Peter Fenton (born July 1972) is an American

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...

based in

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

. He is a general partner at

Benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevati ...

, a venture capital firm. Fenton has steadily worked his way up the ''

Forbes ''Forbes'' () is an American business magazine owned by Integrated Whale Media Investments and the Forbes family. Published eight times a year, it features articles on finance, industry, investing, and marketing topics. ''Forbes'' also re ...

Midas List The ''Forbes'' Midas list is the annual ranking by ''Forbes'' magazine of the most influential and best-performing venture capital investors. Described by Kara Swisher as the "Oscars for venture capitalists in tech," the Midas List uses parameter ...

of the 100 top technology investors, starting at no. 94 in 2007, then rising to no. 62 in 2008 and no. 50 in 2009. Fenton was ranked no. 4 when ''Forbes'' resumed publishing its Midas List in 2011 and was described as the "most productive venture capitalist on our list". In 2012, Fenton was ranked no. 5 on the ''Forbes'' Midas List and was no. 2 in 2015. He has been a perennial member on the Midas List since 2007.

Education and early career

Fenton graduated with a BA in philosophy and an MBA from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, where he was elected

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...

and an

Arjay Miller Arjay Miller (March 4, 1916 – November 3, 2017) was one of the ten Whiz Kids hired by Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company. He served as president of Ford Motor Company between 1963 and 1968, until he was abruptly fired by Henry Ford II ...

Scholar, and spent seven years as a partner with

Accel Partners Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional ...

. He began his career at

Bain & Company Bain & Company is an American management consulting company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The firm provides advice to public, private, and non-profit organizations. One of the Big Three management consultancies, Bain & Company was fou ...

and was also an early employee at Virage before joining Benchmark in 2006.

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.’” He served on the board of

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

and backed Twitter when it had only 25 employees. He invested early in

Yelp Yelp Inc. is an American company that develops the Yelp.com website and the Yelp mobile app, which publish crowd-sourced reviews about businesses. It also operates Yelp Guest Manager, a table reservation service. It is headquartered in San Fra ...

in 2006 and sits on its board. Noted for his expertise in open source technology, Fenton has invested in

JBoss WildFly, formerly known as JBoss AS, or simply JBoss, is an application server written by JBoss, now developed by Red Hat. WildFly is written in Java and implements the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) specification. It runs on mul ...

(acquired by

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

SpringSource Spring (previously known as SpringSource) was the company created by the founders of the Spring Framework (a programming model for enterprise Java applications) to support and develop Spring and related projects. Originally incorporated as Inte ...

(acquired by

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

) and

Zimbra Zimbra Collaboration, formerly known as the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) before 2019, is a collaborative software suite that includes an email server and a web client. Zimbra was initially developed by LiquidSys, which changed their name ...

, which was later acquired by VMware. The VMware acquisition occurred on the same day that

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

acquired

FriendFeed FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom feed. It was created in 2007 by ...

, another company in Fenton’s portfolio. He led Benchmark's investments in

Wily Technology CA Wily Technology, formerly Wily Technology, Inc., is a software company based in California. Founded in 1998, it was purchased by CA, Inc. in March 2006, and CA Wily Technology is now a division of CA's Service Assurance business unit. Histor ...

(acquired by

CA Technologies CA Technologies, formerly known as CA, Inc. and Computer Associates International, Inc., is an American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. It is primarily known for its business-to-business (B2B) software with a product po ...

), Reactivity (acquired by

Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...

), Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), Xensource (acquired by

Citrix Citrix Systems, Inc. is an American multinational cloud computing and virtualization technology company that provides server, application and desktop virtualization, networking, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud computing technologies. C ...

), Zimbra (acquired by

Yahoo! Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...

Minted Minted is an online marketplace of premium design goods created by independent artists and designers. The company sources art and design from a community of more than 16,000 independent artists from around the world. Minted offers artists two bus ...

, Quip (acquired by

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

), and

Polyvore Polyvore was a community-powered social commerce website headquartered in Mountain View, California, Mountain View, California. The company's virtual mood board function allowed community members to add products into a shared product index, and u ...

(acquired by Yahoo). In addition to Twitter and Yelp, Fenton also serves on the boards of (in alphabetical order)

Cockroach Cockroaches (or roaches) are a paraphyletic group of insects belonging to Blattodea, containing all members of the group except termites. About 30 cockroach species out of 4,600 are associated with human habitats. Some species are well-known as ...

Labs, Digits, Docker (formerly DotCloud),

Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is dual-l ...

Engine Yard Engine Yard is a San Francisco, California based, privately held platform as a service company focused on Ruby on Rails, PHP and Node.js deployment and management. History Engine Yard, founded in 2006, offers a cloud application management plat ...

Hortonworks Hortonworks was a data software company based in Santa Clara, California that developed and supported open-source software (primarily around Apache Hadoop) designed to manage big data and associated processing. Hortonworks software was used to b ...

Lithium Technologies Khoros, formerly Spredfast + Lithium, is a global customer engagement software company that provides online community management, social media marketing, social media analytics, digital care, and content management software and services to ent ...

New Relic New Relic is a San Francisco, California San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the ...

Optimizely Optimizely is an American company that provides digital experience platform software as a service. Optimizely provides A/B testing and multivariate testing in marketing, multivariate testing tools, Personalization#Web pages, website personalization ...

, Revinate,

Zendesk Zendesk is an American company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides software-as-a-service products related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications. The company was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007. ...

, and

Zuora Zuora is an American enterprise software company headquartered in Redwood City, California that creates and provides software for businesses to launch and manage their subscription-based services. Zuora's applications are designed to automate re ...

. In December 2014, Fenton "had one of the most unusual days in venture history" when two of his investments, Hortonworks and

, went public the same day. In February 2014, he was awarded the TechCrunch Crunchie for Venture Capitalist of the Year.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fenton, Peter American computer businesspeople Living people American financial businesspeople Stanford University alumni American venture capitalists 1972 births Directors of Twitter, Inc. Midas List