Sarah Smith

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 deeply involved in high growth start-ups as an executive, investor, and student at institutions including Quora, Facebook, Graph Ventures, and Stanford.

Most recently, Sarah was VP 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 VP of HR, 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.

She loves playing board games and collecting wine with her husband Kyle.