No agenda, no rush, no leaving San Francisco: Benchmark’s partners on investing in a frenzied market
Benchmark may have grown its funds and swapped out some partners, but onstage the five who are left sounded like friends who just happen to be running one of the Valley’s most storied firms
Key points
- Benchmark's five partners said at TechCrunch Disrupt they still make only two or three new bets per partner each year.
- The firm raised $2 billion across two funds this summer, only the second time in 31 years it has raised a larger vehicle.
- Partner Ev Randall said the AI ecosystem is healthy and blamed volatility on an 'X echo chamber' of exaggerated data.
Benchmark's five general partners appeared together on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt this week and described a firm that is growing its funds but not its deal pace. The partners said they still make just two or three new investments per year per partner, and their Monday partner meetings still have no agenda.
This summer Benchmark announced $2 billion across two funds, only the second time in its 31-year history that it has moved away from raising a much smaller vehicle. Peter Fenton said the core fund had been held at $500 million for 20 years and has now grown to match inflation, which he called a correction of a likely tactical error.
Why the firm added a growth fund
Fenton said the new growth fund expands Benchmark's mandate beyond early-stage investing. He said opportunities had come to the firm that could have returned between 10 and 1,000x, but its early-stage focus held it back.
Asked how many bets the $1.25 billion growth fund might make, Fenton said he would like a concentrated portfolio of four to six, maybe seven or eight investments, with one or two generating most of the returns.
There’s nothing inherently unhealthy about the AI ecosystem.
— Ev Randall
New partners on joining
Ev Randall, who joined late last year after working at Founders Fund, Bond and Kleiner Perkins, said she was drawn to small partnerships over large hierarchical firms. Jack Altman, who joined in February, said he wanted to be part of a group that cares about founders and is concentrated rather than focused on money and status.
On the AI market, Randall said predicting macro trends precisely is a fool's errand. She said the first AI bankruptcy, involving Character AI, was being misread as an industry chill, and blamed volatility on what she called a "hyperactive X echo chamber."
