YouSaid · the spoken record

Sarah Tavel

lines on the record: 118
first: 2023-12-27
most recent: 2023-12-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We at Benchmark were early stage firm. We aspire to be first board member. Usually it looks like the Series A. And that's really where our sweet spot is.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I appreciate that. I'm Sarah at Benchmark. I'm on Twitter, Sarah Tavel, and I have a sub stack, SarahTabble.com. If you're a founder, you're working on something, don't be shy. I were in the business of meeting with people like you. And so I love, I always love to get stimulated by new ideas and people.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What people might be surprised of, especially if they meet me, is that I was actually a really good tackler. And I think I broke my nose a couple times and had more injuries that I would care to remember. But I definitely inflicted more injuries on other people than I received. And I think the rugby is just, there's a camaraderie that comes with rugby. And the one thing I'll confess is that we always joke that the rugby team is not a rugby team. It's a drinking team that has a rugby problem.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My partner at Greylock, Reid Hoffman, had this line of every strength has a corresponding weakness and vice versa. And there's so much wisdom there. Like we always make, you know, we see our own strengths and we see our weaknesses, but not realize that they actually go together. Like you can't have one without the other. Similarly, strengths in organizations like a decentralized organization can move really quickly and the corresponding weakness of that is that it can feel chaotic and disorganized on the other side, a centralized organization can feel really slow, but it is very intentional in the decision making and the control of the experience. And so everything has trade-offs and realizing that more often than not, they come together. It's just so useful to be aware of that.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say we are late joiners to Tesla, my family. And man, it is one of those products that you use it for the first time. And music, I could see why I'd want to own equity in this company. Not financial advice, obviously, but it's just an awesome experience.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always love hearing the journey people take and specifically how they've made decisions along the way, like what drives them from each step. I think that's always very illuminating.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pachinko is one of the best fictional books I've read in a while. I just loved it, and so I highly recommend that. And then to founders, I am The five temptations of a CEO and the five dysfunctions of a team. It's kind of like you imagine those books in the grocery store aisle, but they're fast reads that are incredibly insightful. And I highly recommend.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Segments of a market or a niche market itself that makes it possible to bring it online. So I haven't seen anything yet, but I am definitely on the hunt.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, kind of like Grubhub, the atomic unit there was a restaurant that has its own delivery fleet and then Postmates DoorDash Oveats came and said, actually, it's any restaurant will provide the delivery fleet. And so they opened up the available supply. Now, when I think about LLMs, I think there's a real opportunity for the third one, right? Like 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 actually create an opportunity to expand the supply in a way that none of us can anticipate right now. And then who knows whether there's an opportunity with LLMs to create a better experience in one of these kind of low NPS.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of fun to ask the question whether LLMs change the game or open up new surface area. So in my post I read about three ways that you can kind of look for a new opportunity. And I think it was like number one, you always find a horizontal marketplace and you find the kind of low NPS part of that segment and you create a marketplace around that eBay being horizontal marketplace. the sneakers being a low NPS part of that and you get goat, right? The second is finding a niche that no one else is paying attention to. And like, you know, the ETC examples we gave, the hip camp stories, and bringing that online, taking friction away and showing that it's actually a bigger market than you think. And then the third is changing the atomic unit of the supply so that”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think a lot of this for new companies kind of leveraging large language models to build products is that focus on a constrained market to start is the way to win.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Benchmark, I'm lucky that I have partners who look at very different types of companies that I look at. And we meet such an incredible breadth of founders. And what you just realize, again, and again, is that these same lessons hold. With open source, it's about solving specific developers need in the beginning and solving it really freaking well and then expanding from there with SAS. You know, I think maybe the fascinating exception kind of similar to your thumbtack exception, I think what Parker Conrad's doing with Rippling and this idea of a compound startup is very different and actually he has a level of ambition that is both like the sun and a laser at the same time. And so you, you know, that's kind of an rare founder. You can have that level of execution. But again and again, what you see.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God disrupted by the DoorDash Uber Eats of the world. And so you just can't rest on your laurels, expectations constantly go up. And it's part of what's so exciting about this market that we play in.