Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 3/5

Safe and calm entrepreneurs rarely profoundly change the world

Peter Fenton · A Fireside Chat with Benchmark General Partner Peter Fenton (Data Driven NYC / FirstMark) · Mar 18, 2016 · at 5:54

Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark, shares character traits he and Paul Graham look for in founders.

0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Peter Fenton

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
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)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.