20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Investing Success Lies In Small Markets Adjacent To Very Large Ones, Why You Have To Be Judicious On When To Pay Up vs Be More Price Sensitive & Why Crypto Investing Is Like The Early Days of AdTech Investing
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 24 September 2018
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark, one of the world’s leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. As for Sarah, Sarah has led Benchmark's investments in and currently sits on the boards of Chainalysis and Hipcamp. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners, where she led Greylock's investment in Sonder and another (unannounced) company. Before Greylock, Sarah was one of the first 35 employees at Pinterest where she led the company's international expansion and aided in the closing of the Series C financing. Sarah was also the product lead for search, recommendations, machine vision, and pin quality and led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper-growth.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her first foray into the world of venture with Bessemer over 10 years ago? How that led to Pinterest and how she came to be a GP at Benchmark today?
2.) Speaking of Sarah's operating career with Pinterest, Pat Grady said on the show "never has the rate of decay on operating experience been greater". How does Sarah think about and respond to this? How has operating made Sarah a strong investor? What are the drawbacks that this operating experience can present for investors?
3.) Moving to evaluation, Andy Rachleff, Founder @ Benchmark said on the show, "good team poor market, market wins; good market, poor team, market wins. How does Sarah think about the balance between founder vs market? Why is going after big markets so hard? What should investors look for in a market with that in mind? How does Sarah determine the right time to open up adjacent markets?
4.) There has never been a greater supply of capital in the market than today, does Sarah believe we have an excess supply today? Does Sarah agree with her Partner, Peter Fenton, "no good deal is too expensive in hindsight"? How does Sarah assess her own price sensitivity? How does it depend on the opportunity? How has it changed over time?
5.) Having 2,5000 hours on boards, how has Sarah seen herself develop and change as a board member? What have been some of the biggest learning curves? What are the commonalities in the very best board members Sarah works with? how doe the best entrepreneurs manage and use their boards effectively?
6.) Why does Sarah think that crypto today is very much like the world of adtech in the early days? How does Sarah think about the requirement for specialisation in the space? WIll this be a game for the specialised crypto funds or can generalist VC funds compete?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Sarah’s Fave Book: Creating the Kingdom of Ends
Sarah’s Most Recent Investment: Hipcamp
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Sarah on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to The 20 Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I would love to welcome you |
| 0:03.7 | behind the scenes on Instagram at H. Stebbings, 1996 with two Bs, where you can both suggest |
| 0:08.7 | questions and guests for future episodes. It'd be fantastic to see you there. But to our episode |
| 0:13.5 | today, and I'm thrilled to welcome back a very special guest I had on the show over two years |
| 0:17.6 | ago now. So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome back Sarah Tavill, general partner at Benchmark, one of the world's leading VC funds, with a portfolio |
| 0:24.6 | including the lights of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp, and many more |
| 0:29.7 | revolutionary companies of the last decade. As for Sarah, Sarah has led Benchmark's investments |
| 0:34.1 | in and currently sits on the board of chain analysis and hip camp. And prior to |
| 0:38.1 | benchmark, Sarah was a partner at Greylock Partners, where she led Greylock's investment in Sonder |
| 0:42.4 | and another unannounced company. And before Greylock, Sarah was one of the first 35 employees |
| 0:47.3 | at Pinterest, where she led the company's international expansion and aided in the closing of the |
| 0:51.9 | series C financing. Sarah was also the product lead for |
| 0:54.6 | search, recommendations, machine vision, and pin quality, and led three acquisitions as she helped |
| 0:59.8 | the company scale through a period of hypergrowth. But before we dive into the episode with Sarah today, |
| 1:04.3 | thanks to my friends at Weepay, let me introduce you to another very cool player in the space, |
| 1:08.3 | Builder Trend. Builder Trend is the number one construction |
| 1:11.0 | management platform for builders and contractors. It's designed to handle pre-sales, project |
| 1:15.9 | management, customer management and financial matters like budget, pre-orders and payments, |
| 1:20.5 | and with more than 450,000 construction professionals using it to manage more than 800,000 |
| 1:25.6 | projects and $67 billion worth in Builder Trend alone. |
| 1:29.6 | You can learn more at Buildertrend.com. |
| 1:31.5 | And to learn how you can grow your revenue with integrated payments, just like BuilderTrend did, |
... |
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