#113 Sarah Tavel: The Value of Intellectual Rigor

**Sarah Tavel** (0:00)
I'll describe what you see for the people who do scale. The founders who are not afraid to be vulnerable, they understand that they are works in progress, and then figure out the ways to constantly grow, evolve, and push their own abilities.
And it's the people who aren't willing to admit to themselves or whomever they work, that they don't know something, or they're not letting themselves have that learning moment of accepting that they don't know something, that they tend to just hold themselves back and not scale as a company scales.

**Shane Parrish** (0:51)
Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast sharpens your mind by helping you master the best of what other people have already figured out.
If you're listening to this, you're not currently a supporting member. If you'd like special episodes, Access Before Everyone Else, transcripts, and other member-only content, you can join at fs.blogslashpodcast.com. Check out the show notes for a link. My guest on this episode is Sarah Tavel. Sarah is a general partner at Benchmark. This conversation is interesting because not only is Sarah an investor, but she has significant operating experience and scaling as an early employee at Pinterest. We talk about how studying philosophy helped her as a VC, her concept of the net present value of pain and how it applies, why every strength has a corresponding weakness, where boards go wrong, assessing the performance of a CEO, lessons from rapidly scaling Pinterest, and so much more.
It's time to listen and learn.
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You studied philosophy and not computer science or business. How has that shaped the way that you approach your job as a VC?

**Sarah Tavel** (3:58)
Yeah, you know, it's funny. Like, I think most people misunderstand what philosophy is. I think that people probably, when you say that you studied philosophy, they imagine a bunch of, you know, guys in three-piece suits sitting around a table drinking cognac and pontificating on the meaning of life. But it is a little different.
You know, this, of course, philosophy is this big umbrella. But the type of philosophy that I studied in college was a very analytical version of philosophy, where, you know, it's underpinned by logic.
And you learn a level of intellectual rigor that you don't even realize.
It's kind of like you think you can be rigorous in your thinking, and then you have to write a philosophy essay or read a philosophy essay, where you have to, you know, you're breaking things down into premises. You have to think through thought experiments to imagine all the corner cases and preempt, like, any objections that someone might have on your argument. And the level of rigor that you learn actually has made such a difference in my life. Like, when I was doing a product, a Pinterest, you know, a product document where you're making a recommendation on a product is actually very similar to a philosophy proof. Like, you have hypotheses, you know, about how users behave, how they'll accept a different, you know, a new feature, what, you know, what their intent is on the product. And you underwrite that with, you know, user research, experiments, analyzing the data that you already have. And it's, you know, if all these hypotheses are true, then the conclusion is that you should ship the product. And that's, it's, it's, it's a philosophy proof, but for product. And, and I think investing is the same thing. Like when you're writing an investment recommendation, or thinking about a potential investment, you also, you know, really what it comes down to is a proof in the same way, where you have the premises, which may be a belief that you have about the future, the kind of product market fit, the founder market fit, all these, all these things that you once again underwrite by, you know, understanding the competitive landscape, talking to customers, looking at the data, all those things and trends. And if you believe all those hypotheses to be true, all those premises, then it follows that you should make the investment. And so it was one of those things that I never would have anticipated. You know, when I studied philosophy, it wasn't with intent to go into venture by any way or to go into technology even.