Everyone’s Using AI Alone—The Next Hit Product Makes It Social | Sarah Tavel, Benchmark and ex-Pinterest

April 30, 2025 • 49 min

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🤖 AI Summary

Overview

Sarah Tavel, a partner at Benchmark and former Pinterest product manager, explores the evolution of consumer technology and its implications for AI. She argues that the next wave of consumer AI will be driven by product-focused founders who prioritize social and multiplayer experiences, rather than purely technical innovation. The conversation spans the maturation of AI, the potential for social prompting, and how VCs can adapt their decision-making processes using AI tools.

Notable Quotes

- Someone's going to create a UGC-type community where people who are really, really good make it so much easier for the rest of us to take advantage of this technology. – Sarah Tavel, on the future of social AI.

- You're going to be the average of the five AIs you spend the most time with. – Dan Shipper, on how personalized AI companions could shape our lives.

- The best companies are donut companies—you go to the board meeting, eat a donut, and leave because they don’t really need you. – Sarah Tavel, on identifying exceptional founders.

🧠 The Shift from Technical Founders to Product Geniuses

- Early-stage technologies like Google and OpenAI were led by deeply technical founders who built groundbreaking infrastructure.

- As technology matures, the competitive edge shifts to product-focused founders who excel at creating intuitive, engaging user experiences.

- Examples include Pinterest, Snap, and Instagram, where non-technical CEOs leveraged product genius to scale.

🌐 The Case for Social AI

- Current AI tools like ChatGPT are powerful but lack a social layer, making it difficult to share and discover effective prompts.

- Sarah envisions a platform where users can follow expert prompt creators, fostering a community-driven approach to AI usage.

- Multiplayer and network-effect-driven AI products could unlock new opportunities, similar to how social networks incentivize user participation through status and visibility.

📈 Spotting Exceptional Founders and Real Network Effects

- Sarah looks for founders who treat building a company as a calling, not just a career move. She values obsession, resilience, and a willingness to learn.

- True network effects show early signs of traction in a niche market segment, with clear accelerants driving growth. Many startups claim network effects but lack evidence of a functioning flywheel.

🤖 How LLMs Could Transform Venture Capital

- Sarah logs her investment decisions, including reasoning and outcomes, to create a dataset of her judgment.

- She believes LLMs could help VCs pressure-test decisions, identify biases, and refine their investment strategies over time.

- However, she cautions that while AI can probe thinking, human intuition and adaptability remain critical in a rapidly changing landscape.

💵 Beyond AI: Stablecoins and Global Financial Infrastructure

- Sarah highlights the potential of stablecoins like Tether and USDC to democratize access to the US dollar in high-inflation countries.

- Stablecoins reduce friction in international transactions, enabling faster, cheaper, and more inclusive financial systems.

- She sees parallels between stablecoins and network-effect businesses, where liquidity and adoption reinforce each other.

AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.

📋 Episode Description

Sarah Tavel thinks it's criminal that ChatGPT isn’t inherently social.

There’s no easy way to discover great prompts or share the ones that worked. As a venture partner at Benchmark, Sarah believes that the next wave of consumer AI will be built on this missing social layer—by product-driven founders who understand people, not just models.

Sarah has seen this shift before. As one of Pinterest’s first product managers, she saw the company grow from a niche consumer tool to a beloved global community. On this episode of Every's podcast AI & I, we talk about how she’s applying the lessons she learned to AI—and what it takes to build a breakout consumer AI app today.

We get into:

Why product geniuses win as new tech matures. In the early days of a new technology, companies win by wrangling raw innovation into something usable. But as the infrastructure matures, Sarah says the edge shifts to product thinkers—founders who turn new capabilities into delightful user experiences.
The future of prompting is social. When Sarah had to dig through Reddit to find a prompt to help her interpret her blood test results, she saw a gap: The best prompt creators are invisible. Sarah bets that a social AI product that makes them discoverable and followable would gain traction.
Sarah’s method to spot exceptional founders. Sarah backs founders for whom building a company feels like a calling—or even an affliction. These are people who have fallen in love with the process and are obsessed with learning how to grow alongside their companies.
How to tell if your startup really has network effects. Founders raising money love to say that their business has “network effects.” Sarah has learned to look for early signs they’re real—like traction in a small, white-hot segment of the market. If there’s no evidence the flywheel is already starting to spin, it’s probably not a network effect.
How LLMs change the way the best VCs invest. Sarah thinks the future of venture will be shaped by how well VCs can turn the decisions they make into training data. After every pitch, she logs what she liked, what she didn’t, the deal terms, and her reasoning. Over time, she’s building a dataset of her own judgment—one an LLM could help her use to pressure-test decisions and avoid past mistakes.

This is a must-listen for if you’re building a consumer AI product and want to see ahead of the curve.

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