Peter Fenton

GP @benchmark. Director: @ExaAILabs @mercor_ai @SierraPlatform @ollama @ClickHouseDB @Sorare @sema4ai @airtable @digits @TigerDatabase @LabsCockroach @Docker

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

@SierraPlatform @airtable Pure joy to see this success (I suspect I would’ve been crucified if it fell short 😉)

[Aaron Katz @ceo_clickhouse]

Next month marks 10 years of @ClickHouseDB as an open source project and we are thrilled to welcome our community at our annual user conference today in San Francisco.

To everyone who contributed code, filed an issue, or ran ClickHouse in production from the beginning: thank you.

Today, we’re proud to share that ClickHouse has over 4,000 customers, passed $250M in ARR, and is trusted by teams like @AnthropicAI, @OpenAI, @cursor_ai, @Lovable, @vercel and many more building the future of AI.

In this post, I cover the milestone, what we’re shipping, and what comes next:
https://t.co/stjs4J3ByA

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

Exa is what I trust for all my agents. We use it at YC. We use it in all my OpenClaw and Hermes Agents. There is no other option that is as fast, as reliable, and as complete.

When your agents need to search the web, accept no substitutes.

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

@ExaAILabs Best signal in venture: when serious developers rave about a tool other developers built. @ollama told us about @ExaAILabs 18 months ago — they could see the obsession with DX and knew it would be the API of choice for the agentic world

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

A new @bgurley blog post!

I have been thinking about how sophisticated executives are using open source in super creative ways. Started writing this three years ago. Excited to finish it up and publish it! And with the new @p3institute brand.

https://t.co/W84vODq1ME

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

I’m so fucking proud of this team.

They took an extraordinarily difficult technical swing with wafer-scale and connected on the first try.

Then they spent years grinding through packaging, cooling, compilers, frameworks, early customers, and everything else required to turn a technical breakthrough into a real company — swinging and missing and learning and trying again.

Most importantly, they stayed clear-eyed about what they had (a technical marvel) and what they didn’t (enough advantage in training), saw the opportunity emerging in inference, and adapted.

That kind of persistence — not to be confused with stubbornness — is incredibly hard to describe, but absolutely essential in the unstable substrate of AI.

The requirements of AI today will not be the requirements of AI tomorrow. But this team will keep figuring it out.

And I’m here for it.

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

Today marks the 4th board I’ve served on for 10+ years — Confluent, Amplitude, Cerebras, and Contentful.

4 of my first 5.

Venture is a loooong, non-linear game.

[Sierra @SierraPlatform]

Series E - raising $950 million from new and existing investors, led by @Tiger_Global and @GVteam, at a valuation of over $15 billion. Sierra now has more than $1 billion to invest in becoming the global standard for companies transforming their customer experiences with AI.
https://t.co/JjPvXhtopD

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Just went to visit Legora. Most impressive startup I've been to visit in years. They're going to surpass Harvey in 2027. After that their only potential rivals will be the model companies. And if ever there was a territory you could defend against the model companies, law is it.

[Eric Vishria @ericvishria]

So it turns out I just ran this experiment yesterday, providing the exact same prompt and presentation notes to Gamma, Genspark, HyperAgent, Manus, and Claude for PowerPoint. All on paid plans.

HyperAgent was by far the best. Claude for PowerPoint did a nice job with the text but was horrific on imagery. Genspark and Gamma were fine but the presentations that were spun out were too literal to my text and maybe optimized for visual pow versus great “story”

I also did subsequent iterations with each of them and found Hyper Agent was the easiest and best to iterate on, but Genspark and Gamma allowed fine-tuned presentation changing whereas with Hyper Agent I had it spit out a PowerPoint and made my last tunes in PowerPoint

For what it's worth I also tried Gemini, where I could not figure out how to get it to generate a whole presentation instead of slide-by-slide, and ChatGPT where I could not figure out how to get it to generate a full presentation

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

I've only felt this a handful of times in a first meeting — TheFacebook (2005), Twitter (2007), Instagram (2010), SnapChat (2011). Meeting @paulscherer hit me the same way -- wow, then inevitability

[paul @paulscherer]

I’m honored to share that @eigenhq has raised $15M from @Benchmark to build a mutual friend that’ll help us belong and grow, together.

