Episode

Uncapped #41 | The Benchmark Partnership

Podcast
Uncapped with Jack Altman
Published
Feb 4, 2026
Duration seconds
3390
Processing state
not_requested
Canonical source
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/PDP3049674390.mp3
Audio
https://traffic.megaphone.fm/PDP3049674390.mp3
JSON
/v1/public/podcasts/uncapped-with-jack-altman-7251833/episodes/uncapped-41-the-benchmark-partnership
Markdown
/podcast/uncapped-with-jack-altman-7251833/uncapped-41-the-benchmark-partnership.md

Actions

  • POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/uncapped-with-jack-altman-7251833/episodes/uncapped-41-the-benchmark-partnership/transcription-requests
    Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
  • GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/uncapped-with-jack-altman-7251833/uncapped-41-the-benchmark-partnership.md
    Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

Summary

In this episode, the Benchmark partnership explains why they’ve resisted scale, eliminated residual economics, and built an equal partnership designed to endure. We talk about what that choice enables – for founders, for decision-making, and for practicing venture as a craft rather than a factory. Peter Fenton is the longest-serving full-time general partner at Benchmark. Over the last two decades, Peter led investments in Twitter, Yelp, Elastic, Docker, Zuora, and many others. More recent investments include Sierra, Ollama, ClickHouse, and Airtable. Peter has been on the Forbes Midas list 18 years in a row. Eric Vishria is a general partner at Benchmark. Eric led investments in Confluent and Amplitude, both of which IPO’ed in 2021. He is also an investor and board member at Cerebras Systems, Benchling, Contentful, among others. Most recent investments include Fireworks, Quilter, and Greptile. Before joining Benchmark, Eric was the co-founder and CEO of a social web browser company called Rockmelt, which was sold to Yahoo. Chetan Puttagunta is a general partner at Benchmark. Eric is an investor and actively involved with Elastic (which IPO’ed in 2018), Legora, Manus, LangChain, Airbyte, Cursor, Reducto, Numeral, and the list of great companies goes on. Noteworthy exits include MuleSoft, which was acquired for $6.5B by Salesforce and Acquia, which was acquired for $1B in 2019. Prior to Benchmark, Chetan was a general partner at NEA for seven years. Ev Randle is the newest general partner at Benchmark. Prior to joining the firm, Ev invested in Anthropic, Chainguard, Databricks, Flock Safety, and SpaceX, among others as a partner at Kleiner Perkins. Through his experience at Founders Fund and with personal capital, Ev also has invested in Rippling, Ramp, Wave, Faire, Figm…