Tavel: Postponing difficult management decisions creates compounding organizational damage
Sarah Tavel · #113 Sarah Tavel: The Value of Intellectual Rigor · Jun 15, 2021 · at 19:31
Sarah Tavel, General Partner at Benchmark, describes her 'net present value of pain' framework for startup founders managing underperforming executives.
0:00 / 0:43exact quote · 43.5s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 like, hey, I'm just gonna wait a few more months until I get this other role right before I address this thing. The compounding problems that happen, that you ship the wrong things, you hire the wrong people, like the problem, you have to nip these things in the bud, otherwise there's these cascading effects that happen that make it a bigger and bigger deal when you actually get to that decision.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sarah Tavel
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…”