[ollama @ollama]

Starting tomorrow at 11am PT, Ollama subscriptions usage will refresh to cover increased usage of third-party tools like OpenClaw.

Our goal is to help you transition smoothly.

All tools will work with Ollama's cloud just like before.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

Thrilled to announce our investment in Starcloud. From our initial investment to a $1.1B valuation, this extraordinary engineering team continues to make remarkable breakthroughs in power, cooling, and manufacturing. Their technical rigor and ambition is truly exceptional!

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

Q4 '22 divided the world into pre- and post-ChatGPT. Q4 '25 did the same for agentic AI. The best entrepreneurs sensed the gravity of this moment — @btaylor and the team at Sierra acted on it

[Bret Taylor @btaylor]

Today, Sierra is releasing Ghostwriter, our agent for building agents. With Ghostwriter, you can create an AI agent for your customer experience — one that can chat, pick up the phone, speak dozens of languages, take action on your systems of record, and be protected with industry-leading guardrails — simply by having a conversation. No clicking, no forms, no menus.

Codex and Claude Code have transformed how we build software, making it possible for software engineers to orchestrate and review the work rather than doing all the work themselves. We think the same transformation will happen for all software. Rather than every enterprise app having a web app for humans and an API for automation, every software platform’s UI will be an agent that can do the work on your behalf.

I recorded a demo of my building and optimizing an agent with Ghostwriter so you can see how powerful and easy it is to use. It’s completely changed the way our early adopters build agents, and it’s changed the way I think about the software industry. Let me know what you think, and, if you’re interested in trying it out at your business, please reach out directly.

[Joshua Xu @joshua_xu_]

HeyGen made Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list for 2026.

We built it for introverts. For people who hate cameras. For people who had something to say but no easy way to say it.

31 million people signed up so far.

Turns out there were a lot of us.

[adarsh @adarsh_exe]

Traditional coding benchmarks do not reflect how software is actually built and maintained.

That's why we built a new benchmark, APEX-SWE, in partnership with @cognition. It measures whether AI models can perform complex, real-world software engineering work to ship systems that work and debug them when they don't.

@OpenAI GPT 5.3 Codex (High) tops the leaderboard at 41.5% on Pass@1.

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

Turner and I covered a wide range of topics including the history of software and why the AI application vs SaaS shift mirrors the SaaS vs On-Prem disruption. Plus: investing in AI applications, the dynamics in the AI application market, and more. Hope you will listen!

[Chetan Puttagunta @chetanp]

If you haven't listened to this conversation between @btaylor and @jaltma yet, I couldn't recommend it more. If you are building in the AI space right now, consider this required listening. Truly exceptional content. 10/10.

[Peter Fenton @peterfenton]

The same brilliance that made @airtable — giving millions of builders the power of a relational database — just did it again with AI. A bright, clarifying light in the complexity of agents, this makes it all so vivid and useful for builders

[Howie Liu @howietl]

I've been personally burning through billions of tokens a week for the past few months as a builder. Today I'm excited to announce Hyperagent, by Airtable.

An agents platform where every session gets its own isolated, full computing environment in the cloud — no Mac Mini required. Real browser, code execution, image/video generation, data warehouse access, hundreds of integrations, and the ability to learn any new API as a skill.

Deep domain expertise through skill learning. Teach the agent how your firm evaluates startups or how your team runs due diligence — now anyone on the team gets output that reflects your actual methodology, not a generic template.

One-click deployment into Slack as intelligent coworkers. These aren't bots that wait to be @mentioned — they follow conversations, understand context, and act when relevant.

And a command center to oversee and continuously improve your entire fleet of agents at scale.

We're onboarding early users now. https://t.co/kctMfFCQqG

[Everett Randle @EverettRandle]

The thing that becomes obvious when you hear Bret speak is how much of a business/tech historian he is and how valuable being steeped in those learnings from the past is when building a generational business for the future