Sarah Tavel
Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark and sits on the boards of Chainalysis, Hipcamp, Rekki, Cambly, and Medely. She is a founding member of All Raise, the nonprofit organization working to accelerate the success of women in the venture-capital and VC-backed startup ecosystem. Before Benchmark, Sarah was a partner at Greylock Partners. She joined Pinterest in 2012 as their first PM and launched their first search and recommendations features. She also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hypergrowth.
Growth & Retention Skills
Sustainable organic growth is achieved by converting individual user energy into collective network effects that improve the product for everyone.
"This is where I love to think of every time a user users your product, let's say they're clicking on the mouse or they're tapping on their phone, I love to think of it as this kinetic energy that they..."
The goal of onboarding is to teach users the product's mental model so they can immediately begin performing the core action.
"Part of it is how do you measure the success of your NUX, of the activation? To me, it is are you taking those new users and helping them understand the mental model of your product well enough that t..."
To build a retentive product, ensure it becomes more valuable as users engage and that abandoning it results in a significant loss of accumulated value.
"The test for me, of whether you're building a product that has the ingredients to create a retentive product on a micro level, just at the user level, is that the product should get better the more yo..."
Overlay: Zero-to-One / Founder Skills
When pitching investors, focus on the dynamics of market change and momentum that will make building an enduring company easier for founders.
"I actually think that the most interesting markets, you have to think of them like currents where you're there's something happening in the market that's creating this current where you can have a pla..."
Strategy & Positioning Skills
Identifying a fundamental core action is essential because it signals a user's comprehension of your product's utility and predicts their likelihood to return.
"What you realize when you look at social products is that they're almost is this action which I call the core action of that product that forms the foundation of the product. When a user completes thi..."
Building an enduring product requires moving past vanity growth metrics to focus on the criticality of user engagement with the core action.
"When I started to meet with all these really talented consumer founders building consumer social products, this was during a time when everybody was getting excited about growth hacking. What you woul..."