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.
AI & Technology Skills
AI can unlock new marketplace supply by automating the high-friction onboarding and management of long-tail providers.
"LLMs may make it possible to bring on a supply type that maybe the long tail, that was just, it was too much effort to reach out to them, onboard them, but maybe if you automate that work, you actuall..."
Growth Skills
The Sean Ellis survey is a more reliable indicator of product-market fit than NPS for early-stage startups.
"I don't like NPS for this... I like Sean Ellis's question of how disappointed would you be if this product disappeared? And I think it's if you have at least 40% of people respond that they'd be very..."
Product-market fit in marketplaces is measured by 'Happy GMV'—transactions that result in high retention and satisfaction.
"Customers don't care how big you are, they don't care how many transactions you've accumulated. What they care about is when they have a transaction with you, how happy do you make them? How much bett..."
Network effects are the strongest growth loops because user actions automatically improve the product for others.
"The biggest thing that you can do is a network effect. The more I pin something on Pinterest, the better the experience for every user on Pinterest. Every time I add a pin to a board, I'm creating a n..."
Effective growth loops leverage user activity to acquire new users or re-engage dormant ones without manual intervention.
"How do you get it so that, as your users use the product, they want to share it with other people? They create metadata that you can then use for SEO. You have collaborative experiences that pull othe..."
Marketplace scaling requires growth loops where one side of the market (supply or demand) naturally brings in the other.
"I think every marketplace has to figure out what I call tipping loops. And there's two types of tipping loops that work together symbiotically to help a marketplace scale. The first are the growth loo..."
True retention is built when a product creates accruing benefits and mounting loss for the user over time.
"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..."
Retention should be measured by the percentage of users in a cohort who consistently perform the product's core action.
"I particularly love to look at that on a weekly active user completing the core action pieces of like, are users completing the core action? How is that changing overtime for each of the cohorts? And..."
A product only has a viable foundation when cohort retention curves eventually flatten out rather than dropping to zero.
"Until you reach a point with your cohorts where there is a plateau, you have more work to do on figuring out the retention of your users."
In marketplaces, retention is driven by 'happiness loops' that identify and reward high-quality participants while filtering out poor ones.
"The happiness loop, the idea is you have a lot of new sellers coming in, and of course you have new buyers, but you want to make sure that you are matching your buyers with the sellers that are going..."
Product Management Skills
Roadmap prioritization should focus on driving users toward a single 'core action' rather than diffusing attention across many features.
"What that ends up meaning when the when a new user signs up is that there's too much in the beginning to to take in and understand, and you don't then have a very focused product that gets the user to..."
Market selection should focus on 'currents' (momentum and change) rather than just static market size.
"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..."
Marketplace profitability is directly tied to relative market share dominance over the nearest competitor.
"The more dominant a marketplace is relative to the number two in its space, the more profitable that business is... you don't want to be in the middle of the pack, but even being number one but just b..."