Liu: Peter Fenton excels by combining systems thinking with human empathy

“Yeah, what makes Peter special as a investor, and more importantly, as a thought partner to, I think, the CEOs, the portfolio companies that he gets involved with as a helpful partner, is he's basically, on one hand, very much a systems thinker, right? There are a lot of VCs, I think, who are more what I would call domain specialists. They kind of come in and they just build up the playbook or really pattern match against, like, one type And Peter actually has like this eclectic diversity of different types of companies that he's worked with, right? Both directly, as well as through bench work, as well as through just having personal relationships as a friend, and maybe sometimes like friend visor to companies he didn't invest in. But, you know, he's experienced like open source SaaS platform companies, consumer companies, obviously, you know, companies like Uber and Snap with really interesting network effects or marketplace effects, also like true platforms. And so on the one hand, like he really takes the systematic way of thinking Thinking about those companies, and as I was saying earlier, I think that's really important versus just saying, like, oh, well, this company did this, and so you should do it as well, to instead say, this worked for this company, but it was part of that broader system, and let's try to understand that system. And then on the second side, I think he's also, for somebody who thinks so much about systems, he's incredibly appreciative of the fact that like, you know, we're all humans, right? And companies are run by humans and are worked on by humans. And there's such an important, soft element to success, human motivation, human belief. In the possibility of success, right? Both for founders as well as all operators out there. And so I think the fact that he kind of like marries this very structured systematic way of thinking, but then also this kind of soft appreciation for like the humanities, the liberal arts, the very people, the soft and fuzzy”

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