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe just this kind of the coda, which is like You can never rest on your laurels. And we talked about this already, but the history of marketplaces is one of disruption. And, you know, the idea with happiness is that Amazon and Bezos talk about this, which is like expectations, consumer expectations are constantly going up. And so if you ever stagnate in the experience that you give to the consumer, guess what? You're going to get disrupted. And the examples of we talked about with Airbnb and Home Away, DoorDash and Grubhub, you know, Grubhub wasn't able to for different reasons. They were a public company, and so they couldn't access capital in the same way that the private markets could. But they were too slow to change the atomic unit of their supply to have delivery that they fulfilled.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I might have a new once there because I think crypto is too broad of a way to describe it. Like if you said it was a DeFi crypto company, then yes, definitely. Like no one, you know, what treasuries where they are, the opportunity in DeFi isn't as material as it once was. With stablecoins, I'm a huge believer in stablecoins. And I think that's a market where you have a real current with inflation in so many local currencies. There's real demand for stablecoins, the US dollar stable coin that it comes in many different shapes and forms. That is something that I believe has a very strong current right now that I'm actually quite excited about.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What are the dynamics of change? What's the current and momentum that's going to pull the company and make the job easier for the founders to actually build something that endures?”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I want to just double click on the current thing because it's very related. A lot of people, and this is back to maybe our contrarian take on markets, I think a lot of people think about markets almost like these bodies of water. You know, and it's like, oh, it's this big body of water that we're going after. And I actually think that the most interesting markets, you have to think of them like currents, where you're just trying to, there's something happening in the market that's creating this current where you can have like a plank of wood that you put on the river and it's going to pull you forward versus a market that doesn't really have that momentum to it. You're going to have to build like something really big and fancy to make any progress. And that's why we care less about market size because really what you're looking for when you're looking at a market or”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Obvious at this point why this would be true is a founder then that really has focus. And it's kind of back to focusing their ambition like a laser beam as opposed to this like broad sun trying to do everything. And so you really feel like they're focused on the right things. And that actually leads to the third thing, which is like you really feel when a founder is Trying to fool you or fool themselves with vanity metrics versus like the true intellectual honesty and the intellectual rigor of like what's really working in my business, what's not working, where are we focused to make that the best it can be? And man, that is always, that's how you build long-term and during value. And it's something that I think it's consistent across all the founders I'm lucky enough to work with.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a couple things. One is, and I'm thinking actually of one founder I met recently, where there's that earned secret where they see a market opportunity that other people are overlooking that hasn't been addressed. Maybe there's a reason why it hasn't been addressed in the past, but now is the moment there's something changing that's creating a current in the market. I always, we can talk about currents later if we want to, but that there's something that's creating momentum in the market that's opening up an opportunity for this marketplace to exist. And for whatever reason, that founder is the person who sees it. And it's kind of one of those things that once you see it, you're like, how does it still work this way? And it makes so much sense for somebody to come in and do something about it. And then the second thing that always just deeply resonates, and it's going to.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they ended up, I don't know if it was related, but it ended up precipitating, I think, a CEO change to the CEO that is there now and who has obviously done an incredible job building Etsy from there.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, when I was at Pinterest, being driven crazy by Etsy, because Etsy was all about handmade goods, right? But as they were running up to going public, they started to chase GMV. And what that looked like is that they started to have a lot of mass produced goods on Etsy. Edrove Crazy at Pinterest because there was this one seller of these scarves that was clearly mass-produced scarves. And they were spamming Pinterest constantly with pins of those scarves. And it was just very clear that Etsy had kind of lost its way in that moment. They would start to chase GMV growth. They were going beyond what they actually stood for. And they ended up having a real reaction from the sellers that were making handmade goods and the buyers. It was this big erosion of trust.