Sarah Tavel
19 statements across 1 episodes · 7 bullish · 6 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Jun 15, 2021 by Sarah Tavel · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Sarah Tavel's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Sarah Tavel, oldest first
Jun 15, 2021 negative
Tavel: Choosing wrong metrics forces startups to optimize wrong product features
“What happens is that if you choose the wrong metric, so MAUs in this case, you actually end up optimizing for the wrong thing. You know, the product that you build opto, like you end up deciding on different features that you're going to build that optimize fo…”
Jun 15, 2021 positive
Tavel: Pinterest improved user engagement by switching OKR to weekly active pinners
“When the growth team realized this and ended up changing their OKR to be what we called weekly active pinners, you know, actually making someone who signs up for Pinterest not just come to the site once in a month, but actually pin something once in a week, th…”
Jun 15, 2021 positive
Tavel: Moving Pinterest's growth team under product leadership streamlined execution
“And so there was a point in time when the growth team at Pinterest was actually reporting to the marketing team. And so you had a team that was separate from the product team that was making changes to the product and wasn't actually aligned with what the prod…”
Jun 15, 2021 negative
Tavel: Founders must deliver bad news to boards immediately to avoid breaking trust
“You know, one of the things that I tell my companies is you can take as long to, you can wait until the board meeting to give good, you know, good news, but you give bad news as fast as possible. And there's, that is a classic trust breakdown from the founder …”
Jun 15, 2021
Tavel: Venture Investment Memos Work as Deductive Philosophical Logic Proofs
“And I think investing is the same thing. Like when you're writing an investment recommendation or thinking about a potential investment, you also, you know, really what it comes down to is, is a proof in the same way where you have the premises, which may be a…”
Jun 15, 2021 neutral
Jun 15, 2021
Tavel: Postponing difficult management decisions creates compounding organizational damage
“And what I always remind founders is that pain today postponed until tomorrow is going to be harder. It's like taking a loan out on the pain. And particularly in the early stages of a company, if you have the wrong head of product, And you know it, but you're …”
Jun 15, 2021
Tavel: Integrating acquired founders succeeds only with deep mission alignment
“All people that work in a company are on a spectrum where on, on one side you have the founders where their identity is the company. They You know, they don't ask what their job is. They ask what the company needs. They work nights and weekends. It's like, it'…”
Jun 15, 2021 bullish
Tavel: Next-Gen Remote-Native Tools Will Transform Work Beyond Zoom and Slack
“And in a way, like you had technologies like Slack and Zoom That I think facilitated a new way of working, which was the ability for us to be remote, but aren't actually native to the way we are working when you're working remote. And so you're seeing a new ge…”
Jun 15, 2021 negative
Tavel: Founder ambition often causes failure by avoiding narrow market focus
“For the failure scenarios, a founder's ambition blinds them in not picking a small starting place to really, really execute and get incredibly strong product market fit. Their ambition blinds them to wanting to take on A really big problem with a blunt product…”
Jun 15, 2021 bullish
Tavel: Benchling succeeded by spotting overlooked biologics market tailwinds
“We have another company called Benchling that has just done a phenomenal job executing in this kind of biologic space, which again, there was a current that they saw that other people didn't see that was creating this really, really big market, but in the begi…”
Jun 15, 2021
Tavel: Unlike other firms, Benchmark GPs conduct executive talent calls directly
“I'm on, you know, seven boards right now, and I am on these talent calls every week for some of my companies where we're doing a search for a CRO as an example, and it will always be me and then the talent partners of the other firms as opposed to the partner …”
Jun 15, 2021 negative
Tavel: Board members lose founder trust by poaching, investing in competitors, or self-optimizing
“The other way that happens from where the board loses the CEO's trust is usually if the CEO doesn't feel like the board member is acting in the best interest of the company. If an investor ends up investing in a competitive company, if they recruit someone to …”
Jun 15, 2021
Tavel: Product Recommendation Documents Function as Philosophical Logic Proofs
“Like when I was doing product at Pinterest, you know, a product document where you're making a recommendation on a product is actually very similar to a philosophy proof. Like you have hypotheses. You know, about how users behave, how they'll accept a differen…”
Jun 15, 2021 bullish
Tavel: Efficient startups should burn aggressively to pull away from competitors
“If you have a more efficient machine where you're able to, again, take that dollar and make, you know, five dollars, six dollars, whatever it may be out of it, if not more, then you should be burning as much money as you can do efficiently to keep getting furt…”
Jun 15, 2021 negative
Tavel: Firing role misfits beats internal transfers 95% of the time
“I would say that's right, 95% of the time. Like all, all roles, sometimes you should break it. Particularly, you know, at the early, early stages of a company, when you're going through hypergrowth, you're bringing in these athletes, and the company gets more …”
Jun 15, 2021 negative
Tavel: Mediocre 'seven' employees kill companies by blocking top talent
“And the thesis was is that sevens kill companies. And what that means is that, you know, when someone is a four, you just know they're not doing the job, they're not up for it, and let's, let's take them out of the system. But the problem with the seven Is tha…”
Jun 15, 2021 positive
Tavel: Talent acquisitions are vital to inject rare founder DNA into companies
“I think it's so important to constantly inject that type of DNA into a company through the entire life cycle of a company. I'm a huge believer actually in talent acquisitions for this reason, because it's just very, very difficult to recruit founders because t…”
Jun 15, 2021 positive
Tavel: Startup org chart changes indicate company growth, not dysfunction
“I think people sometimes see org changes As a bug, you know, as a oh, something must not be going right with my company, the company that I'm at, because we had to change the org chart, and now I'm reporting to someone else, or, you know, they had to change th…”