Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark, discusses the trajectory and massive scale of Amazon Web Services (AWS) at Data Driven NYC in 2016.
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…”
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.”
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”
Insight
OpenCore monetization fails on developer tools
“Doing open core on a developer tool is not going to get you very far.”
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”
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?”