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, what happened with hip camp is that in the beginning it was going after this very different market segment, but as they became successful made their landowners money, those landowners invested that money back into their land and started to open up the market opportunity for Hip Camp, into people more like me that are glampers that want that experience in nature, but maybe don't want to pitch a tent to have it. And so that's kind of one of those examples of an underestimated market that ends up growing beyond that. There's warning stories here too. I always think of Etsy. So like Etsy, I remember”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, amazing. Well, if you have a tent and a sleeping bag and you're not afraid to put your thermos in a running river and clean the water, then that was the early days of hip camp. It was for the hardcore camper, which itself feels like a very small market, right? It's not actually that small, but it is a smaller market than other people might themselves get comfortable with. But then what would happen is that hosts on hip camp, and I stayed at one of these hip camps, and it's just such an incredible experience. The host started to make a little bit of money from hip camp. And they took that money and they started to invest in structures on their land. So in the beginning, maybe it was a fire pit or a bathroom or shower. And then it became a tree house or a yurt.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yeah, it's just such an important point. Like the market itself, it can't be a cul-de-sac. Like you need to start somewhere that has the potential to grow beyond that. But in the beginning, it's going to look small. Let me give you the example of hip cameras. Hip camp when we invested was literally land. You know, it was land where people, I don't know, Lenny, if you're a camper, I unfortunately love him.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but like you knew of it, and like Etsy also underestimated for years and years and years hip camp, like that was part of what excited us is that it was this market that was actually much bigger than people would have thought from the outside. And the wonderful thing about going after these underestimated markets is that they don't have competition in the beginning. And so you have more of the elements of being able to operate into a market and tip the market towards you when you don't have competition. And so we love these types of markets. And we always say to the founders out there, if other people are telling you that the market's too small, we would love to get to know you.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would underline it even which is that we get excited about the markets, the opportunities that might seem small from the outside.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I don't know. I don't know. What is clear is that they built an incredible company, right? Like it's just an incredible. They've done an incredible job of doing what they do. And it is a crowded market still.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And it's like such an important point because don't forget you're always going to be vulnerable to competition, right? And so let's say you have a million dollars and you spread that million dollars of go-to-market costs across 10 cities, spreading yourself really thin, you have a competitor come in and guess what? They put a million dollars into one city. They're going to win that city. And that's going to set them up for greater success down the road to keep on going being able to get more capital and more expense that they can put to work to grow those cities. And of course, we never have one competitor, always have a lot of competitors. And so focus on these steps is just, it really is such an important thing to have discipline around.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“you then reinvest in growing. And so this is really the place where you are as aggressively as possible while at the same time not losing sight of the fact that your goal is in each market individually to dominate that market. You're trying to grow into as much possible market opportunity as you possibly can.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, your equity value that you're going to create is going to come from dominating the market. And so you don't want to plant a thousand flags in a thousand markets at the same time spread yourself too thin and not decidedly win anyone market. You're trying to put, you know, you always want to put more wood behind fewer arrows. The more scale that you have, the more cities or categories where you have the flywheel starting to spin and you're starting to see the tipping point happen, the stronger your company will be, right? Each market that you get, you have scale in where you'll have contribution profit. You take that contribution profit, you invest it in new markets, the more markets and contribution profit you have, the more venture capital you'll be able to raise.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Find ways to kind of answer more use cases in that market that you can do, especially if you don't have a lot of competition. And then the third vector of growth is you want to then try to get as many plates spinning in as many markets that you can handle as quickly as possible. And this is like the blitz scale, right? This is the land grab.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then I think you have two things that you want to do at the same time to grow. The first thing is that you want to take the existing market that you're in and you just keep doing what you're doing. And you may even find ways to stretch beyond that initial market that you're going after within the same market. And so what I mean by that is Uber went from black cars to Uber X to Uber pool. They kept on finding ways in the geographies where they were already dominant to keep on getting stronger by expanding the use cases that they serve. So you have continuing to grow and penetrate the market.