Ended

Talking to Customers with Benchmark and Cambly

Sameer co-founded Cambly, a one-on-one video chat app that connects English learners to native English tutors, in 2012. In less than a decade, Cambly has become one of the largest English schools in the world and operates in 150 countries. The company has raised more than $60 million in venture funding to pursue its mission to bring high quality English education to every English learner in the world. Cambly was listed as one of the top YC companies in 2022. Prior to founding Cambly, Sameer worked at Google on Search Quality and led the team that built Google’s A/B testing framework used to evaluate the quality of ranking changes to its core search algorithm. Sameer has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University and a master’s degree in computer science from Stanford University. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife and two children.

Sarah Tavel is a General Partner at Benchmark where she invests in network effect businesses, with a focus on marketplaces and social, as well as Web3. Sarah led Benchmark's investments and currently sits on the boards of Chainalysis, Hipcamp, REKKI, Supergreat, Cambly, and Poparazzi, as well as a couple unannounced companies. She is also a founding member of All Raise, the nonprofit organization working to accelerate the success of women in the venture capital and VC-backed startup ecosystem. Prior to Benchmark, Sarah was a Partner at Greylock Partners, where she led their investment in Sonder ($SOND) and Gixo (acquired by Openfit), and represented Greylock on the board of both companies. Sarah joined Pinterest in 2012 after co-leading the Series A investment while at Bessemer Venture Partners. There she became the first product manager and was the product lead for search, recommendations, computer vision, and pin quality at Pinterest. While at Pinterest, she also led three acquisitions as she helped the company scale through a period of hyper-growth. Sarah graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Philosophy.