The Craft of Early Stage Venture | Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark | Ep. 18

six minutes in, you're like, "Okay, there's forty coding companies," and this and that, but there's one person who has this clarity.

Totally.

And you just don't even have to finish. Like, the, the five minutes in the meeting, you're done. But then it's clumsy because you're like, it's a relationship, so you wanna have a two-way, you wanna have a-- You don't wanna just say, "Oh, my gosh, yes, you had me five minutes in." [upbeat music] Peter, really excited to have this conversation with you. Thank you for making time for this.

Thrilled to be here. What a joy!

So I asked you what ideas you've been thinking about lately.

Yeah.

And you shared that the idea of Darwinism, you think, is still underappreciated, and how evolution applies to areas outside of biology. Can you just share a little bit about that idea?

Well, I think that in the last fifty plus years, the biggest intellectual progression that, that, um, maybe we'll look back and see in, in hindsight, has been generaliz- generalizing Darwinism. What does that mean? You know, we're in these complex systems. Um, we're sitting at the center of the Silicon Valley, which is an interesting, complex ecosystem that is undergoing the same mechanisms of Darwinism that I think you can see visible in, in evolution by natural selection, but also in cultural evolution, in technology evolution. And it comes down to these sort of very base mechanics that I think generalize and give us insight into the systems that we work in, be they cities or, or companies or industries. And the, the three mechanics of evolution, um, we all know to be random mutation, but I'd call that planned and unplanned variance. And interestingly, unplanned being more, um, important than I think we all have appreciated, and take that for, like, even the unplanned mutation of ChatGPT.

Mm-hmm.

Secondly, you have selection, which is some force that determines the reproductive or fitness or whatever, is usually just what's the likelihood that that thing is going to be around? In evolution by natural selection, it's a, it's reproduction and survive and reproduce. In an ecosystem, in a company, it's of course, you know, surviving and then creating more profits, more revenue, whatever, more, more customers. Um, and then the third variable in, in evolution is, of course, inheritance. And so there's this, this idea that things are all on a continuum and evolving through these three mechanics. And so w- why is that relevant to the world of the Silicon Valley? You know, I spent a fair amount of time in, in France and, you know, ten years ago, and, and I'm-- I, I really got to think, w- why hasn't the Silicon Valley been created somewhere else? A- and then you ask another question, is it, why is it most likely, in probabilistic thinking, that the next trillion-dollar company will come out of the Silicon Valley? Why is the Silicon Valley the most likely ecosystem to, to identify, adopt, and scale the next disruptive technology? I mean, you look at the Internet, it didn't have to happen here, but it did. Of course, obviously, there's Amazon up in Seattle, but I think if you look at the super majority of market cap, the gravity's here. Um, you know, social and mobile, here. Crypto is interesting because it sort of was not i- of a place-