Early Stage and Enterprise Investing (with Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

All right, LPs, we have a special treat today. We are fortunate to be joined by Chetan Puttagunta, General Partner at Benchmark.

Chetan is a board member and led investments in Elastic, Sketch, Duffel, and you're going to have to help me with this one.

Chetan Puttagunta (0:15)

Pachyderm.

Ben Gilbert (0:15)

Pachyderm. He previously led investments and held board positions at Acquia, Mulesoft, MongoDB, and several others.

It goes without saying he has a pretty unbelievable track record, especially in the enterprise, and he holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Chetan, welcome to the show.

Chetan Puttagunta (0:33)

Thank you so much for having me. As you both know, I'm a huge fan and I'm excited to talk with you guys.

David Rosenthal (0:40)

Yeah, good to have you on this side of the table.

Chetan Puttagunta (0:42)

Exactly. It's great.

Ben Gilbert (0:44)

So we're going to break this episode into a few sections, the first of which we want to talk about Benchmark. The Acquired Limited Partners are a pretty savvy group, and I'd say most of the audience is aware of the most publicized, high-level things that make Benchmark truly unique. So there's five partners, there's no associates. It's an equal partnership where all the five share equally in the profits. It's a very disciplined firm with a fund size that unlike many of their peers has not grown dramatically over time.

They primarily lead high conviction, series A investments, and always take a board seat. As much ink has been spilled, there are some of the best returns in history from Benchmark. Any venture firm that have come out of Benchmark in multiple eras.

Chetan, my question for you is, what are some of the things that are less talked about, but totally integral to the firm's operations?

Chetan Puttagunta (1:37)

We're pretty open about this, which is that there is a respect to the craft of venture capital, that I think is pretty under talked about in the ecosystem, which is that the overall exercise of partnering with founders to help them build and create something really meaningful, innovative, and enduring that lasts over a long period of time, is an exercise that takes a lot of effort, time, and commitment. And so spending a lot of effort against the craft itself of company building, is one that takes a lot of time, takes a lot of energy, and that commitment to that craft, I think is something that's very easy to talk about, but very, very hard to actually do in practice. It means being very disciplined about how you spend your time. It means very disciplined that you don't spend any time scaling the partnership or the firm.

All your effort is focused on helping scale the companies you're partnering with. That's a totally different mindset than what I think is most prevalent in the ecosystem and what most people talk about.

And so every single function that you could think about that a founder wants to talk to you about is a one-to-one interaction that is about the firm helping the founder. And making that commitment is one that we take very, very seriously.

Ben Gilbert (3:03)

And how about firm operations? So how does it work over the course of a week? When do you see your partners? How do you make decisions together? That sort of thing.

Chetan Puttagunta (3:12)

Look, we get together every Monday. We start at 10 a.m. And then we just have a really open-ended conversation.

And some topics take a really long time and some topics don't take that long. The great thing is having a small group is that when you sit around the table, you can be very transparent with your partners. You're all equal. There's no CEO. There's nobody running the meeting. It's very collaborative. And you can be very open about what's going on in the portfolio. You can be open about the things that you're looking at that are particularly interesting.

You can also be pretty open about things that aren't working well and saying, you know, I really need help here. I'm helping a company recruit a VP of Sales. And that process is taking a really long time. We're having trouble, you know, creating top of the funnel. We're having trouble with the process, et cetera. You know, can we all huddle and figure out how to really help here? What are the things that we can do?

And so that open-ended conversation allows you to go deeper than what I had experienced before, frankly, which is, you know, if you have a lot of people around the table, as a result of that, you have a lot of topics that you need to cover.