YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Fenton

lines on the record: 60
first: 2023-11-28
most recent: 2023-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Stayed in touch. We didn't spend a whole lot of time in person. It was during COVID, and it's crazy. But then the artifact of maybe a year later is that Victor had built relationships with these people. That we adore. How are you? I'm on the board of Airtable. You mentioned the team at Brexit, but that's just the beginning. Dylan and Figma and Alex at scale. It's people who are the epicenter of our industry. And here he is, this kid from Brazil who's not a kid. But to me, that is the precondition to be able to be an effective partner in the way we practice the business. And we talked about Matt Kohler before and how you call Matt. He doesn't show up trying to cram his agenda down your throat. It's like he's a humble.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Victor With his brother. To build a different kind of business. That was On just being its own internal And so when he came to the Silicon Valley”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm out, and we're like, but, and he's like, this is it. It's yours. I've done my part. See you later. It's yours. There was no negotiation about the residual economics. There was nothing. And we tried to give him, and he's like, no, no, no, no. You don't understand. This is an ephemeral thing. My struggle in general with firms is that I think it's the ego that wants to attach to something that will outlive them. To me, it's all form of not accepting the total finitude and ephemerality of our existence. And I think benchmark embodies that, which is why I don't think that Yuri said this to me. Over dinner, and he's like, do you have any reason to believe benchlock could be around in 50 years? And I see his pictures of the cosmos behind him. In the grand scheme of things, no. But then, you know, our planet's not going to be around probably in any life-bearing form in a billion years. So there's some point in time where it all goes away.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say them all. Yeah, okay. So you discover these things through the lived experience, but the fragility of, okay, you can have six partners as a constraint. People need to be equal. And I remember I thought a lot about this when I joined the firm. What's the end look like so that partners who are there could feel like were approaching the end, there was a way to stay. Connected. In my experience at the end of other firms, I was at Excel and it was not binary. There wasn't just like boom, they're out. And when people would leave, there would be narratives about them leaving that were not kind. Oh, they became this or they became that. And Bob Kagel did it. Just raised his hand, said,”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Witness to the firm at seven partners, at eight partners, go to a dinner conversation and there's eight people, you're going to have two conversations typically, sometimes three. Something broke. And I can only say the phenomenon of it breaking was hard for me. None of us really stood by and said, okay, we're going to let this be the firm because you could feel the atomization of the effort. So by coming back to a core number, and we got down to as low as four partners, five actually, because Bruce was in that fund, but it was Mitch, Bill, and myself, Matt, and Bruce. And then we had our best period of time. It was Uber, Instagram, Twitter. Snapchat Discord”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question I say yet because I think we're all vulnerable, all of us as humans, to the wandering attention. And I think the firm structure has to come back to these principal truths. One is this is your central life's work and the other central tenet is this contract for lack of a better term, but this idea that we're partners to entrepreneurs will always be bigger than us, who will always have more We want all the limelight on them, all the attention, which makes talking about the firm very awkward because it's sort of not who we are. It's why we don't have a website. It's why we don't have a PR agency embedded inside of our firm. These are things that run against our culture. So the long-term question you're asking, which is how do you sustain this and how does an LP make the next commitment and not know that we're just going to revert to the mean of the industry returns? I don't know. But I can say that the structure, because it has one more important constraint that we discovered when we...”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense of excellence, a sense of doing the best work that you can do and have that be the dominant force in your life, the firm could very quickly become irrelevant and complacent and comfortable. And when I joined the firm, I was the seventh partner, Mitch and Matt, came after me and some of the founders raised their hand and got off the playing field. But our average age when I joined was 43, 44, all relatively tall white men. Today the average age, I think, is 39, 38, 39. The median vacation home for the partners is zero. And so you have a group that I think has deeply committed to being not just there, but in the Bay Area principally, but we've backed a lot of entrepreneurs who come to the Bay Area and some who are outside of the region and don't have the corruption that can occur that leads to complacency yet.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Captured the essence of The benchmark model requires to have a standard that gets maintained over many years a prevention against the egoic rise of an alpha, meaning the one partner that seems like, that feels like they're better, that's in charge, that's the chief, if we were large, we'd need that. And the energies of that person would be largely consumed as they are in the central tribe with protecting the position that person has. Because there's lots of people who want that position. And there's no competition for that inside a benchmark like the Western tribe. And this is in Uganda. And what happens is that you have a freedom of movement, an absence of the glucacorticoids that come from displacement of your bad feelings towards the person who's below you in the hierarchy because there's no hierarchy. Its vulnerability, of course, is that you could establish a norm of complacency. Hey, it's all good. We're all happy here. And so if you don't internalize”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Atomic unit of the quote unquote deal would be the companies we're invest, but that's not how we con Encouraged my partners last night to. Watch chimp Of them will watch it, so I'll give you the shorthand. But in Chim Pampi, which is a great little Netflix series, we both have a love of primatology. Which hopefully we can talk Two The largest tribe I've ever recorded of chimpanzees. Central Have over 100 chimpanzees Remarkably large There's an alpha Least through the lens of the TV show, the Alpha Male Dominated Society. So, Jackson, the Al Retribution, there's all sorts of internacine conflicts.”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't imagine a world where there's a benchmark To 50 years Accepting the finitude Think protects you from investing ego and identity. Of the firm that don't connect with the core work, which is working, partnering with an entrepreneur like Victor and being Shoulder to shoulder with them. Overwhelming energies that Up To Partnership with an entrepreneur. The building of the franchise. Managing the franchise. Is the nature of Relationship So that you”
2023-11-28 · Invest Like the Best · Peter Fenton & Victor Lazarte - Purpose and Partnership - [Invest Like the Best, EP.354] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source