Eight years after becoming a member of Benchmark because the agency’s first girl normal companion, Sarah Tavel introduced on X that she is transitioning to a extra restricted function on the storied enterprise agency.
In her new place as a enterprise companion, Tavel will proceed to make investments and serve on current firm boards, however she may have extra time to discover “AI instruments on the edge” and mirror on the route of AI, she wrote.
Tavel joined Benchmark in 2017 after spending one and a half years as a companion at Greylock and three years as a product supervisor at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Tavel was an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, the place she helped supply Pinterest and GitHub.
Since its founding in 1995, Benchmark has intentionally maintained a small workforce of six or fewer normal companions. Unlike most VC companies, the place senior companions sometimes obtain a larger share of administration charges and income, Benchmark operates as an equal partnership, with all normal companions dividing charges and returns equally.
During her tenure as Benchmark’s normal companion, Tavel invested within the campsite market Hipcamp, the cryptocurrency intelligence startup Chainalysis, and the sweetness platform Supergreat, which was acquired by Whatnot in 2023. Tavel additionally backed the photo-sharing app Paparazzi, which shut down two years in the past, and the AI gross sales platform 11X, about which TechCrunch wrote not too long ago.
