Benchmark General Partner Sarah Tavel discusses common failure modes among startup board members and investors.
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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…”
Insight
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 …”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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…”