Team

Sarah Smith

  • Partner
  • Bay Area

Sarah joined Bain Capital Ventures in 2018 and primarily invests in early to mid-stage companies across a range of sectors including consumer, SaaS and marketplaces. She is based in Palo Alto and spent the last decade in leadership roles at Facebook and Quora.

Sarah has been deeply involved in high-growth startups as an executive, investor and student at institutions including Quora, Facebook, Graph Ventures and Stanford.

Most recently, Sarah was vice president of advertising sales and operations at Quora. She led the launch of monetization, onboarding more than 500 advertisers to the self-service ads platform. From 2012 to 2016, Sarah was vice president of human resources, recruiting, and operations scaling the company from 40 to 200 employees across all hiring from university to executive search. She built the HR and operations teams responsible for company culture, compensation, benefits, equity refreshers, performance reviews, HRIS/ATS implementation, people development, policy enforcement and content moderation.

From 2008 to 2012, Sarah was in various regional and global leadership roles at Facebook. As director of online operations, she launched teams including the Austin office, mid-market account management, and the SMB growth team. Her team grew revenue to $1 billion ARR while reducing churn and increasing customer satisfaction.

Sarah enjoys helping founders grow and scale. She is passionate about inclusion and encourages the development of underrepresented groups in leadership and entrepreneurship. Sarah has her Master of Business Administration from Stanford and undergraduate degree in music education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She loves playing board games and collecting wine with her husband Kyle.

Experience

  • University of Wisconsin-Madison 5 years
  • Sylvan Learning Centers 4 years
  • Stanford Graduate School of Business 2 years
  • Swish Marketing 1 year
  • Facebook 4 years
  • Quora 5 years
  • Bain Capital Ventures 4 years

Portfolio Companies

Personal Interests

  • Champagne with her husband Kyle

  • Competitive strategy board game player

  • Wisconsin native = Packers fan!

  • Collect and occasionally make pottery

  • Finding incredible Airbnb's for vacation

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