NEWS

Benchmark Capital Snags Facebook's Matt Cohler

VentureWire
June 20, 2008
By Tomio Geron and Rebecca Buckman

Benchmark Capital has lured top Facebook Inc. executive Matt Cohler to be its new general partner.

Cohler, 31 years old, was one of Facebook's first five employees and now serves as its vice president of product management. He is also a key lieutenant to Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and widely admired by employees for his efficiency.

But this fall, Cohler will join Benchmark Capital as its ninth general partner. Cohler, also a founding employee of LinkedIn Corp., will continue to serve as a special advisor to Facebook and to Zuckerberg, however.

For Benchmark, reeling in a top executive who has worked at two of the hottest recent Internet start-ups bodes well for future investments in the next Facebook or LinkedIn, said Steve Spurlock, general partner at Benchmark. Cohler will focus on investing in a wide range of Internet-related companies for Benchmark.

"Matt's 31, so at a relatively early point in his career he's managed to work with two of the most interesting entrepreneurs of our time in Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook," Spurlock said. "So our expectation is that Matt will continue to attract entrepreneurs of the quality of Reid and Mark."

Cohler said it was a difficult decision to leave Facebook, but that an agreement to stay on at Facebook as a special advisor helped.

"I wasn't really thinking about leaving Facebook at any point in the future," Cohler said. "This came up and was so well aligned with my longtime interests and was so special and rare that I couldn't turn it down."

Cohler helped build Facebook and LinkedIn virtually from their beginnings. And while he has affection for Facebook, he believes helping start new companies is where his talent and passions lie.

"If you look at the things I've done in my career, such as it is, so far it's always focused on the same thing," Cohler said. "I've focused on trying to find really great companies and worked with entrepreneurs to build great companies."

Asked how he will help Benchmark identify the next Facebooks or LinkedIns, Cohler said: "The bar is certainly high...It's the same core things as when I decided to join LinkedIn and Facebook. It's a combination of things: great visionary entrepreneurs, where you walk out saying this person is the real deal; a good person with a really strong, big, dedicated vision and dedication to seeing it through."

Finding an opportunity to disrupt markets or create new markets while building capital-efficient companies doesn't hurt either, he said.

Benchmark has had high regard for Cohler for some time. "We've had our eye on Matt for a long time," Spurlock said. "We started pursuing him in earnest in recent months."

In keeping with Silicon Valley's disregard for traditional conventions, Benchmark is not daunted by Cohler's age, which will make him the youngest general partner at Benchmark. "We think it's a big plus," Spurlock said. "He's got tons of energy and passion for the business and is incredibly well-networked with younger entrepreneurs. And he can do this job for the next two or three decades."

Talks to lure Cohler away from the start-up began about a month ago, he and Benchmark partner Peter Fenton said, though Fenton and Cohler have known each other for several years and have kept in close touch. Fenton said he has long wanted to recruit Cohler to Benchmark, the Menlo Park, Calif., firm that has backed tech stars such as eBay Inc., Juniper Networks Inc. and MySQL AB.

Cohler's departure comes at a shaky time for Facebook, the pioneering social-networking Web site that is currently valued at $15 billion by investors. The four-year-old company - founded by Zuckerberg when he was an undergraduate at Harvard University - is trying to professionalize its management and morph from a youth-oriented chat site into a profitable Internet company.