Sarah Tavel
@sarahtavel
Partner at @Benchmark. Student of escaping competition. Formerly product @pinterest. Ball and chain for @cklemke and 🧒🏻👶🏻.
For the past 25 years, application software startups have had a singular focus: increasing company and employee productivity. AI enables a paradigm shift: Rather than sell software to improve an end-user's productivity, consider what it would look like to sell *the work itself*.…
Was talking to a solo founder building a consumer network, and I couldn't help but observe that consumer networks tend to have larger founding teams: Facebook: 5 co-founders LinkedIn: 5 co-founders Twitter: 4 Twitch: 4 Snap: 3 Reddit: 3 YouTube: 3 Pinterest: 3 Instagram: 2…
One of the early gifts I got in my venture career, was getting to partner with @FDavidsonT. For an investor, there is nothing like getting to partner with someone like Francis. His raw intellect, ambition, intensity, urgency, purity of vision and purpose, and perhaps most of…
After 11 years of blood, sweat and tears – my time as Sonder's CEO has come to an end. Building a company from the ground up has been more rewarding, but also more challenging that I could have ever imagined. x.com/FDavidsonT/sta…
The number of times I've tried to ♥️ a message in a WhatsApp group, only to fat finger the 😂 right next to it...
Can’t recommend this post by @sarahtavel enough - captures beautifully what it means to be an AI-native team. When companies like @rekkiapp spawn more orgs, they’ll be AI-native from day one. Because "AI-native is a mindset shift". sarahtavel.com/p/an-ai-metamo…
Met a truly "AI-native" team building in AI + Services. No PMs. Biz folks vibe-code feature requests in @Replit. Devs pick it up, rebuild it better in @Cursor. North Star? 10x revenue/employee vs incumbents. “The more we build it, the more we feel that is the base case.” 🔥
Classic "A lie can run around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on" for this app....
I am never deleting this app 🤣
I love this reflection on the interview I posted earlier on @rekkiapp's approach to building a platform internally to enable everyone to use AI, vs the tech team being gate keepers of it. What If We Built the Last Mile First? open.substack.com/pub/outsidesho…
Jews are being hunted in America. courage.media/2025/06/02/he-… @CourageMedia___
Looking for a campsite this summer? Hipcamp just added 250,000 campsites to its inventory and released a new mobile app with up-to-date availability info on public and private campgrounds. outsideonline.com/outdoor-advent…
exciting. Interesting too that it used to be when a SaaS vendor added an integration to a smaller third-party app, it was a big deal for those apps. Now, Anthropic et al making a play for the driver's seat. Not only that, but increasingly owning the user.
Today we're announcing Integrations, a new way to connect your apps and tools to Claude. We're also expanding Claude's Research capabilities with an advanced mode that searches the web, your Google Workspace, and now your Integrations too.
The biggest win in consumer AI so far is a single-player text box. @sarahtavel is calling it now: The next win will be multiplayer. The @Benchmark partner joined @danshipper on AI & I to talk product genius founders, social AI, and the $10B idea hiding in custom GPTs.
I have been a @danshipper fan for longer than I can remember, so it was so fun joining him here to talk consumer AI. First five mins I talk through my take on where we are from a consumer AI perspective (still very very early), and then I commit the sin of a former product…
Sarah Tavel (@sarahtavel) thinks it's criminal that @ChatGPTapp isn’t inherently social. There’s no easy way to discover great prompts or share the ones that worked. As a venture partner @Benchmark, Sarah believes that the next wave of consumer AI will be built on this missing…
Kind of interesting to wonder what the new "proof of effort" vectors will be. Obviously in person interactions. Written content that doesn't sound AI generated (though that will be harder to spot over time). Others?
Makes me wonder, if we get flooded with these interactions that are clearly fueled by AI, will we start to take note of the more natural authentic ones?
Did a fireside chat yesterday at an AI conference, and then got a bunch of very polished emails summarizing key points of my chat, telling me how insightful I was, and asking to meet. Clearly: audio intake --> transcript --> AI --> email. Interesting to see these little…
Seeing all the user education prompts from Gemini to try their new AI products when I log into GDrive or Gmail is a reminder of how hard it is to change someone's mental model of a product. I'm so used to using those products a certain way, and Google is reluctant to change…