Michael Eisenberg (00:00)

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What was it like being the first female partner of Benchmark?

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Sarah Tavel (00:02)

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I've been the first at almost every place I've been to. 

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Benchmark is a firm that our aspiration is to partner with the most ambitious founders of our generation, as the first board member. 

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Being a founder is another level. I'm married to one. It's like a relentless job. Relentless. 

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The revenue ramp we see on businesses right now, I've never seen anything like this. You have to have a level of paranoia in this space. You are constantly evolving your strategy so that you are able to escape competition. 

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I always joke that you trade stress for anxiety when you go from operating to...

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Michael Eisenberg (00:41)

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That’s a good one. Become an investor, and trade stress for anxiety. Good one.

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Sarah Tavel (00:44)

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The VCs who are starting right now don't realize how good they've got it.

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Michael Eisenberg (00:52)

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I'm so excited to welcome to Invested Sarah Tavel. Welcome Sarah.

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Sarah Tavel (00:56)

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Good to see you.

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Michael Eisenberg (00:58)

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Good to see you. We had breakfast in San Francisco a few weeks ago. Now we're doing this virtual.

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Sarah Tavel (01:02)

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Yes.

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Michael Eisenberg (01:04)

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Sarah, for those who don't know, is a General Partner at Benchmark, which I guess I could call my alma mater at this point, and joined Benchmark as its first female partner. For those who don't know, Benchmark is an equal partnership firm. Sarah was before that at Greylock and at Bessemer, and between Bessemer and Greylock, did a stint as an operator at Pinterest. So she has been at very successful places since the beginning of her career. I wanted to remind myself, Sarah, how do we know each other?

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Sarah Tavel (01:33)

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You know, I would say, impressively, you reached out to me maybe when I was at Pinterest, or Greylock. I can't remember.

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Michael Eisenberg (01:42)

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I think so.

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Sarah Tavel (01:43)

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And then I remember we went for a walk at the boat basin. So it must've been when I was at Greylock, we went for a walk there.

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Michael Eisenberg (01:51)

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You're younger than I am, that's no secret to anybody. And an up and coming venture capitalist, and it came across the radar, and have been impressed ever since. What we're trying to cover here is A, how values create value, so we'll just start with a really cheesy question, which is, what's your core value?

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Sarah Tavel (02:10)

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You know, I was thinking, like, when I think about my core values, I have to confess they come a lot from my dad. And my dad's, you know, as these values kind of get passed down, or inspired, came down from his uncle, which was this guy, Kivie Kaplan, who–my family, my dad's side of the family, they were kind of Lithuanian Jews that came to America with nothing, of course. And Kivie Kaplan was this guy who took over the family business, which was a tannery. Became very ambitious, smart, hardworking, became successful enough. 

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He was able to be a philanthropist. Ended up becoming president of the NAACP, which was just a pretty incredible thing. So my dad's middle name comes from Kivie. And I think my dad growing up in Dorchester, outside of Boston, was inspired by Kivie's success. And that kind of idea of the resilience, the ambition, that sense of justice that you have, and the gratitude that you also have for your position, or whatever privilege that you have–so I saw that with my dad. And my middle name actually comes from Kivie's wife, Emily.

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And so I think that I feel very strongly those values. The ambition, the hard work, the resilience, but also the sense of justice. I studied Kant in college, and just this idea, you know, the Rawlsian veil of ignorance, just the kind of ethics that you learn from Kant. And then of course being grateful always for what you are, where you are and kind of having some perspective on that. So that's what I think about.

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Michael Eisenberg (04:14)

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We share a bunch of things in common, We both grew up in New York. I also studied Kant in college and half my family is also Lithuanian Jews who moved to the United States in the early 1900s.

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Sarah Tavel (04:25)

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I didn't know that connection. That's great.

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Michael Eisenberg (04:27)

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There you go. I want to dig into the time you spent at Greylock and Bessemer, and now at Benchmark. And I'm sure you've been asked this question a hundred times, but walk me through the differences between the firms and what, if anything, is similar? In my own experience, every venture firm has a culture.

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Sarah Tavel (04:47)

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Well, you know, so I was just unbelievably lucky to start at Bessemer. Because you know, Bessemer is a firm, it's probably the oldest venture capital firm in the United States. I think it's more than a hundred years old, and very East Coast in its origin story, the Carnegie Steel family. 

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And what they did so successfully–you know, we talk about generational transfer in venture capital generally; Bessemer has without question the greatest track record of doing that. Like somehow, they have managed generation of investor after generation of investor to kind of continue to grow. 

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And one of the things that I was so lucky for was that, it was kind of two things, which was like one, there was like an ethos at Bessemer of finding and identifying talent early, and providing a pathway in the venture firm to go from the lowest rung of the ladder, which is where I started at Bessemer–I was an analyst cold calling companies–to becoming one of the general partners. And so Bessemer developed then like kind of, there was almost this belief that there was a little bit up and out, up or out I should say, but that the firm could scale horizontally so long as

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there was enough of that young kind of hungry, ambitious group of people that would work their way up the ladder. And they developed a number of systems in place to make sure that the firm could scale horizontally. So I was very lucky for that ethos. And then of course, as I've talked about many times now at this point, was unbelievably lucky to be hired by one of the partners there, Jeremy Levine, who really mentored me and taught me everything I know. And I would say, actually, a third thing about Bessemer that's very important–it t very much was an investor's way of thinking about investing. 

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On the Bessemer website, bvp.com, they list some of the memos that we've written over the years for different companies. Like one of the things that you'll see is a scenario analysis at the end of the memo. And it's this idea that actually when you make an investment, you know, we all think, ‘this could be big,’ but there's when you invest–and there's a great book by Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets–it's a probabilistic decision at that point in time. Like you don't actually know, there's no set path for the company. The outcomes are probabilistic.

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So Bessemer had very much a way of thinking about this that's almost the way that a growth investor might think about making an investment. What's the downside risk? What's the percentage probability of that downside, all the way to the percentage probability of a very large outcome.  I just think of it like very much an investor mindset, very analytical approach to investing that any investor, I think, is lucky to have as a foundation for how they do this business.

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Michael Eisenberg (08:19)

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And when you contrast that, let's skip Greylock for a second, because I think what you said about the rigor and the downside, Bill Gurley was at Benchmark, famous for saying, “You can only lose one time your money, but there's infinite upside.” My own experience of Benchmark was, it was much more of an upside mentality than a downside mentality. And I'd be curious for your thoughts on contrasting Benchmark and Bessemer.

