20VC: Benchmark's Peter Fenton on The Single Question That Defines The Art of Early Stage Venture, Marketing Timing Risk, Why The Oversupply of Capital Is Good & His Biggest Lessons from 12 Years On The New Relic Board

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Welcome back to The Twenty Minute VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I want to dive straight into the episode's day, because naturally it would be improper for me to have favorite guests have on the show, but this is one of my favorite guests for sure. His career and thinking inspired so much of my journey, and it's just such a pleasure to welcome back Peter Fenton to the hot seat today. Now, Peter is a general partner at Benchmark, one of the great venture firms of the last three decades, with a portfolio including the likes of Snap, Twitter, eBay, New Relic, Stitchfix and many more. As for Peter, he's led deals, sat on the board, or sits on the board of Elastic, New Relic, Digits, Docker, Optimizely, Yelp and Zuora, to name a few. Prior to Benchmark, Peter was a general partner at Accel Partners in San Francisco, and as a result of his incredible track, Peter's been on the Forbes Miners list more times than I've done podcast episodes. This was such a joy to do. But before we move into the show today, I have to say I just love using AngelList's Fund Admin Platform to manage my investments. The team and platform at AngelList takes care of all my back office needs so that I can focus on working with great founders. Leading fund managers have made over 10,000 investments into 6,000 startups via AngelList, all online and all in one place. And with recently announced Rolling Funds, you can easily find and invest in these top fund managers on angellist.com forward slash rolling. And speaking of amazing products there with AngelList, last month I had Jeff Seidbert and Wayne Chang on the show from Digits. Simply put, they're two of the best founders I've met and they're creating the most intuitive financial software you've ever used, automatically analyzing your company's spend and visualizing it for you as it happens. Hone in on recent activities, trends, anomalies, or any question you have in just a few clicks. And unlike every other financial software, their integration is not weeks, it is just a few clicks. I have to say the product is just beautiful and you have to check it out and so you can do that on digits.com. And finally, I've always been a big history man and so I want to talk about Cooley, the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley's formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50 plus years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments, and handle the myriad of issues that arise throughout a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC backed companies going public, head over to cooley.com, check out cooleygo.com also. But enough from me, so now I'm thrilled to hand over to Peter Fenton, General Partner and Ad Benchmark.

**Peter Fenton** (2:24)
You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:27)
Peter, this is such a joy to do. I've wanted to see this ever since our first episode, so thank you so much for joining me once again.

**Peter Fenton** (2:32)
It's my pleasure to be here. You do great work, so we're all flattered when we get the invitation.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:37)
That is very, very kind of you, and I very much appreciate that. But I want to start today really with a focus on the origin story as we unpack the series A that you left for New Relic way back in 2008 now. So let's start with the story and some history. And I heard that it all originated on a golf course, so I'm going to let you take it from there. What was the story, Peter, from that golf course moment?

**Peter Fenton** (2:57)
Yeah, it is embarrassing in a way because I don't dislike golf, but I'm no good at it, and it's exceedingly unlikely you'll ever find me on a golf course. So the fact that that isn't the origin of this company is sort of hilarious to me and a little bit embarrassing. So Lou, I had known since 98, 99 when I was at Stanford, I'd met him and was fortunate enough to back him at Wiley, where he was the CEO of a generation prior to New Relic, application performance management product. Wiley had sold to Computer Associates and Lou was sufficiently enjoying his time off, which led him to invite me to play golf with him. And so we were both not very good. Now Lou's better than me and doesn't stop the fact that about halfway through the golf round, we start to drink. Maybe two or three beers in could have been more. He starts to share with me his ideas about a new company. And one of the things that Lou had earned after Wiley was economic freedom. So he didn't need to have investors, he didn't need to have a board.