The product manager who oversaw Pinterest’s search tool, Sarah Tavel, is headed to Greylock. It’s the startup investment firm known for big wins with companies like Pandora, Airbnb, Instagram and Facebook.
Greylock Just Hired Its First Female Investment Partner
At Tavel’s last investing job, she discovered Pinterest.
Greylock
Tavel will be the firm’s first female investment partner (the firm has Elisa Schreiber as its marketing partner on the operations side). She’ll be focusing on early-stage consumer investments in communications, media and commerce along with enterprise investments in software companies.
In the blog post announcing the news Greylock partners David Sze and James Slavet said, “We are incredibly happy to have a woman joining the investing team; it will bring greater diversity and valuable perspective to our partnership and portfolio companies.” At the same time, they were quick to emphasize that Tavel wasn’t hired because of her gender — she was hired because of her talent. “Sarah Tavel saw things in Pinterest that we missed.”
The hire comes at a time when diversity is at the forefront of conversations about tech. This spring, the Ellen Pao harassment lawsuit against startup investing firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers brought renewed attention to unequal gender ranks in venture capital. At the time, investors, reporters and other people in tech told Re/code they thought the trial would keep venture firms from hiring women because they would be afraid of getting sued.
This isn’t Tavel’s first time in the startup investing world. She spent six years at Bessemer Venture Partners, where she helped bring Pinterest into the portfolio. After working with the company so closely, she decided to leave Bessemer and join the Pinterest team as one of the first 40 employees.
During her three year tenure, she was in charge of growing Pinterest internationally, helping close the company’s Series C, leading the search and discovery team, acquiring three companies and more.
Her departure comes soon after the exit of partnerships head Joanne Bradford, who left last week after being asked to take a smaller position at the company.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