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're ready to take your eye off the ball and start to diffuse your focus into other markets. So there's kind of three vectors then that any marketplace can grow at this point. The first vector is within the existing market where you already are tipping that market. You as a founder then have to make a very kind of very personal decision that what you're looking at is the context of your competitive situation. So if you're tipping a market and you have no other competitor going after that market, you're the first one to see this opportunity.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the London food scene, there's like significant fragmentation of suppliers. In the Berlin food scene, that's not the case. And so it's not always the case that whatever you did in one market works in another market. But usually there's something that rhymes. There's a hint of what is going to work. So what happens now is you have a market that's tipping. And the question then is,”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, level three. And this is the one I feel like every founder who starts a marketplace, like they're chomping at the bit, right, to be able to really focus now on growth. Because all along, I feel like we've been holding you back of just like focus, focus, focus. And what you're doing through level one and level two as you're honing what you're building is that you're basically building a playbook. You don't yet know whether this playbook is repeatable, right? Like it's not always the case that the dynamics of one market Is the same elsewhere. I'll take Reki as an example”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you see two things you see one, the cohorts getting better. So people start using you more, right? As the supply side gets more diverse, you have more and more use cases that you start to be able to serve. And so you get the demand side leaning in more, the cohorts get better. And then to your point, you have the organic growth that happens where you don't have to fight to get each new participant on both sides of your market. There's something that starts to happen where the value proposition is just so strong relative to any other substitute that the market starts coming to you.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's it's such an important point, which is that you can never rest on your laurels when you're building a marketplace. Like the history of marketplaces is one in which you have a marketplace that feels dominant and then gets disrupted by a competitor home away, VRBO being disrupted by the likes of you at Airbnb.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's so many other examples of reasons why a marketplace won't tip competition. Like, you know, again, you go after New York's, you're a food delivery company and you go after the suburbs where there's no competition, that makes your job really easy to tip the market. You go to New York City where you have an entrenched competitor of Grubhub plus Seamless Web, a different culture around delivery where the restaurants mostly have their own delivery fleets. And it's just going to be so much harder for you to tip that market, right? And so being, I think you have to be really context aware when you're building a marketplace of what your competition is going to be so that you see if there is a path for you to actually tip the market.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What sometimes happens like a labor marketplace is that you have this homogeneity in the supply where it's not clear that adding the next incremental unit of supply actually changes the experience for the demand side. And so at mechanical turquo whether mechanical turqu has 100,000 Turkers or 5 million Turkers, it probably doesn't really change the experience for somebody who is using mechanical turk. And that's why in the early days a mechanical turk, you sell a lot of other copycats or clones of mechanical turk doing something similar because it didn't take that much supply for them to be able to create an experience for a segment of the market that was as good as the already scaled mechanical turk.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you need in a marketplace for that flywheel, you know, I have a graph in my slides where you kind of show that the more you penetrate the market, the happier you're able to make your customer. You should have an exponential experience where the flywheel doesn't slow down. Now you take Airbnb as an example. There isn't a limit to how valuable it is to have more supply on Airbnb because everybody has their own special preferences and there probably is a theoretical limit, but you just feel like there is always going to be such heterogeneity in the supply for Airbnb that that's what has let Airbnb really close and escape competition. With B2B marketplace,”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely that, but I think actually the bigger challenge would be to be marketplaces is on the homogeneity of the supply. Know, when you think about a law of labor marketplaces, and like let's take a classic example of mechanical Turk, right?”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the beginning, the only way you get to start with a marketplace obviously is you're bringing the supply online. And that's what opens up the opportunity. And the only way If there's enough fragmentation on the supply side to create a differentiated experience for the demand side to care about your marketplace. But the only way to build long-term enduring value with a marketplace is to corner the demand side. And so it's kind of a little bit that evolution of a marketplace that ends up changing who you focus on. And I don't know if you've experienced this. In my experience with the marketplaces that I work with, it's a constant like I have to focus more on the demand side right now. Okay, now we got to focus more on the supply side. And it's just back to how difficult these businesses are to build, especially when you have limited resources, that it's like the forever battle of building a marketplace.