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Sarah Tavel (08:43)

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Well, no, you're absolutely right. And I'll say that it was part of the reason why I chose, when I was making the decision to leave Pinterest and go back to investing–as much as I loved Bessemer, part of me felt like I really wanted to learn more of that Silicon Valley ethos on what can go really, really right with the company. Sometimes, you know, I think Bessemer has evolved a lot from when I was there, but I always felt like there was a little bit of a, making sure you really understand the downside protection, what's the downside risk. And then there was almost a humbleness on, you felt crazy to say that a company could become a billion-dollar company. Like that wasn't the culture. And so I made a transition to Greylock, which was a firm that very much had that slogan. Even though there was some East Coast legacy to the firm, it very much had that Silicon Valley, what's the big opportunity that you swing for? And then the transition to Benchmark, as you said, and that articulation that Bill always would remind us, which is that, yeah, you can only lose one times your money. And the hardest, most important thing to really think about when you're investing is what could go right? If this really goes right, what are the things that happen, and what does that company look like as a public company even? And then you work your way backwards from there.

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Michael Eisenberg (10:15)

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It's interesting what you said, that Silicon Valley mentality of Benchmark. Benchmark obviously got started in Silicon Valley. Greylock started in Boston. Earlier in my career, I asked Henry McCance, founding partner of Greylock, for like five minutes of his time to give me a piece of advice. One of the things he said to me was, and this is in 1995, he said, “Make sure you can make $100 million on an investment. Any investment you make.” Which to my mind was like, mind blowing. How much are we investing here? A million dollars, a million and half, make $100 million. And now we talk about a billion dollars.

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I wonder if the kind of Boston legacy at Greylock influences its current behavior, and kind of being founded in Silicon Valley, which the Benchmark was versus, for example, New York for Bessemer, and Boston for Greylock actually makes a massive cultural difference.

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Sarah Tavel (11:00)

I think there is. I kind of felt when I was at Greylock, it was a point of transition there. It felt to me like it was still finding itself, like that kind of mixture of the Boston elements still being there. There's also, you could say, there's a different mindset that happens for more infrastructure, B2B-oriented companies versus consumer.

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Like you have to have a very high willingness on the consumer side to lose money, because the consumer opportunities are way harder to–the competition for those consumer companies, anything that's growing with some kind of engaged user base, like there's very much this art that comes into play of analyzing whether the company can become the next Pinterest, the next Discord, the next Instagram, whatever it is.

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And as you know, there's a ton of companies that never go the distance. And by the way, most of those companies have zero resell value. There's no acquisition. Whereas for a SaaS business or a developer-oriented business, there's a much higher probability of some success, and a much lower probability of the type of outcome that really ends up being the billion-dollar return for the firm. And so you always, even within a Silicon Valley firm itself, you do also have those two cultures at play.

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Michael Eisenberg (12:34)

Yeah, of course we're sitting here talking on the day that Wiz got sold for $32 billion.

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Sarah Tavel (12:38)

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Yes, I know. Remarkable.

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Michael Eisenberg (12:41)

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You know, kind of a king of an infrastructure. It's the largest, I didn't know this. It is the largest venture backed M&A ever.

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Sarah Tavel (12:48)

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It's remarkable. No, I didn't know that.

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Michael Eisenberg (12:51)

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I kind of sat here wondering this morning, I'm saying–Gili Rannan wrote the first check there. I think it turns out like $4 million, I think became $1.3 billion. How do you do a scenario analysis? What did it look like on day one?

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Sarah Tavel (13:04)

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Yeah, well, you know, you joke, but like when I look at–again, I really recommend people go to the Bessemer website where they have the memos. And I remember, I always joke about Shopify's memo. Because I remember when Alex Farrar brought Shopify into the group, and I can't remember exactly now what the just-go-nuts, best-case scenario was for Shopify, but I would bet you it's less than $500 million in that Series A memo.

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And it's just one of those things that, you know, we're very lucky that the history of, this kind of software eating the world, like these markets, and I feel this a lot very strongly with what's happening in AI, is that the market opportunity for these companies, it used to be just US, then it became global, and now with AI, is going not just after software spend, but actually human capital spend, that these markets just keep getting bigger. And so one of the biggest mistakes, and this is back to the Bill Gurley way of thinking, is that we can make the fatal error when we're making a decision of underestimating what the total opportunity size is going to be over time.

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Michael Eisenberg (14:24)

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It’s interesting you say that. Today I was thinking about two things. I was thinking about Checkpoint, when they first got started ,and became this monster company. People assessed the firewall market for internetworking at the time was like $10 million. And it just grew. And you know, you made the Uber investment at Benchmark. You know, a professor for NYU said the taxi market was $150 million. You know, no one ever imagined you could replace taxis. What do you think causes underestimation of these market sizes? Where does it come from?

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Sarah Tavel (14:53)

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Well, I think the biggest thing is that, it is just like when you are rooted so much in the way the market works now. So let me give you an example. We're investors. There's two companies that I think are great illustrative of this. One is DeepL. So DeepL is an AI investment that we made a Benchmark before AI was the hot thing. And DeepL is AI translation. And if you were to look at the market of human translators, you know, you would think, ‘that's not a great market.’ Like how big is the global business? Like you could call GDP for translators. It's not very big. But when you make it, when you take away all the friction of hiring a translator, you know, giving them access to–first of all, you had to find them, negotiate the contract, then give them the content that they have to translate, get them to translate it, then figure out some way to ingest that into your own system or use it. There's just so much friction, and there's a lot of costs. Now, if you reduce that all to an API, then all of a sudden, all of the universe of content that you actually want translated blows up. It's just like a huge, huge thing.

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HeyGen is another example in our portfolio where, it's a company that makes AI avatars. And this is another thing where no human, if you have a website and you have a product you want to tell customers about, or some learning and development content to help your customers or your employees, the probability that you're going to think it's worth it for you to hire an actor, to set up a studio, and then do all of like, figure out the script, work on like talking how many times I'm gonna have to do it again. I would block off three days, I get the post editing, all that stuff. It's so much work. And then all of a sudden AI lets you just write a script, take a 30 second video, and then you have it and you can edit it whenever you want? 

