You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought to you weekly

by the Stanford Technology Ventures program. You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures

online at eCORner.standford.edu.

I get to introduce Peter Fenton, who's the one on the left.

Peter was a student here in the 1990s and as an undergraduate as a philosophy major, which really makes me happy to report.

A humanities major, he goes on to get an MBA here at Stanford

and then enters the venture capital industry. First seven years of being in that industry

was at a firm called Axel, partners, where you may have heard of from Facebook and folks like that.

But then about seven years, six, seven years ago, he became a partner at Benchmark Capital

and has been involved in a tremendous number of hits and successes there, including

Yelp and Open Table and others.

And something I know you've heard about Twitter.

So without further ado, let me introduce you to Peter.

Peter. Thank you.

So Tom threw me a curveball and said a couple weeks ago, hey, we've got a change of plans. Can you fill in for the gentleman from O-Power that couldn't

make it today? And I thought the last thing you guys would want to hear from is another

venture capitalist. And so I tried to put myself into your shoes and say, you know,

who would I want to have come talk? And about, oh, a millisecond later, Jess Lee popped into my mind. Jess had just

won the Fortune one of the 40 under 40. I can't remember what number she was, but something

approached in the 30s, maybe the 20s. And there are really two reasons. The first is that Jess,

like myself, sat in your seat. In her case, it was eight years ago in 2004.

She took this class.

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