Sarah Smith

Sarah Smith is a partner at Bain Capital Ventures where she primarily invests in early- to mid-stage companies across a range of sectors including consumer, SaaS, and marketplaces. Sarah has been deeply involved in high-growth startups as an executive, investor, and student at institutions including Quora, Facebook, Graph Ventures, and Stanford. Before joining BCV in 2018, 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, 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 held various 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 holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and lives in Palo Alto with her family.