Sarah Tavel
Venture Partner, Benchmark · 1 appearance on the record.
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investoroperatorexecutive@sarahtavel ↗LinkedIn ↗sarahtavel.com ↗
Sarah Tavel became Benchmark’s first female General Partner in 2017, leading investments in companies such as Chainalysis and Hipcamp. Earlier, she co-led Bessemer's Series A in Pinterest, joined as its first product manager, and was later a partner at Greylock.
28statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 2.21/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 4 assertions · 1 opinion · 19 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Sarah argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Sarah Tavel on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Sarah Tavel said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Tavel: Ex-operator VCs act as harmful crutches by micromanaging functional roles
“And this is sometimes the weaknesses that ex-operators have when they transition into investing is thinking, oh, I can do this and I'm going to dig in on, in the company and get, you know, help them with growth or help them with whatever it may be. And it ends…”
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…”
Tavel: Board observers matter because decisions rarely come to formal votes
“That's so, so wrong, because things rarely come to a vote. It's always about what's that conversation around the table. And someone who has a seat at the table is participating in whatever strategic conversation you're having can really change the direction of…”
Tavel: Benchmark deliberately limits itself to five equal GPs and no delegation
“At Benchmark, our model of investing is that we have decided that we're not going to scale our business. You know, we haven't grown our fund size, and it's just five general partners right now, and it's a kind of this rare structure of an equal partnership. An…”
Tavel: DoorDash beat Postmates by targeting uncontested suburbs instead of cities
“You know, I would say Postmates could be executing a 10 X DoorDash's execution, but because DoorDash had a strategy that let them just be, you know, so much better than any substitute because it's a lot better to be Better. It's a lot easier to be better than …”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
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 …”
Tavel: Chainalysis Achieved Winner-Take-Most Dominance Without Explicit Network Effects
“And so chain analysis has become this de facto standard in the space. It just got into a space before other people saw the opportunity And because they were the leader, they were able to build more and more technology. You know, they're able to go across any b…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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'…”
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 …”
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 …”
Tavel: Underestimated Markets Protect Startups From Strong Competition
“The other type of company that doesn't necessarily have a network effect, but I also love, are companies that actually go after a space that is underestimated from the outside, and because it's underestimated, it actually doesn't invite competition. So, or the…”
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…”
Tavel: Startups should maximize for easily tippable markets
“I wouldn't say that you should choose a market necessarily to pick the hard thing. I actually think that you want to pick something that is easy to win, to tip the market, you know, and it, you know, there was ways in which going after the suburbs was harder t…”
Tavel: Horizontal platforms are forced into lowest-common-denominator products
“The hard thing about being a horizontal platform like an eBay is that you're, you have to try to be everything for everyone. You know, and what that forces is this kind of lowest common denominator product.”
Tavel: GOAT disrupted eBay by authenticating sneakers and building vertical features
“And so GOAT went after that vulnerability first by creating like, you know, a policy that it was always good that they were going to vet all the inventory to make sure it was authentic. And then they also created A product that was focused on this white hot ce…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| #113 Sarah Tavel: The Value of Intellectual Rigor | Jun 15, 2021 | 48m |