23rd March 2023
20VC: Greylock’s Sarah Tavel on What Founders Need From A Good Investor and Why Products Need To Be 10X Better & Cheaper
Sarah Tavel is a Partner at Greylock Partners. Prior to Greylock, Sarah was a product lead at Pinterest. As one of the first 35 employees, her first order of business was to launch Pinterest internationally and close the Series C financing. Sarah then moved into product, becoming Pinterest’s founding PM for search and discovery, and launching Pinterest’s first search and recommendations features. She also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper-growth. Sarah joined Pinterest in 2012 after co-leading the Series A investment while at Bessemer Venture Partners. She spent six years at Bessemer, investing in a wide range of businesses from Quidsi to Cornerstone OnDemand.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Sarah made her way into the world of VC from selling ads in college?
2.) What is the deal sourcing story behind your sourcing of Pinterest for Bessemer? What made Sarah so excited about the product? At what stage did Sarah realise the huge potential Pinterest did have?
3.) How did Sarah decide Greylock was the right VC to choose over the plethora of other options?
4.) How does Sarah try and appeal to the inner founder? What does she do to make sure she is the first person they call? What forms of communication does Srah like to communicate with?
5.) What is Sarah’s attitude to VC’s personal brand? How has Sarah seen the personalisation of VC in recent years? Why the shift from blog to Medium?
6.) What is the most important attribute for a consumer product to have? Does it have to be both 10X better and cheaper?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Episode:
Sarah’s’s Fave Book:
Sarah’s Fave Blog or Newsletter:
If you would like to see a more colourful side to Harry with many a mojito session, you can follow him on Instagram here!
The Twenty Minute VC is brought to you by Leesa, the Warby Parker or TOMS shoes of the mattress industry. Lees have done away with the terrible mattress showroom buying experience by creating a luxury premium foam mattress that is order completely online and ships for free to your doorstep. The 10 inch mattress comes in all sizes and is engineered with 3 unique foam layers for a universal, adaptive feel, including 2 inches of memory foam and 2 inches of a really cool latex foam called Avena, design to keep you cool. All Leesa mattresses are 100% US or UK made and for every 10 mattresses they sell, they donate one to a shelter. Go to Leesa.com/VC and enter the promo code VC75 to get $75 off!
