About this episode

Chetan Puttagunta discusses the evolution of software, AI investments, and Benchmark's investment strategies.

Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner at Benchmark. We talk about investing in Manus, the AI company that went from zero to $100M ARR in eight months and was recently acquired by Meta. We also talk through the full history of application software, from mainframes to client-server, to the internet to cloud, why each wave reduced the barrier to entry and created an explosion in the number of new software, why legacy SaaS companies are making the same mistake on-prem vendors made at the dawn of the cloud, why software companies should be making big AI acquisitions, and how public market investors are begging private AI companies to go public. We also talk about what Benchmark actually looks for in founders, how they make decisions, and why his last two investments were consumer AI and crypto. Thanks to Sam Ross and Everett Randle for helping brainstorm topics for this conversation. Thanks you to Numeral and Flex for supporting this episode. Try Numeral, the end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance: https://www.numeral.com Sign-up for Flex Elite with code TURNER, get $1,000: https://form.typeform.com/to/Rx9rTjFz Timestamps: (0:08) Inside the $2.5B Manus acquisition (6:24)…

People in this episode

Host: Turner Novak

Guest: Chetan Puttagunta

Topics covered

• software history
• AI investments
• SaaS companies
• Benchmark
• acquisitions
• public markets
• founder criteria

Keywords

• software
• AI
• Benchmark
• SaaS
• investing
• acquisitions
• public markets
• founders

Sponsors

Numeral, Flex

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Benchmark, Meta, Manus

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