What makes Peter Fenton a Global Shaker?
Peter Fenton is a general partner at Benchmark. He’s been a fixture on Forbes’ Midas List since 2007, landing at the #2 spot in 2019 behind Neil Shen of Sequoia Capital China. He was named VC of the Year in 2014 at the TechCrunch Crunchies’ awards
“I think, to be a great investor, you need to do both [focus on consumer as well as enterprise business],” he told Outlook Business. “I might be alone in thinking so, because my partners would say it is better to focus and specialize. I believe we can benefit from cross-pollination in all aspects of our lives. You can help your enterprise company learn from the growth dynamics in consumer and apply incrementalism to problems, rather than having a wide-eyed approach towards growth. You can be more appealing as an investor, if you have a broader array of experience and sectors to draw from. You need to understand what is going on, and that is what I aspire to do.”
Peter invested in Twitter when it had only 25 employees and served as a board member of the company for several years. He’s currently a board member at Yelp, New Relic, Elastic, Zuora, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco Opera, Docker, and more. His investment style was described in Venture Beat as searching for the moment “right before the company’s rising ‘adoption curve’ meets the declining ‘risk curve.'”
“The challenge is to identify the acceleration/adoption phase before it’s obvious,” he said in 2009, as reported by Venture Beat.
Before joining Benchmark in 2006, he was a managing partner at fellow top VC firm Accel Partners and general manager of video at Autonomy Virage.
Peter received both his bachelor’s in philosophy and MBA at Stanford University and was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa honor society.
Tags: Benchmark, Investment and Funding, VCLast updated: May 13, 2019
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