About
Sarah Wang is a general partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz, focused on AI and enterprise technology companies. She currently serves on the boards of Character.AI, Crossbeam, and Hex.
Prior to joining a16z, she was a vice president at TA Associates, where she invested in and partnered with founders at growth-stage companies across technology, tech-enabled services, and financial services. Sarah also served on the board of ZoomInfo (fka DiscoverOrg), which scaled to over $350M in revenue in the enterprise sales and marketing intelligence sector. Before TA, Sarah was an early stage investor at DCM Ventures and Radicle Impact, and she started her career at the Boston Consulting Group and Morgan Stanley.
She holds a BA, Phi Beta Kappa in economics from Harvard, where she was a John Harvard Scholar, and earned her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a Siebel Scholar and Arjay Miller Scholar. She grew up in the midwest across North Dakota and Chicago.
Latest Content
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The opportunity to build the next iconic cybersecurity platform has arrived: Wiz, a global leader in cloud-native security.
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Crossbeam CEO Bob Moore explains how ecosystem-led growth can improve customer acquisition, account expansion, and access to new markets by leveraging partners and partner data.
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GenAI will deliver massive value to companies, but it can be difficult to account for its costs. How we're thinking about monetizing new genAI features.
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In 2024, enterprise leaders are doubling down on their genAI investments. 16 developments for founders to keep in mind to capture this new opportunity.
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Insights from leaders at OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Databricks, Character.AI, Roblox, insitro, and Figma on where we are, where we're going, and the open questions for building the next wave of AI.
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Noam Shazeer, Character.ai CEO and cofounder, talks to a16z's Sarah Wang about the dawn of universally accessible intelligence, the compute it will take to power it, and his pursuit of AGI's first use case: AI friends.
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With generative AI, we’re already seeing use cases with orders-of-magnitude improvement in time, cost, and performance over previous AI waves.
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How 4 key AI innovations will evolve over the next 6–12 months, and how founders can integrate these new advances into their businesses.
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How 2022 impacted growth, efficiency, and burn metrics, and how companies should view their metrics in light of these new benchmarks going forward.
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Character AI is a platform, based on a proprietary LLM, for creating and chatting with different AI characters. We're leading their Series A!
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At the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023. Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications. In our 2-part series, we’ll be covering 12 of these big ideas with the partners that shared them. Here in part 1, we’ll cover Consumer, Games, and Enterprise, with a little Fintech sprinkled in. Listen in as we chat with Connie Chan, Anne Lee Skates, Jack Soslow, Doug McCracken, Sarah Wang, and Sumeet Singh. And for the full list of 40+ ideas, check out the full article: https://a16z.com/2022/12/15/big-ideas-in-tech-2023/
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Tracking metrics and benchmarking is a critical part of scaling a growth-stage company, but there are a lot of common failure modes. For instance, it’s easy to fall prey to confirmation bias and manipulate your numbers t...
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Benchmarks for B2B companies, based on a16z data and investing team expertise.
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The API economy and a Cambrian explosion of apps have transformed best-in-class tech to a stack of 20 apps working together. Partnerships have become a critical part of early go-to-market strategy that can lead to higher quality pipeline and accelerated sales.
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Gross margins–which are essentially a company’s revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers–are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup and growing business. And yet, figuring out what goes into the “cost” for delivering products and services is not as simple as it may sound, particularly for high-growth software businesses that might use emerging business models or be leveraging new technology. In this episode from June 2020, a16z general partners Martin Casado, David George, and Sarah Wang talk all things gross margins, from early to late stage. Why do gross margins matter? When do they matter during a company’s growth? And how do you use them to plan for the future? The conversation ranges from the nuances of and strategy for calculating margins with things like cloud costs, freemium users, or implementation costs, to the impact margins can have on valuations.
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The Data50 are the 50 bellwether data startups across the most exciting categories in data, such as AI/ML, ELT and orchestration, and data observability.
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Much has been discussed, written, and reconfigured around the modern data stack – and for good reason, it’s one of the most significant shifts in data architecture of our time. But as close followers of its evolution, on...
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It’s no secret that the Cambrian explosion of SaaS applications is already leading to a massive shift in how companies reach and engage with customers. As students of this evolution, we’ve watched the decade-long Death o...
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If software is eating the world, code is swallowing companies whole. Whether living across multiple repositories or within a single monolith, an astonishing amount of code—and its associated languages, systems, and tools...
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The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.
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Industry lessons from the first generation of iconic bottom-up companies and how they layered in top-down sales to accelerate growth.
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Gross margins are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup, but figuring out what does and doesn't go into them as a company grows is not as simple as it sounds. In this episode, we discuss why and when margins matter, and how they evolve along the way.