Peter Fenton (venture capitalist)

Peter Fenton (born July 1972) is an American venture capitalist based in Silicon Valley. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a venture capital firm. Fenton has been a perennial member on the Forbes Midas List since 2007,^{[1][2][3][4][5]} earning the number 2 spot in 2015.^[6]

Peter Fenton
Fenton in 2013
Born	July 1972 (1972-07) (age 53)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Stanford University
Occupation	Venture capitalist
Employer	General Partner at Benchmark
Spouse	Kate Fenton

Education and early career

Fenton graduated with a BA in philosophy and an MBA from Stanford University, where he was elected Phi Beta Kappa and an Arjay Miller Scholar, and spent seven years as a partner with Accel Partners. He began his career at Bain & Company and was also an early employee at Virage^[7] before joining Benchmark in 2006.^[8][9]

Career

Benchmark

Fenton's investing style has been summarized as, “Wait until right before the company’s rising ‘adoption curve’ meets the declining ‘risk curve.’”^[10] He backed Twitter when it had only 25 employees.^[4] He invested early in Yelp in 2006.^[10]

Noted for his expertise in open source technology, Fenton has invested in JBoss (acquired by Red Hat), SpringSource (acquired by VMware) and Zimbra,^[11] which was later acquired by VMware.^[12] The VMware acquisition occurred on the same day that Facebook acquired FriendFeed, another company in Fenton’s portfolio.^[10] He led Benchmark's investments in Wily Technology (acquired by CA Technologies), Reactivity (acquired by Cisco), Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), Xensource (acquired by Citrix), Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo!),^[5] Minted,^[13] Quip (acquired by Salesforce),^[14] and Polyvore (acquired by Yahoo).^[15]

In December 2014, Fenton "had one of the most unusual days in venture history" when two of his investments, Hortonworks and New Relic, went public the same day.^[6] In February 2014, he was awarded the TechCrunch Crunchie for Venture Capitalist of the Year.^[16]

Board roles

Fenton serves on the boards^[17][18][19] of Airtable,^[20] Clickhouse,^[21] Cockroach Labs,^[22] Digits,^[23] Docker (formerly DotCloud),^[24] and Sorare.^[25]

Fenton has previously served as director for seven IPOs, including Twitter,^[10] Elastic,^[26] Hortonworks,^[27] New Relic,^[27] Zendesk,^[27] Zuora,^[27] and Yelp.^[10]