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Again, it completely takes a market that's underestimated and blows it open. And I would say that's what happened to Uber. I think the history of these large companies that get created are usually taking something, some market that's so held back by all the friction and cost of that market, and completely makes a 10X better and cheaper that blows it open. And again, not to keep bridging to AI, I don't intend to, but I think that's part of the promise right now.

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Michael Eisenberg (17:42)

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So now we have Moore's Law, is that the power of computer costs doubles every 18 months or whatever is in Jevon's paradox, is, as the costs come down, the market grows in dollar terms. And now we have Tavel’s law, for every step of friction you reduce, the market grows 10X.

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Sarah Tavel (17:50)

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Yes. Exactly. I like it. I'll take it. 

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Michael Eisenberg (18:05)

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There you go. We're going to put that right in the headline to the podcast. Tavel’s Law. For every step of friction you take ou,t a market grows by an order of magnitude.

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Sarah Tavel (18:12)

I will sign my name to that.

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Michael Eisenberg (18:15)

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All right, so I want to dig down on that for a half a second. Because there's at least a notion that part of the friction was in what I would call pixels, which is the UI. How good and how easy is the UI? We spent a ton of time with Scott Belsky. I actually had a Tweet today about embedding designers in every move of an R&D product and that'll make a company. And that's what makes a company. I think it was him. And so one part of this is the UI/UX.

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But another part of it, as you mentioned, is just reducing coordination friction. You know, we started Aleph, á la Benchmark, we said, you know, the more people we have, the more friction we have in the business. So you want to keep the number of people low. What are the different steps of friction in a given product that you think early teams need to focus on in order to specifically to increase market size?

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Sarah Tavel (19:09)

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I always just think of it as time to value. Well, there's actually two things really, when I think about it now, which is that there's, first of all, time to value. But there's a mental mindset that has to change. So let's go back to HeyGen. It’s almost like you're inspiring in someone a realization that they could do something that they didn't otherwise think to do, because all that overhead, like the mental cognitive load, the effort of doing something is just completely removed. And all of a sudden your creativity explodes. 

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I'll give another example. You know, what's happening in the AI image generation–it used to be,  in order for me to have an image or a logo or whatever it is, I would have to hire a designer. But now I can do it myself. I can type a prompt, iterate, get better and better at it, and then have this time to value completely compressed in a way that just once somebody, I feel like it's one of these things where you're putting a boulder down a mountain. 

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You start one thing, and then your creativity and curiosity just explodes, and you realize that there's so many more things that you can do. And I think that great companies are able to really inspire that and package it in a way where someone can immediately activate. They can immediately be successful. And once they're successful in that very initial thing, there is a depth that they can go down that, as they get better and better, they're able to become a better power user of these tools. And so I would imagine, I don't actually know exactly what the story is for DeepL, but usually what happens is that you have a little project that you're working on–it's like a hair on fire problem–you need a painkiller, you go after it, you find it, and it's so easy that it inspires you to kind of expand, expand, and having a product that then supports that expansion is a very powerful place to be.

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Michael Eisenberg (21:38)

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Listening to you, it almost sounded like a gamer's mentality, right? Which is, I kind of get in, I get hooked, and I keep going to levels. And I up-level and up-level, and I get more capabilities and you know, then I become the OG of the game.

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Sarah Tavel (21:51)

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Yeah, it’s definitely something like that.

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Michael Eisenberg (21:53)

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How much did your time at Pinterest, which is what we kind of skipped over, when you left being an investor to be an operator for a bit, influence how you think about these companies, and what works in product and what kind of companies can unlock these markets?

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Sarah Tavel (22:08)

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Yeah, it certainly trained me and trained my way of thinking. Your poor listeners who have read it in my work know that I like to write a lot about frameworks and what it takes to build enduring products, enduring systems, whether that's kind of social products, marketplaces, or anything else. And I think that was one of those things that when you're in it, you just don't realize the dots that are happening in your brain. And then it was when I left, and then I started to write and synthesize that you connect, I connected all those dots. And I do really think that it affects my way. What I always tell founders that I work with, or that I'm spending time with, is that I'm just very oriented in not achieving the short term success, achieving the short term numbers, but what are the decisions we make today that set the company up to be in a position to scale with velocity four quarters from now? 

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And I think that's a little bit–like, when I was at Pinterest, like there were bad quarters, there were good quarters, there were moments when I thought the company was going to implode. There were several moments of that. And you just realize like, how not making the right hire, not making the right hire early enough, focusing on the wrong metrics, not having the team aligned well, not, you know, there's all these things that the pain of those decisions compound. And so it's the same thing with making great decisions today as much as possible, orienting towards, you know-I hate vanity metrics. 

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Like I have a joke that I can see a vanity metric from a mile away, because I experienced it myself at Pinterest when we had MAUs as our metric versus Weekly Active Pinners as our metric, just like, how different the product roadmap is, the company orientation. And so, of course– I think I'm pretty good at not extrapolating too much from my one real job of being at Pinterest, but it definitely influenced how I see the world.

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Michael Eisenberg (24:31)

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How did you know you should be an investor and not an operator?

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Sarah Tavel (24:35)

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Well, that was definitely a part of the reason why I went to Pinterest. That I love the company. You know, I was lucky to invest in the company for the Series A when it was four people. And then I was doing whatever I could to help the company be successful. And I just had this moment of realizing that if I didn’t throw my hat into the ring to join the company, I would always regret it. Cause I was so excited about the founder, so excited about the product and so excited about the culture. And I just, in a way, I always thought I would be leading a team. I was one of those people that was captain of the rugby team or whatever thing I was part of. And so I wanted to experience myself in that context. And then as the company got larger, when I joined, it was just a couple of 20 or so people. And then when I left, as I was beginning to think about leaving, we were 650 people.

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I just started to feel like what I really missed–the company was so big, I was responsible for a bunch of teams on the product side–that I really missed, the true seeking, the partnership, the strategic thinking that happens when you're closely partnered with the founders. And Ben and Evan were walking around stressed all the time. I was walking around stressed all the time, and it just wasn't the same thing. And so I started to think about it, and just realized that that partnership with a founder, especially in the early days, was what I really loved doing, what I really missed doing. And it was a very difficult decision, to be honest. Like, I anguished over the decision to leave Pinterest because I loved it so much, but I realized that what I really wanted to do was that partnership with founders.

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Michael Eisenberg (26:24)

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You miss being the operator when you sit around the board table and you say, “I'm just coaching here. I'm not really making the decisions. I'm asking hard questions, but really they should do this–and maybe I'd like to get back in that seat,” or not really?

