E35: “Angel” Podcast: Sarah Tavel, Partner at Benchmark shares insights on getting recruited by Peter Fenton, disrupting VC gender norms from the inside, transitioning from operator to investor & more

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2020

⏱️ 94 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:50 Jason intros Benchmark's Sarah Tavel
1:20 Aside from Slack, what other companies grew like consumer-facing but charge like enterprise?
3:19 How was Sarah recruited to Benchmark? How is Benchmark different from other major VC firms?
12:04 Limited upside of talking to the press in 2020
17:30 Growing up in NYC and going to Harvard
21:30 Jason on becoming a "Don't touch the thermostat" dad
23:58 How did the offer from Peter Fenton go down? What drew Sarah to Benchmark?
28:36 Sarah's thoughts on disrupting VC as a woman from the inside & from the outside
37:30 How going from operating to investing is trading stress for anxiety
40:51 Jason and Sarah discuss their most personal & significant investments: Calm & Pinterest
47:26 How Pinterest's business model was a mold of Facebook and Google
49:45 Jason tells regulators how to stop Google
58:14 Investing in Chainalysis & Crypto infrastructure
1:12:44 Are the best companies polarizing?
1:16:30 Investing in Hipcamp
1:29:43 Marc Andreessen asks Sarah a question

Transcript

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0:50.7	Hey everybody, welcome to Angel the podcast. is episode four of season three and we are
0:55.5	cooking with oil the guests have been transcendent and people are just raving about
1:00.5	the Dan Rose episode I think you're gonna love today's as well. We've got
1:03.8	somebody who has worked at what most people would consider two of the top 10
1:08.5	venture capital firms here in Silicon Valley, Graylock, and now Benchmark, and we're going to talk about
1:13.9	Sarah Travel's transition from one of those firms to another and her focus on consumer.
1:21.0	You're a consumer investor mostly.
1:22.6	Yeah, I mean,
1:23.2	Nowadays, yeah, a lot of marketplaces, B to B, C.
1:27.0	And then, you know, nowadays you can't ignore SAS of you're, you know, doing, actually
1:31.7	consumer investing. I mean, a user is a consumer at the end of the day and so
1:35.2	it feels like the two things are starting to overlap the bit slack feels like a consumer
	...

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