Peter Fenton | |
|---|---|
 Fenton in 2013 | |
| Born | July 1972 (age 52) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Stanford University |
| Occupation | Venture capitalist |
| Employer | General Partner at Benchmark |
| Spouse | Kate Fenton |
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]
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]
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 served on the board of Twitter [10] and backed Twitter when it had only 25 employees. [4] He invested early in Yelp in 2006 and sits on its board. [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 addition to Twitter and Yelp, Fenton also serves on the boards of (in alphabetical order) Cockroach Labs, Digits, [16] Docker (formerly DotCloud), Elastic, Engine Yard, Hortonworks, Lithium Technologies, New Relic, Optimizely, Revinate, Zendesk, and Zuora. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] 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. [24]