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Peter Fenton

General Partner, Benchmark · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investor@peterfenton ↗benchmark.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Peter Fenton is an early-stage venture capitalist and the longest-serving active partner at Benchmark. He has led investments in technology and open-source companies including Twitter, Yelp, Docker, Elastic, New Relic, Zuora, and Sierra.

25statements → 9claims → 5claims resolved → 60%fully supported → 3.88/5average certainty → 2.6/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 6said about them ↓

3 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 5 assertions · 5 opinions · 9 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 5 are resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Peter argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
AWS is nearly certain to reach $100B in annual revenue
“And I think it's a near certainty Amazon's gonna do a hundred billion in revenue in AWS.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 24:47 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Amazon Web Services holds about 90% market share
“You have a company that's gonna, ah, it's on its path to be, and it is, about a 90% market share player.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 25:03 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

How they sound: speaking style how? →

269 words/min while actually speaking · 26.8 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Peter Fenton: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 8,964 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Peter Fenton said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
'Product market fit' is an overused tautology
“Product market fit. Which, I mean, if I hear that again, that's where, big data, whatever big data went to, or Synergy I mean, it's such a tautology, you know, it's like, yeah, ok, people want what you've built a product that people want to buy, it's so insigh…”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 7:08 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Safe and calm entrepreneurs rarely profoundly change the world
“Because if you're in that meeting, and the entrepreneur makes you feel safe and calm, and, ah, you know, kind of, ah, very much in the linear mindset, ah, they're not likely to, you know, profoundly change the world.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 5:54 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Investors should follow top founders rather than set sector theses
“We had to actually follow, in many ways, follow the instincts of the best people of their generation, because they're chasing the things that have the highest rate of change, that are at the intersection of a collision of different sectors and segments”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 13:01 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
OpenCore monetization fails on developer tools
“Doing open core on a developer tool is not going to get you very far.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 20:57 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Premature open source monetization invites competition
“If you try and monetize and constrain adoption, you're just gonna open the door for another company to come in and compete with you”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 21:58 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Opinion
Competing with Amazon is the biggest challenge for open source
“The issue, the single biggest issue facing open source business models is not I don't think hosted versus packaged like Red Hat. It's how do you deal with Amazon?”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 24:36 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Prediction Held up
AWS is nearly certain to reach $100B in annual revenue
“And I think it's a near certainty Amazon's gonna do a hundred billion in revenue in AWS.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 24:47 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Contradicted
Amazon Web Services holds about 90% market share
“You have a company that's gonna, ah, it's on its path to be, and it is, about a 90% market share player.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 25:03 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Machine learning is a 'game of kings' favoring big tech
“And machine learning is the game of kings.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 29:03 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Opinion
Tech startups are experiencing a massive burn rate bubble
“We have a burn rate bubble, meaning companies have lost, they've numbed themselves to the fact that you have to eventually replace the capital that you're burning with operating income”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 32:59 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Startup valuation correction will be a long tail, not a crash
“This is not like, 99 to 2001, where it went like that. I think it's much more of a long tail”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 36:29 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Prediction Held up
Wins from top unicorns will overwhelm broader ecosystem losses
“The overwhelming positives of a few of the companies in this unicorn ecosystem will overwhelm the losses”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 36:42 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Open source licenses cannot protect startups from Amazon's cloud competition
“Unless there's something proprietary in the open source, which by definition it's sort of already out there and open I think it's very difficult for a license to protect you from Amazon coming up with good enough in a competing service.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 47:49 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Opinion
Solomon Hykes' initial DotCloud idea was catastrophically bad
“And turns out, by the way, his idea was catastrophically bad. Dot cloud, which we don't talk about.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 5:25 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Disclosure
Benchmark partners are paid equally with no associates or principals
“Each of us are equal partners. We pay each other exactly the same. There's no associates, there's no principals,”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 9:10 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Great entrepreneurs prefer dealing directly with senior VC partners
“The premise of Benchmark was that the great entrepreneurs don't want to talk to that junior associate. They want to talk to the decision-making senior partner.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 9:27 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Former Facebook CTO Jeff Rothschild called CockroachDB 'the one'
“Jeff had helped me turn down pretty much every database company that ever existed, and he said, this is the one. And, you know, if we were at Facebook, we could do it all over again. This is the product we wish we could use”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 15:33 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Disclosure
Benchmark prefers backing founders on their second or third venture
“I love backing company two and three, and some, and number one, you get lucky sometimes, but, ah, I really love, ah, number two, if the first one was, you know, done with integrity”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 14:55 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
60% of traditional enterprise software investment goes to sales
“When we make an investment, it's still somewhat the case that if we put a, for every dollar we put in, something like 60% of that goes into selling the technology.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 18:07 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Achieving ubiquity is step one for open source software success
“The step one in any open source success story is ubiquity.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 23:52 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Historically 15% of IT companies suffer catastrophic value loss yearly
“You know, in any given year, about 15% of the companies in the IT world have a catastrophic loss of value, which is 70% of your value evaporates, and it never comes back. So for the last five years, that's been five percent.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 33:41 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Opinion
Bitcoin has the strongest network effect among blockchain applications
“What has the strongest form network effect around it? It's Bitcoin.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 40:21 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Insight
Stronger startups become stronger when capital is scarce
“Because I actually think the stronger companies are gonna get stronger when capital is scarce.”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 42:19 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
The tech ecosystem is entering a cycle with less promotional BS
“I think we're moving into a cycle where it's gonna be refreshingly you know, I don't wanna say the promoters are gone, it's sort of the nature of industry, but it'll be a lot, there'll be a lot less of that kind of BS, and I think it'll make the whole ecosyste…”
Peter Fenton Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 48:56 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

Show 1statements(1 left)

The other half of the tape: Peter Fenton's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 3 episodes on the MAD Podcast. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Aaron Katz 3Ajay Kulkarni 1

Statements about Peter Fenton, by other people (2)

Opinion
Katz names Mike Volpe and Peter Fenton top open-source VCs
“And I believe, and there's a lot of very smart people that are deploying capital in this category, specifically open source and infrastructure, but my belief, and I'm biased obviously, is that they are the top two or, you know, two of the top five, let's say.”
Aaron Katz Nov 16, 2021 ▶ 9:50 Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Fenton invested in Twitter when it had only 25 employees
“You invested when the company was only 25 people strong.”
Matt Turck Mar 18, 2016 ▶ 0:17 A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark)

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011212018201920202021202220232024episodesmentions
0112018201920202021202220232024episodes it came up in
0010.5212018201920202021202220232024episodesmentions per episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark) Mar 18, 2016 38m
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