20VC: Benchmark's Sarah Tavel on Why Investing Success Lies In Small Markets Adjacent To Very Large Ones, Why You Have To Be Judicious On When To Pay Up vs Be More Price Sensitive & Why Crypto Investing Is Like The Early Days of AdTech Investing

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
You are listening to The Twenty Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I would love to welcome you behind the scenes on Instagram at hstebbings1996 with two Bs, where you can both suggest questions and guests for future episodes. It'd be fantastic to see you there. But to our episode today, and I'm thrilled to welcome back a very special guest I had on the show over two years ago now. So with that, I'm thrilled to welcome back Sarah Tavel, general partner at Benchmark, one of the world's leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp, and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. As for Sarah, Sarah has led Benchmark's investments in and currently sits on the board of Chainalysis and Hipcamp. And prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a partner at Greylock Partners where she led Greylock's investment in Sonda and another unannounced company. And before Greylock, Sarah was one of the first 35 employees at Pinterest where she led the company's international expansion and aided in the closing of the series C Financing. Sarah was also the product lead for Search, Recommendations, Machine Vision and PIN Quality and led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper growth. But before we dive into the episode with Sarah today, thanks to my friends at WePay, let me introduce you to another very cool player in the space, Buildertrend. Buildertrend is the number one construction management platform for builders and contractors. It's designed to handle pre-sales, project management, customer management and financial matters like budget, pre-orders and payments. And with more than 450,000 construction professionals using it to manage more than 800,000 projects and $67 billion worth in Buildertrend alone. You can learn more at buildertrend.com. And to learn how you can grow your revenue with integrated payments, just like Buildertrend did, visit wepay.com forward slash Harry. And WePay's got this fantastic case study about how another platform, TeamSnap, is using WePay to make payments its number one revenue stream, more than its subscription business. Again, that's wepay.com forward slash Harry. And speaking of transforming companies, we all know that happens with teams themselves.
And that's where Terminal comes in. The reality is that hiring amazing developers is hard. It's much harder if you're only looking in a 25 mile radius of your office. So Terminal is your dedicated partner in rapidly standing up world-class remote technical teams. How do they deliver both speed and quality? Well, Terminal does this by focusing on everything necessary to successfully source, set up and support these teams. From physical elements like beautiful workspaces and equipment, to ongoing resources like HR, payroll, legal, professional learning and development. But really, don't take my word for this. Take the word of Eventbrite, former 20VC guest hymns and Dialpad, all customers and lovers of Terminal. And you can find out more today at terminal.io. And now we have the team in place as a founder or operator. Your crucial job is people operations, whether that be hiring execs, developing managers, retaining that top talent and really building a high performing culture. And that's why you need Lattice. Lattice is the number one people management solution for growing companies. And it helps companies like Asana, Reddit and Cruise build a really strong company culture. And with Lattice, it's easy to launch 360 reviews, share ongoing feedback, facilitate one on ones, set up goal tracking and even run employee engagement surveys. And Lattice is the only solution that combines both performance management and employee engagement so operators can really make sure top performers are happy. And Lattice is giving away three months of Lattice free to 20 VC listeners. Just go to lattice.com forward slash 20 VC. That's Lattice, lattice.com forward slash 20 VC. Build an award winning culture with Lattice, the number one people management solution. However, you've heard quite enough of these dulcet English tones. So without further ado, I'm thrilled to hand over to Sarah Tavel, General Partner at Benchmark.
You have now arrived at your destination.
Sarah, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the show today for a very special round two. So thank you so much for joining me again today.

**Sarah Tavel** (3:46)
Yeah, it's so great to be back.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:47)
Now, I would love to kick off those days, Sarah, with a little on you. So tell me, how did you, for those that maybe didn't hear our first episode, come to make your way into what I always call the wonderful world of venture and come to be a general partner at Benchmark?

**Sarah Tavel** (3:58)
So I had an unusual beginning for me, which is that I started in venture, actually one year out of college.