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who aren't the incumbents? The incumbents aren't going to lean in on your marketplace. They're already fat and happy, but you want to have these hungry suppliers who lean in, right? But if there's already concentration in your marketplace, in the ecosystem, the market that you're playing in, then you're not going to have sellers lean in. And you're not going to be able to create a flywheel that spins where the more sellers you bring on, the better the pricing or experiences on the demand side because the sellers are happy and there's nobody that's hungry or fighting. And so that's just like a critical, critical point.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The second thing that I'd say is, and this is so important, is that not all markets are susceptible to tipping, right? Like there are, we've all experienced this, I'm sure, Lenny, with the companies that you work with, companies I work with, where there are conditions of a market that make it vulnerable to tipping. I have six in my post just to name a couple classic ones. You know, the first obvious one is just concentration on the supply side. In order to be able to tip a market, you need suppliers to want to lean in on your marketplace, right? My partner, Bill Gurley, talks about how great marketplaces create the new incumbents. So you basically have suppliers.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A real advantage to being able to prove out the playbook as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible before you move on to bigger challenges. And so I love, I think it kind of underscores again why it's so valuable in the beginning to focus on something that is constrained. And again, postmates focusing on San Francisco, the city, DoorDash focusing initially on the suburbs, much smaller opportunity, but one that they could really knock the cover off the ball on. They had no competition. They had, you know, a customer that was desperate for attention. And so they could make them happy. And that just sets you up for real success to go from strength to the adjacent market.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's kind of two other things that come to mind. One, just as a reminder, and then one as a caution. So the reminder is in order to tip a market, you have to reach a saturation point in that market, right? You can't tip a market before you've penetrated it to some saturation level. And it goes back to level one of why you want to focus on a constrained market. Let's take growing food delivery product in Des Moines, Iowa versus LA or New York, right? When you're growing in a small city and you're focused on restaurants, you're going to be able to get to this tipping point a lot faster and more efficiently than if you're going after a very big market. And so there's”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changing, but still is illustrative is that Uber eats in the very beginning of their journey, thought that their advantage in the market was going to be about having really fast delivery, right? Because they already had this network of drivers. And so they thought that that's where they were going to really lean in and have an edge over any competition. And so in the search ranking, they rewarded restaurants that prepared the food quickly. And so answered the Uber Eats request and then actually got the food out as fast as possible so that Uber Eats became synonymous with like the quickness by which you got the delivery. And so that restaurant that takes 40 minutes to prepare the food, they would get ranked low in the experience for Uber Eats, even if the food was really, really great.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One star, too. Like that person, you don't want on your marketplace getting matched with buyers. And so you're trying to then make sure that as you grow, you have a natural mechanism in your marketplace to reward the suppliers that you want to reward and to churn out the ones that you don't. And of course, your job is to do your best to set all the sellers up for success, but it's an inevitability. And so there's two kind of great examples, I think, of as in these happiness loops, which is around search ranking and then reputation. Search ranking is just a very obvious one, which is like you're trying to understand what creates a happy experience for the buy side and then reward the sellers that provide that experience. So I think a kind of an interesting example that ended up actually”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love it. And so the second type of loop, and again, this loop works symbiotically with the growth loop, is what I call. I think of them almost as like the kidneys for your marketplace as you grow. The happiness loop, the idea is like you have a lot of new sellers coming in. And of course you have new buyers, but you want to make sure that you're matching your buyers with the sellers that are going to give them the best experience, right? And so, you know, normally like in a consumer social product, churn is heartbreaking. Once a user churns, they're almost never going to come back and you're with a consumer social product, you're trying to get to massive scale. But when you're building a marketplace, you actually, there's a healthy amount of churn that you want on the supplier side because there are just going to be suppliers who aren't going to create a great experience for the buyer and you can't do anything about that. And so we've all had the Uber driver whom you give.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Etsy literally gave them business cards. So Etsy gave their sellers business cards that made them feel like, oh, I'm a real professional, and the link on it was to their Etsy store.”
2023-12-27 · Lenny's Podcast · The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source