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Sarah Tavel (26:36)

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I always joke that you trade stress for anxiety when you go from operating to....

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Michael Eisenberg (26:46)

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That’s a good one. Become an investor, trade stress for anxiety. Good one.

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Sarah Tavel (26:50)

You know what I mean? It's like, when you're operating, you feel the stress of the execution, of, am I going to be able to get this done on time? But you have a lot of, is this the right thing to do? Like, should I be thinking about something else? How do I get all these people aligned? But there's a much higher degree of control, and you feel there's something very concrete about everything you do when you're operating. Like at the end of the week, you feel like, okay, I made progress on this, check. Okay, this one's done, check. You have these concrete goals that you kind of, you aim towards, you make progress towards. And when you invest, I always say it's like going from building a house brick by brick to gardening. You do all this work, you don't know what's gonna work, you’re looking at this barren ground waiting for something to sprout when you're, especially in the beginning, when you're trying to kind of source opportunities. And then of course, you invest, and at the end of the day, you try to provide good counsel to a founder and you could have–I certainly ruminate on like, how do I help this founder see things the way I see it? Like what's the way to influence? But at the end of the day, like, you know, it's the founder who has full accountability for the outcome of the company. And that can be hard sometimes, especially when there are moments where I think, we should go this way and the founder wants to go that way. But ultimately, that is their decision. And it is an adjustment for sure. But I don't miss it. Like, you know, operating is really hard. Being a founder is...is another level. Like I'm married to one. And so I've seen it firsthand and it is a very, very hard job. It's never over. It's a relentless job. Relentless.

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Michael Eisenberg (28:59)

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So you sit around a table like I do. I always say I'm unencumbered by any operating experience in my life. But you sit around a table and my partner, Eden, was an operator and a founder. And you sit around a table that has some people who've been lifelong investors, and some people who've been operators, at least at some point along the journey. Any difference in investment outlook and insight and approach between people who've been an operator at some point in their career and those who have not?

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Sarah Tavel (29:28)

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It's so hard to generalize, you know, look at my partnership. Like I have Peter Fenton, lifelong venture capitalist, Chetan, pretty much lifelong venture capitalist, Eric and Victor, experience on the operating side. I'm kind of the hybrid middle. What I've seen outside of, and I think we all show up differently as board members, and we all certainly have different strengths and weaknesses and lean on different facets of our personalities or experience sets. I'll say like, there are two places where I see, there is a common ground in terms of the failure state on both sides.

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The person who is an operator, the failure state for that person is thinking that they can do it themselves. it biases their investment decision-making process. And then once they've partnered with a founder, it biases how they partner with that founder. They think that they could do it themselves. They get too micromanage-y. That's certainly a big, no-good way.

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On the lifelong investor, I think there's an arrogance that can be very difficult in a lack of perspective, you know, where the feedback isn't grounded. Maybe even too grounded in analysis of a public company, versus what really makes sense for an early stage company that has to be ruthless on prioritization, that has to be ruthless on a lot of the decision making around the people that they hire, and maybe not really understanding that as well.

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Michael Eisenberg (31:32)

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That's interesting. Makes me wonder whether you have to get off public boards as a venture capitalist just to reorient about size for your new investments.

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Sarah Tavel (31:40)

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Well, certainly the time allocation is the big thing for us that we think about, which is that public boards, as you know, take a lot of time, and not the most productive means, often, versus the early stage work, where you recruit one person for a company at the early stages and it has a real big impact on the trajectory of the business. And so, Benchmark is a firm that, our aspiration is to partner with the most ambitious founders of our generation as the first board member. And we have no leverage in our system. There's no platform team. There's no marketing team or PR team. And so every hour that you dedicate to a governance committee in a public company is an hour you can't dedicate to meeting that next founder or supporting the ones that you're already partnered with. And that opportunity cost is very high.

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Michael Eisenberg (32:43)

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And so what would be a reason to stay on a public board?

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Sarah Tavel (32:45)

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I think certainly the relationship with the founder. And there's some things–we're big students of public companies at Benchmark, because we think that by studying the public company, what it looks like at scale, you can kind of have a feedback loop for the decisions you make at the very early stages, and how that ends up compounding to become a public company. So Eric Vishria, my partner, as an example, he's led the first round of Confluent. It was his first investment at Benchmark, and now it's a business doing a billion dollars of revenue. He's still on the board. And I think for him, a lot of it, of course, is just dedication and commitment to Jay and the rest of the team there, but it's also just seeing even more the wisdom that you get that you can then partner with the founder who has a 500-million revenue business, or a 200-million revenue business, or a 50 million, or before that–those points are so difficult and having a little bit more perspective on it from a company of that scale still helps inform the early partnership that we do.

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Michael Eisenberg (33:57)

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Before I move on to AI, where I really want to dig into, what was it like being the first female partner of Benchmark, the E-boys firm?

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Sarah Tavel (34:08)

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I've been the first at almost every place I've been to. When I joined Bessemer, I remember Jeremy telling me, “You know you're gonna be the first woman we hire since, I think it was 10 or 20 years.” The firm was like 25 people, and I was the only woman. That was hard. When I joined, just because I was so young, that was actually a big transition. 

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But then when I was at Pinterest, I was responsible for the most technical product surface area. So what ended up happening is I was almost always the person in the room with a bunch of engineers, almost always all men. When I joined Greylock, I was the first woman GP. When I joined Benchmark, I was the first woman GP. So I think you do it and, you know, it's a shame that that's true. 

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But if anything, I actually felt like Benchmark was just an incredible breath of fresh air. The thing that most hit me when I joined Benchmark was the equal partnership. You don't realize that you exist in a hierarchy your entire career until you join a place like Benchmark where all of a sudden–I remember my first board meeting, my first Monday partnership meeting, I believe Bill brought a company in to present to the group. 

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And here I was, first partnership meeting with Bill Gurley and the rest of the incredible crew of Benchmark. And this guy's a lion of venture capitalists–it was a little bit during some of the Uber stuff, but he was unquestionably one of the best investors of our generation, you know, and not just that. And he came to the group with humility about a company that he wasn't sure what to do. And when I spoke and gave feedback, it was as an equal. And that culture, that organizational ethos, is so strong. People from the outside think it's a compensation thing. It's not. There's something very intrinsic to the group. And I think maybe I'm even more sensitive to that as a woman. And so it felt very special and different.

