Sarah Cannon, Partner at Index Ventures, on lessons from her time working with Obama, Capital G & Slack

Sarah Cannon is a Partner at Index Ventures focused on investing in consumer businesses. She has had an unconventional path to venture, starting her early career by working in Ghana and as a Policy Advisor on the National Economic Council at the White House during the Obama Administration. 

In this episode, Sarah sat down with Hadley Harris, Founding Partner at Eniac Ventures, to share how she went from Ghana, the White House to CapitalG, what led her to join Index in 2018 and why she got into an argument over open source the first time meeting a partner.

Sarah speaks to her time at Capital G, how she supported the India launch and the breadth of her work across Oscar, Multi-Plan with Hellman and Friedman, Care.com and Looker. She also discusses what she is seeing across the future of work industry and the bottom-up approach to productivity tools and its effect on the unbundling of Microsoft. 

Sarah also digs into the disaggregation of work into the gig economy from her perspective as an economist, the opportunities she sees across vertical marketplaces and her interest in new tools to serve this new class.

Sarah shares what it is like to work with Danny Rimer, his thesis on authenticity, her time as a Board Observer at Slack and valuable lessons she’s learned from Stewart Butterfield about building a disruptive product and rethinking customer service.

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