What does one of Silicon Valley’s most successful venture firms think founders are getting wrong? At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, we’re putting all five Benchmark general partners on one stage to find out. Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria will come together for this main stage session, “What We Believe Now” – the first time the entire current Benchmark partnership has appeared together on the Disrupt Stage in San Francisco.
Rather than another conversation about where venture capital has been, the focus is on where it goes next: where the next generation of startups will come from, which assumptions founders should reconsider, and which opportunities the partners believe are still hiding in plain sight. And 2026 is an especially interesting year to ask them.
Image Credits:TechCrunch Benchmark has spent decades building a reputation around concentrated early-stage investing. This year, it made one of the biggest changes in its own playbook – raising approximately $2 billion across a $750 million flagship fund and its first $1.25 billion growth fund. The market changed. Benchmark changed with it. Now we want to know what the firm thinks will happen next.