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Michael Eisenberg (36:30)

‍

Yeah, I too believe that it’s a culture that runs deep. It's not the economics at all. You have to have respect for your partners, and like them, and take their feedback as an equal. Only if you feel comfortable do you solicit their feedback. And if you're new, you get a seat at the table like everybody else. And that provides fresh perspectives that everyone should take into account. It's super powerful. I agree with you.

‍

Okay. I want to look at AI. So you've a ton about AI, and you have some framework. 

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Sarah Tavel (37:04)

‍

What’s AI again? What does that stand for? 

‍

Michael Eisenberg (37:29)

‍

That’s exactly my question! And every investor you talk to today is saying, “Okay, show me your AI deals.” And so what I want to ask you, Sarah, is, what is this? There was AI for a while. Then there was the LLM moment, as I'm fond of saying. And now we just feel like, okay, everything's an AI company. And so for Sarah, what is it?

‍

Sarah Tavel (37:31)

‍

I mean, everything should be an AI company. I mean, look, the way I said to one of my companies is, and I think I may have Tweeted this, is that, I read a blog post about this, where we talk about markets as these like large bodies of water, with a certain size. But I actually think what's more important is that you're riding a current. Like, how fast is the current going? Because if you ride a trend, and this is sometimes people ask the “why now,”--if you ride a trend, then–I experienced this with Chainalysis, which was my first investment at Benchmark. The crypto market was growing so quickly. It was a strong current that you could practically throw a board onto the water and you would move really quickly. When you find a market like that, you can make so many more mistakes, and you still move forward. Then at the same time, I’ve had, and I experienced this with some of my investments that had a headwind that happened after COVID, when COVID hit. And when you have the headwind or the water stagnant, you could say, then you have to build like in a really great boat, and really great team, and paddle really hard to make any progress, right? So you'd much rather have that fast current. 

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So right now there are like two rivers you could take. One river is the river and there might be some current from a trend, but you still have to, with your ingenuity, with creativity, a lot of hard work, you're moving your boat forward. And then there's another current where billions and billions of dollars, and the smartest people that we have are inventing new technology that's like an engine that you've put into the water that's just pushing it forward. And you better take advantage of that engine. That current is there for you. I've never seen anything like it. The revenue ramp we see on businesses right now is faster. 

‍

I started at Bessemer in 2006. I've never seen anything like this. SaaS was incredible. Mobile was incredible. But this just feels very different. And so you either are using this technology in some way, LLMs, to automate work, to provide a value proposition that just, relative–often to the cost of a human doing the work–is so much cheaper that the economic equation for a business to adopt your technology is just so easy. Or you're using it yourself in your team with your engineering productivity, with the rest of your team to find ways to take advantage of the technology.

‍

And by the way, not to ramble on too long here, but I think one of my companies, I was talking to the CTO, I'm writing a blog post about this, and he had such a great point, which was that all of us non-technical people have a learned helplessness, that we don't know how to code, to do SQL queries ourselves. And he had this moment of realization with–this was around, I think GPT 3.5 or so–that, wow, right now, all of a sudden, every single person in my company can do their own SQL queries. And how do you get people out of the learned helplessness of feeling like they have to ask an engineer to do something for any task, or ask an engineer for, or some technical person for the analysis, and actually going to a place where every single person can solve their own problems, even if it means building their own software. We are so far from the full expression and impact of that in 99.9% of companies, that I think, if the technology froze today, there's still so much impact that we're gonna see that it's just incredibly exciting.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (42:02)

‍

So what's an AI company? Something that just leverages LLM to reduce costs and reduce work?

‍

Sarah Tavel (42:08)

‍

That’s the probably the easiest–I mean, look, there's AI companies that support, you know–that's the type of company I focus on. I'll put it that way.

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Michael Eisenberg (42:21)

‍

Why are they growing so quickly? What changed?

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Sarah Tavel (42:25)

‍

Well, there's a few things. One is just the economic value proposition. We haven't seen anything like it, maybe since virtualization. It's such a clear economic–all the software as a service, so much of the, and again, I've focused on like application layer up. That has always been this kind of squishier, “I'm going to improve the productivity of your existing employees.” And how much more? 10%, 20 %? It was always this little squishy kind of thing to really justify. There's a little bit of a leap of courage that the $50,000 SaaS bill that you're going to pay is worth it for the productivity improvement and effectiveness that you get from your team. 

‍

Now with AI, it is not even close how compelling the value proposition is, how clear it is. And so that's number one. 

‍

Number two, I'd say, is that these AI teams work their butts off. I think part of what we see with our portfolio is that everybody knows that right now there are a number of opportunities that are going to create generational companies. And if you have the typical, I wouldn’t say nine to five because what startup is nine to five–but if you are used to a cadence that's kind of more, you know, what I would say is like the pre-AI ethos and culture. And, you know, we went through this whole generation of entitlement where people, you know, don't want to work too hard, don't want to come to the office all these days. But like, you know, 11X, which I'm on the board of, you know, that founder Hassan. He is so intense, McCor, Brendan, the same thing. These guys, it's not an in the office three days a week, this is in the office six days a week type culture where people are driving hard, because they know that there are 10 other companies, if not more, focused on the same opportunity. And the ones that are going to win, of course, the right strategy and then executing harder than anybody else.

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Michael Eisenberg (44:52)

I want to reflect back on the two points, reflect back to you what I think I heard, which is point one is, I have a worker, whatever company I am, and I think the SaaS can make them 10 or 20% more productive. And I go to try to justify what's the value of that 10 or 20% productivity increase. If I have an LLM, what I've actually done is replace the worker, and certainly a lot of the time of the worker. And that's a more tangible cost that any buyer or CFO or software can kind of put their finger on and say, “Hey, this is a no-brainer. I'm actually taking out labor and not just improving the productivity of labor.” Is that the point?

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Sarah Tavel (45:29)

‍

Correct, yes.

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Michael Eisenberg (45:31)

‍

We'll come back to that one in a second, because I want to talk about the pricing of that, which I know you've written about. But the second point, which is, I'm just working harder and faster, which is that cycles are accelerating because AI accelerates all of us. I literally wrote, by the way, and I know nothing, your point about coding in SQL, I don't know any of that. And I don't know anything about, more or less anything, but there was a gathering that I was supposed to speak at today of all of the council heads of the Gaza envelope, about places and they're trying to figure out what to do with this 17 billion shekels investment, about $5 billion there, to do that. And so I said to them like a month and a half ago, you know, someone should write a tender. It's now six weeks later and nobody did. So I took an hour and a half, and bounced a tender between Grok and ChatGPT, the research module, $200. And I think I did the work of five lawyers, three architects and 25 Knesset members.

