Michael Jordan, cancer, and human consciousness over a punnet of strawberries. That is what Colossus editor-in-chief Jeremy Stern did on a recent visit to San Francisco. For those less familiar with @ScottWu46: In 2nd grade, he entered a math competition for 7th graders, lost, and was so furious he still fumes about it 20 years later. The next year he entered the 9th-grade division as a 3rd-grader and got a perfect score. Then he won first place at the US national middle-school math competition and three straight gold medals at the International Olympiad in Informatics, where he became the greatest American gold-medalist and coach in history. Most of the people running the biggest AI companies met as teenagers, competing for their countries on international math and science teams. OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Meta’s Alexandr Wang, to name just a few. Most agree that the von Neumann among them was Scott Wu. In November 2023, a few weeks after his mother died of lung cancer, on the day Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, Wu founded his own AI company: Cognition. He was 26 and saw earlier than almost anyone that AI would converge on agents that work in the background, 24/7, like coworkers. He shipped Cognition’s AI software engineer Devin in March 2024. It worked poorly, and he took intense public criticism for it. Now, in its first 18 months of service, Devin has generated $445 million of revenue run rate and usage has doubled every eight weeks. The US Army, Goldman Sachs, and Mercedes-Benz are all customers. Cognition is raising at a valuation around $25 billion. @JeremySternLA sat down with Wu, the emperor of the nerds, to ask the questions we’d all ask one of the smartest people in America—building the most consequential technology of our generation—if we ever got the chance. As well as MJ and weed, they talk about the cluster of competitive math prodigies behind so much of AI, what makes us human when AGI arrives, and why Wu believes he was put on this earth to teach AI how to code. Read the piece below.

This is the story of Hyperliquid, the most profitable startup per employee on earth, told from a guarded office in Singapore. Last year, its team of 11 generated $900 million in profit. It's 3 years old, has never taken a dollar of venture capital, and is beginning to change how