Benchmark’s Newest General Partner, Miles Grimshaw

Benchmark is thrilled to announce Miles Grimshaw has joined the firm as our newest General Partner.

At age 29, Miles has emerged as one of the world’s great venture capitalists, embodying the early-stage focus and company building purpose that defines Benchmark.

Miles’s fiercely independent thinking has allowed him to identify the early potential of some of the breakout companies of this era, including Segment (acquired by Twilio for $3.2B), Benchling, and Airtable, investing in each of these companies before they had 30 employees. Miles cold-emailed Benchling CEO Saji Wickramasekara when the company had zero revenue and a few hundred users. As Saji said, “When everyone else was hung up on market size, Miles saw the expansive possibilities and energized us to go after them.”

Miles has learned from the team at Thrive Capital, one of the great venture firms of this era, how to partner in radical support of CEOs and the teams they lead. Through Benchmark and Thrive’s joint investments, we’ve been able to witness firsthand as Miles built the deep relationships we view as essential to helping entrepreneurs achieve their biggest aspirations.

Intensely competitive, Miles channels this energy into 100-mile races on weekends. Born in the United Kingdom, raised by an entrepreneurial Korean stepfather, and having attended schools in England, India, China, and the United States, Miles will bring a global breadth of perspective to the investments he’ll make. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we’ve been awed by Miles’s maturity and rate of growth as we’ve served as board members together on Benchling, Airtable, and Supergreat. Miles exhibits the judgment of someone with decades more experience.

As other venture capital firms have scaled their partnerships and infrastructure, adding junior or role-defined staff to help their partners scale to more boards, Benchmark has stayed true to our beginnings. A small, equal partnership of now five General Partners, we remain focused on serving the extraordinary founders with whom we work. To do this and continue to perform at the level we aspire to, each person we add to our partnership must raise the bar and make us all better. We have the highest conviction Miles will not only excel at the complex craft of early-stage venture investing but also push all of us in our thinking. We are thrilled to welcome him to the partnership.

Peter, Eric, Sarah, and Chetan