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And I have three copies of three different potential tenders for it in an hour and a half. You go, whoa! That's pretty stunning. So that's kind of speed, and hard work, as you said. But you gotta ask yourself, if there's 10 other people over here doing it, what kind of moat do I have on this business? Speed’s not enough when everything is accelerating that quickly. Or is it? 

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Sarah Tavel (46:56)

‍

It's absolutely the right question, which is, you know, the thing I think about is like–I meet founders all the time, and they talk about all the things that they had to build in order to create this, you know, user experience that works. And the reality is, is that two years from now, another company is going to be able to come in, and they won't have to have done all that complicated work, because the technology is so much better that the floor keeps rising on any company's ability to build new software. And so you have to have a very strong point of view over time of what's the enduring competitive advantage. We are a firm that is very vulnerable to network effects.

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Michael Eisenberg (47:52)

‍

Vulnerable in the popular sense–meaning….

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Sarah Tavel (47:54)

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Yeah, when we see a network effect that's real, it's difficult to resist. Those are, without question, where the largest outcomes tend to come from. And so you have to have a level of paranoia in this space that you are constantly evolving your strategy so that you are able to escape competition, which is absolutely a question that I think about. At the same time, something that Bill said once when we were discussing this is that, and this is before my era, but even in the web 1.0 world, there were X number of web server companies or whatever it was, and they were all successful outcomes. Not all, but there was a large number of them that were successful outcomes, and maybe web servers.

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Michael Eisenberg (48:53)

‍

And we've forgotten about the ones that failed.

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Sarah Tavel (48:56)

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Yeah, but we have lived in an era now where it's just been one. For any sector, there's kind of the winner. And it may be, and we don't count on this without question, but just to play devil's advocate here, it may be that this is also a time when you can have multiple winners in a given vertical or sector.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (49:21)

‍

So what is actually a moat, then, that would cause somebody to be a lasting company versus, someone else just got access to, know, chatGPT 5.0, 7.0 or Grok 4.0 and they'll run me over? They're also working hard. 

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Sarah Tavel (49:35)

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You know, in 80% of the ways it hasn't changed, right? Like you are–an obsession over the customer. Network effects, some kind of competitive advantage. We're big believers in open source. Some kind of accruing artifact that a user creates that then becomes an unfair advantage for distribution. Some, you know, multiple skews for a product so that when you do have a new customer, you're able to not just have the revenue from one SKU, but for many SKUs that create additional–some is greater than the parts. This is the same, I think about 11X as an example, that then let you have an accruing advantage with your going to market engine. I mean, none of these things are different. The 20% that is different is just that the ability of new competitors to come into the market over time is going to go up and up and up. And so you have, and you have of course, many well-funded competitors today. Look at what you see happening in the coding world–that you have to be on top of your game and very adaptable in order to really emerge here as the winner.

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Michael Eisenberg (51:00)

‍

It feels like there's, and you've talked about some of these companies, translation is less obvious, but certainly in the coding world, that was a very obvious use case for a lot of these companies. And therefore, an obvious that 10 of them would get funded. What's kind of the most wild out there idea or AI idea that you have or run into, or you'd love to see someone start a company?

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Sarah Tavel (51:25)

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Well, I'll tell you what I would love to see someone start a company in. And I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but this is my call for startups, which is–I don't know about you, but I have found that ChatGPT, Claude, you know, GROK, all these products are so incredible. And yet there is an art to using them well. And there are some people who have written prompts, custom instructions, that make the product way more valuable than a normal person. I think that there's something about the command line, the kind of text input of ChatGPT or any of these LLMs that for most people, you and I have incentive and high motivation to figure these out. 

‍

But most people–and there's obviously in education, it's a huge, huge use case–but most people have no idea how valuable and powerful this technology can be for themselves. And OpenAI has, in ChatGPT, they have custom GPTs where let's say you are really, really good and there's many of these people, at writing kind of custom instructions, giving documents to make the GPT work exactly how you want it. But I feel it is like scratching the surface of what's possible. And so what I would love is, and I think it's a massive opportunity, is for someone to create a UGC community with these prompts, with these custom GPTs, with whatever the backend is, it doesn't really matter. But imagine I could follow you for your analysis on, you know, updates on whatever news in Israel, investing in Israeli founders. Like whatever knowledge you've wanted to impart, you could put custom instructions. I think about like these health nuts. 

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There's so many quantified health nuts, and I'll find custom instructions on Reddit for how to analyze blood tests or how to do whatever. Imagine you could follow one of these people in a community and see all the custom instructions, prompts that they've created to do these types of things. And all of a sudden, you go from like, that blank sheet of paper to having someone who has already done the hard work, whom I can follow, who gets like status seeking work, the satisfaction of that status seeking work, from being really good at these prompts. I would love that. I would love that. And I hope someone builds that, because I think ChatCPT, as powerful as it is, is still a power user tool. And I think there's going to be some kind of democratization that happens that could be horizontal. It doesn't have to be someone else packaging it up for a user.

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Michael Eisenberg (54:37)

‍

I've actually seen someone build that for a deceased rabbi.

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Sarah Tavel (54:40)

‍

Wow. I believe that. Yes, I believe so, but so that's a great example. It's too atomized right now. Someone will create, I believe someone will create some kind of community here.

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Michael Eisenberg (54:54)

‍

What should somebody starting like a B2B company not do right now? Right? You've been playing this application layer for a while. You've done this in AI. Like, what are the no-nos?

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Sarah Tavel (55:04)

‍

The two no-nos that come to mind, one is Sam Altman in a podcast, I think it was with Harry Stebbings said, “If your startup assumes that LLMs are gonna stand still right now, we're gonna bulldoze you.” And I think the biggest mistake that I see people make is either, they're building something that isn't a beneficiary of the kind of continued and astounding march forward with the power of these large language models. And so if you're kind of, it's back to my streams. Like if you're building something, and you're not benefiting as the engines that are propelling that current forward are getting stronger and stronger, that's a big mistake.

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And also, if you are building something and then it's like a bridge, because you're assuming that the LLMs or whatever the labs are doing isn't going to progress forward, and you're going to outrun them, that feels like a very treacherous game to play.

