My guest this week is Sarah Tavel, a general partner at Benchmark, working alongside past guests Bill Gurley and Chetan Puttagunta. Sarah has a long history as both an investor and as an operator. She was an early product leader at Pinterest before joining Benchmark. Sarah has become one of my go-to resources for topics like networks, consumer technology, and marketplaces among many other topics. I’ve used her framework for how to think about client engagement, company data, and marketplace liquidity and quality over and over again in my business life. I’m so excited to finally have her on the show. Please enjoy our conversation.
For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.
Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub.
Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag
Show Notes
1:24 – (First question) - Lessons learned from watching the food delivery space
5:44 – Hip camp and how they are thinking about the space rental sector
5:45 - The a16z Marketplace 100
7:47 – Valuing private companies vs public companies
9:37 – Building marketplaces
14:24 – Tipping a market
14:30 – Bill Gurley Podcast Episode
18:09 – How to incorporate reputation scores into a network
19:55 – Search ranking as a tool for marketplaces
21:00 – Size of marketplaces vs their competitors
22:15 – Niching of marketplaces
22:21 - Chetan Puttagunta Podcast Episode
23:26 – State of the consumer social sector
27:50 – The LinkedIn problem and how she would build a social platform
30:42 – Things that are piquing her interest in the consumer space
32:20 – Lessons learned about scaling while working at Pinterest
38:42 – Pricing and the marketplace
41:25 – Identifying and optimizing a Core Action in a digital business
44:18 – Accruing benefits and mounting losses as part of the product design
47:48 – Her investment in Reci
52:18 – How should companies gather the best data from their business
56:03 – Lessons to SaaS investing
56:29 – Kindest thing anyone has done for Sarah
57:45 – Most interesting philosophy lesson
58:09 – Creating a Kingdom of Ends
Learn More
For more episodes go to InvestorFieldGuide.com/podcast.
Sign up for the book club, where you’ll get a full investor curriculum and then 3-4 suggestions every month at InvestorFieldGuide.com/bookclub
Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_oshag