Peter Fenton (Partner, Benchmark) on VC and Founder Mindsets, Inflation, and the Current Market State

**Logan Bartlett** (0:04)
Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show. I am your host, Logan Bartlett, and what you're gonna hear on this episode is a conversation I had with Peter Fenton. Now, this episode originally ran in November of 22, but due to some scheduling errors during the summer slowdown, we figured we would run a Best Of, which this is one of my favorite episodes we've ever recorded.
Now, Peter has appeared on the Midas list for 16 straight years, and also been involved in a number of the iconic companies over the course of the last two decades, including Twitter, Yelp, Airtable, Uber, among a number of others. Throughout his career in investing, Peter has always stayed humble, which comes across in this episode. He shares his insights on what makes amazing investors as well as entrepreneurs, and we go down the path of what led him to the success he's had to date. Now, if you like this conversation with Peter and you want to hear more, just like it with some of the best investors and entrepreneurs in the world, please do like, share, subscribe, so that we can reach other people.
Now, here's Peter. Peter, thanks for doing this.

**Peter Fenton** (1:04)
It's a pleasure to be here.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:05)
I'm excited. We're in the, how new is this office?

**Peter Fenton** (1:08)
That's by three years old.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:09)
Okay, you guys have been here a while. Last time I was here, although the Wi-Fi auto connected, but the last time I was here, you were in the old San Francisco market.

**Peter Fenton** (1:16)
At the Warfield.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:17)
Yes. Yeah.

**Peter Fenton** (1:18)
Controversial Warfield.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:20)
Yeah, it seems like a upgrade. Well, I think we're going to play the hits of a bunch of different things that I've learned about you and ask a bunch of questions about the market and some of this. So hopefully, you're comfortable taking this in a lot of different directions.

**Peter Fenton** (1:36)
Yeah, it'll be fun.

**Logan Bartlett** (1:37)
Cool.
Well, the first one, I think is an interesting.
So I meet people today and they ask, they'll be 15 years old, right? And they'll be like, I want to be a venture capitalist. And I'm like, where are they making these people that even know what DC is at 15 years old? Maybe it's not 15, maybe it's 19 And they all seem to go to Wharton or Stanford. But you actually were one of the people that maybe knew early on. I don't know if it was actually 15, but you knew what VC was. It took me to 24 before I actually knew what it was as an industry. But you grew up in the Bay Area, and your dad ultimately became a venture capitalist, right? So what was your exposure growing up to VCs? And why did you want to be one?

**Peter Fenton** (2:17)
Yeah, it's a story that I reflected on because at some point, if you're lucky, I think, in a life, you find something that has a purpose that is insatiable.
It's not extrinsic. It's not, if I achieve this, if only, then I'm going to have that. And that happened to me in my early 20s for venture, but the seeds were planted through my teenage years, which is interesting and does make me, you know, a bit self-conscious, I guess, about luck. Of course, everything is luck. There's no, there's good and bad luck, but it was luck to have been in this soup of the Silicon Valley as a kid. You know, Nolan Bushnell came to my seventh grade public school class and said, we have a problem of too many ball bearings. And for something, it was a long story about how creativity and entrepreneurship and how that led to these insights. And I thought, well, what he's doing is just fun. And it felt at the time, Silicon Valley, I think, was still, and I hope it still is, avowedly anti-authoritarian. And, you know, we had the countercultural elements still percolating in the 70s. And this idea that these companies were coming up to take down the gray lumbering giants of places like IBM, that was in the blood. And, you know, my dad had been an entrepreneur, he'd come out and, you know, founded a company.
I don't know that it was particularly successful, but it was that sense of like, we're not going to go join the establishment, we're going to blow it up and do it our own way.
And, you know, he did talk about venture capitalists. My first memories of venture capitalists were when I was in my teenage years, and he mostly loathed them.