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Michael Eisenberg (56:24)

‍

You know, I heard Sam on the same podcast, and it made me wonder if this is like deja vu again from the late 90s when I got started, which was, don't do anything that's anywhere near where Microsoft is, because they're going to bulldoze you. That turned out to be bad advice early in my venture career. “Hey, don't invest your–Microsoft's going there.” And then something happened, you know, it was antitrust, Microsoft lost his footing, there was Steve Ballmer, I don't know. And Microsoft became easy to compete against. If you invested in the “don't compete against Microsoft,” or you actually were ready when they kind of lost their footing. And I keep wondering whether in that motion and moment again with some of these large language models. Any thoughts on that?

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Sarah Tavel (57:06)

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I mean, let's take Copilot versus Cursor, versus Windsor, versus Devon, Factory, all these companies. I think Microsoft is executing, and we're seeing it. Their pricing power–they can do things that aren't fair, that are advantaged by their balance sheet and their distribution.

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We're investors in Cursor. We think the team is unbelievable, and that they are really as good as they get. And yet they have very fierce competition. And when we made the investment, we asked ourselves, could Microsoft compete? And, you know, we underestimated them. And I wouldn't have changed the decision, because it really was a decision on the team and the clarity of their thinking on what a developer needs and what the opportunity is. But it is intense competition like we've never seen before. And it's the same thing with all the foundation model companies, of course. What I think about, again, I focus on the application layer and then consumer, is we are, this level of competition is the biggest gift to all of us that we could ask for. Think about how cheap it is for us to access this technology. It is unreal. I was coding up an application over the weekend, and I remember I was reading–

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Michael Eisenberg (58:52)

‍

I love how you said that so nonchalantly. “I was just coding up an application over the weekend.”

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Sarah Tavel (58:56)

‍

Well, I should say I was texting up an application over the weekend. That could be one of my other lines. I was just, you know, I remember there was a moment where I had to buy more credits. And I was just like, “Oh my God, you know, another $40 or whatever to buy more credits.” And then I was just like, my God. Like this used to be hiring an engineer, thousands of dollars, so much time, and all of a sudden I could work on something for a few hours over the weekend to build an application I really want, and it cost me $150 to build it. We are in such a time of abundance, and it is because, in large part because the billions and billions of dollars going into these companies, all trying to race ahead of the other models, get to super intelligence first.

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You think about the cost of training, the cost of inference, we're all getting products that should be way more expensive at these crazy low price points, and it's amazing.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:00:09)

‍

It should be said though, as a guy who lived through the internet boom and bust and boom again, that sometimes a lot of this is subsidized by venture capital dollars over time.

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Sarah Tavel (1:00:18)

‍

There's no question that's what's happening. No, it is known. It is known. I mean, if you like, of course there's the variable inference costs and that for many of the labs is gross margin profitable, but then there's the advertising, the costs of the model training. And that's where the numbers don't look as pretty for these firms, but should over time be okay. At least that's the belief.

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Michael Eisenberg (1:00:43)

It should be said that at least the revenues are growing, you know, super fast in these places, which was less true in the internet area. Early internet. That was more of like a circulation of dollars for guys and people in the router companies and whatnot. I want to ask you two questions. The first is, if there's a public company out there that you think is in this current that is non-obvious, like not the mag seven or the Microsoft–

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Sarah Tavel (1:01:11)

‍

Shopify. 

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Michael Eisenberg (1:01:12)

‍

Shopify. Why is Shopify in the AI current? What is it behind it?

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Sarah Tavel (1:01:16)

‍

You know, I Tweeted, I was like, if I could have a portfolio of public companies where the CEO has gone AI native, that would be a very, very good portfolio to own. And when I asked myself which CEOs have gone AI native, Toby is AI native. I mean, the guy has his own GPU cluster at his home.

‍

And I just think when you have a founder, a CEO who understands the impact that this technology can have at an organizational level and then is able to effectively push that, I call it the “Oh fuck moment,” down into the rest of the organization, I think you just are able to achieve outcomes for the company that no one can anticipate. And so that would be my pick.

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Michael Eisenberg (1:02:15)

‍

I love that answer, by the way. What is the most under explored business model using AI right now? You've written a lot about the business model. 

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Sarah Tavel (1:02:23)

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Advertising.

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Michael Eisenberg:

‍

Oooh, now talk to me! 

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Sarah Tavel: 

‍

Look, and I can't take the credit for this discussion. It's a conversation we have at our partnership. I think Peter was the one who kind of first raised it. But if you think about consumer companies and the ones just generally having a business model that is aligned with capturing the most surplus from the customers that use you the most–So gaming is famous for this. Like gaming knows games. Developers know how to have a monetization model that benefits from the whales, that is able to extract the most rent from the whales. And so you're going to have a large percentage of your users who are barely profitable when you look at them from a user acquisition perspective. But then the whales make up for that. It's hard to know who the whales are going to be.

‍

 So you have marketing spend that acquires them all. And then you really cultivate and monetize the whales. Google does this very well, right? Their monetization model natively understands that not every query is the same value economically. Therefore, not every user has the same value. And so there's going to be some sponsored results that are monetized way better than other sponsored results. 

‍

And then you look at ChatGPT. The monetization model feels like such a missed opportunity for the company. Because you have a monetization model that treats coders and education people and people using it for recipes the same way. But if you could have a monetization model that when someone's using you to think about travel, or make an engineering decision, or whatever it is that you're able to monetize those people differently, and then therefore able to remove the kind of subscription barrier and just have a free product for everyone, I think you can build a very large business, one that we underestimate right now.

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Michael Eisenberg (1:04:42)

‍

Love that answer. I have a play in the space. I hope it actually works out. 

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Sarah Tavel (1:04:46)

‍

Well now you're tempting me. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

‍

We'll see if it does. A couple of quick questions for you. You built a brand as a VC. What is your brand in your view?

‍

Sarah Tavel: 

‍

I think people know me for my writing. And what I just hear is kind of, thoughtful, or that they recognize that I'm very focused on building enduring value as opposed to getting lost in the short-term hype.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:05:21)

‍

How important is it to build a brand as a VC today? Beyond the firm brand, called Benchmark in this case.

