Peter Fenton, Benchmark

One of its kind

There’s a story of Silicon Valley that has largely unfolded over the last 25 years. It’s the story of a tiny region on the West Coast of the US that has consistently made the world a better place to live. And there’s one person who was instrumental in making this world possible, serving as the right hand to the founders of some of the biggest outcomes. That person is Peter Fenton.

While you might learn about most venture capitalists from the podcasts they appear on or the books they write, that’s not how you learn about Fenton. You learn about him by reading books about Uber and Twitter, by hearing other founders speak about him, and by listening to venture capitalists who say he’s the hardest-working VC in Silicon Valley. He hosted us three years ago when we had just started Icons, and yesterday we were lucky to meet him again. The first time is always special, and I thought I’d be prepared to grasp the depth of his personality this time around—after all, we’ve hosted over 200 speakers in the past three years. But I was wrong. He’s one of a kind, a person you can never listen to enough, and with each response, you find yourself wondering, “How is it possible to think this deeply about such things?” As one of the participants put it, it was “the equivalent of the lowest level of programming language in human understanding.”

There are 8 billion people in the world, and only one Fenton.