Greylock Partners hires its first female investment partner, Pinterest product manager Sarah Tavel
Greylock Just Hired Its First Female Investment Partner — The product manager who oversaw Pinterest's search tool, Sarah Tavel, is headed to Greylock.
Context & Ripple Effects
Greylock Partners is reaching directly into its consumer portfolio for talent: Sarah Tavel, the product manager who oversaw Pinterest's search tool, joins as the firm's first female investment partner. The hire lands weeks after Pinterest completed its $553M Series G, with Wellington and Goldman Sachs added to the cap table.
It also fits a broader pattern of 'firsts' around Pinterest's senior ranks — the company later named Francoise Brougher its first COO, while its own hiring record showed the limits of stated targets when it hired women for just 22% of its engineering roles in 2016, short of a 30% goal.
First-order effects
- Greylock gains a partner with hands-on consumer product and search experience from inside a portfolio company, while Pinterest loses the PM who ran its search tool.
Second-order effects
- Tavel's seat gives Greylock a direct sourcing lens on consumer product talent coming out of Pinterest, which was simultaneously building out its executive bench with outside hires like Brougher.
Third-order effects
- If 'first female partner' announcements keep tracking the goal-setting-and-shortfall dynamic Pinterest itself documented, venture firms will face the same measured-diversity scrutiny that portfolio companies already apply to their own engineering hiring.
The trend: Venture firms are recruiting operating talent straight out of portfolio companies, and partnership-diversity milestones are arriving as explicit public firsts rather than quiet staffing changes.