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:05:26)

‍

I think it's very important. Ultimately because a founder is partnering with a person. So much of finding companies is often the founder reading something or having heard something you said in a podcast and wanting to make sure that they talk to you. I think there's a very positive selection bias with the founders that are most ambitious and most want to build the best company, being very intentional in their fundraising processes to not just rely on the inbound VCs reaching out to them, but actually being proactive in finding the VCs that they want to speak to. And that is a very positive selection bias. And I think having a brand helps you get to that one, that group.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:06:23)

‍

What’s challenging or different about Gen 3 of the firm? We talked before about succession at the venture firms.

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:06:30)

‍

The VCs who are starting right now don't realize how lucky, how good they've got it. It is just an incredible time to be starting in this business, an incredible time. I think the last, since 2018 has been a very strange roller coaster where the macro has been very strange, the dynamics in the industry have been very strange.

‍

And so that kind of manifests a little bit. But, overall, I think right now we have just an incredible group that has different strengths. You know, we have Peter, Eric, me, Chetan and Victor. And I think it's a great great balance across the team. So I think it's going to be fun.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:07:26)

‍

Philippe Botteri told me to ask you, why did you play rugby in university?

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:07:30)

‍

You want to know the real answer? I had been a competitive swimmer when I was in high school, and then I got to college and I wanted to do a new sport, but I didn't want to do a sport where–I grew up in Manhattan, like my soccer team, we practiced in a gym. We didn't have an outdoor, when we had games, it was on a water recycling facility that stunk.

‍

So I didn't want to play soccer. I wanted to do a new sport where I thought everybody was getting started for the first time. And so I went to a rugby meetup and an ultimate frisbee meetup, and the rugby party was so much more fun–that I joined rugby. Any rugby team will tell you that their drinking team has a rugby problem. And there's a lot of songs and singing, and it's just a very fun, unique culture.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:08:33)

‍

You've called yourself before a San Francisco transplant because you, like me, grew up in Manhattan. Well, what does that even mean?

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:08:39)

‍

I think I'm just always going to be a New Yorker. You know, I try…

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:08:43)

‍

I've lived here 31 years, in Israel. Every time I go back to Manhattan, it still feels like home, which is pretty remarkable.

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:08:48)

‍

Yes. Like I am without question the fastest walker on the sidewalk. I drive like a New York City taxi driver. I curse like, you know, a foul mouthed New Yorker. I just, I can't help it. I am a New Yorker, and just get out of my way when you're on the sidewalk because I will run you over.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:09:10)

‍

Will you move back?

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:09:12)

‍

Probably eventually.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:09:14)

‍

What's changed for you since October 7th?

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:09:17)

‍

Wow, you really like to end on a bang. You know, the truth is, my family, we've always had a history, like my mom's side, Sephardic Jews, that Spanish Inquisition, they were nomadic, were in Turkey, spoke Ladino, came to Argentina. My dad's family, you know, pogroms, leaving Lithuania. Like I always had a very strong connection to being Jewish, but I kind of took it for granted and I took Israel for granted. 

‍

And when October 7th happened and then October 8th, and just seeing the reaction, I realized I couldn't take either for granted anymore, and that it was, you know, I think I heard someone say that they were “born again Zionist,” but that really resonates. And so, you know, I just realized for my kids even, that I was doing a really bad job of connecting them to what it means to be Jewish and to our family history, which was so important to me growing up. And I think there's so many incredible parts about Judaism that I'm so proud of. And yet again, I took it for granted. Like I remember being at Harvard and people talked about antisemitism. I didn't feel any of it. I was just oblivious.

‍

Not to say there was any there. I don't know. I was just completely oblivious. And now you see everything a lot more clearly. And so it's been actually a wonderful silver lining for me, if you could say that, which was doubling down on that and making sure that my kids really, really are connected to it as well.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:11:07)

‍

Okay, you forced me to ask you another question, which is, are there any unique challenges to being a mother and a venture capitalist at the same time?

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:11:14)

‍

I am in a marriage where we really are 50-50 on the parents. Actually, I might be 40-60 to be honest. She might say 30-70, I don't know. So yeah, for me, as for any parent, the opportunity cost of your time goes up when you have kids. And it used to be that the weekends were this incredible time for me to read, and to think, and to write. And now I do that time between like 4.30 and 6 a.m. And so you have to change your schedule. And the opportunity costs, again, it's so much more expensive to say yes to a dinner, or to say yes to a conference, or to say yes to a trip. But that's the same for all parents. And so I encourage everybody to do it.

‍

Michael Eisenberg (1:12:16)

‍

I was hoping you would say that. Last question: who's someone in our space that you'd like to say something nice or kind about, who you think deserves more attention?

‍

Sarah Tavel (1:12:26)

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I don't say nice things about anybody. You know, when I joined Bessemer, as I mentioned to you, I was the first woman that they'd hired in a long time. And then, I like to say I broke the seal, because after I joined, the next two analysts they hired were women. Then over the last, gosh, 15 years since I left Bessemer, they have just continued to hire, and mentor, and promote incredible women at Bessemer. And in an industry, just because you asked about being a mom, I guess it primed my brain to think about this–in an industry where it has been hard for a long time for women to get in, you know, there's all types of subconscious biases that make it harder for a woman to do this job than a man, just like homophily by itself. 

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There's like so many subconscious things where it's easier to refer a deal to somebody who looks like you. It's easier to think about, if you're gonna recruit somebody, you're the head of engineering, your brain naturally sorts to candidates that are people like you. It's a natural subconscious bias we all have. And when an industry is dominated by a particular type of person, then it is structurally more difficult for other people to make progress there. And I think it's made incredible progress. And I think there's just incredible women investors now. Like I could give you a list of 10 women who have just crushed it. Actually, you know who I'll shout out? Laela Sturdy at CapitalG. She is now running the show there. She's just absolutely crushed it.

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No one knows about her. She is so under the radar. And you look at her portfolio, and she is one of the greats. And no one knows about her. And so I think there's a long list, but Bessemer, I give a shout out for having been an early pioneer here, on grooming this kind of new generation of female partners.

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Michael Eisenberg (1:14:53)

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Sarah, thank you so much. That was a fantastic answer. 

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Sarah Tavel:

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Great to see you. 

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Michael Eisenberg: 

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Thanks for coming on. And if you are enjoying the podcast, please rate us five stars on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you listen to podcasts and subscribe to the YouTube channel. You'll enjoy this, and other conversations here. Thanks, Sarah.

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Sarah Tavel (1:14:56)

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Thank you, good to see you.

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