Benchmark’s newest Venture Partner, Jason Droege
Benchmark is thrilled to announce that Jason Droege has joined Benchmark as a Venture Partner to work closely with our portfolio founders, drawing on decades of experience and knowledge of how to build consumer scale businesses.
He’s one of a small group of Venture Partners at Benchmark, including Rich Barton from Zillow, Rob Bearden from Cloudera, and Hatim Tyabji (formerly Chairman of Jasper and Best Buy). The role embodies the dynamic range of these partners as highly curious, operationally excellent advisors and confidants to the best founders of our time.
As with our former venture partners, Jason will bring the unique perspective of partnering with founders as part of Benchmark while operating full time — in his case as partner to Dan Dan Li and Benchmark portfolio company Popshop.
We first got to know Jason thanks to his role founding and leading Uber Eats during his six-year tenure there. At the time, Uber knew that it had potential to be more than ride sharing, but didn’t know what the next wedge would be for Uber to expand its footprint. Jason took on the role of figuring that out, launching multiple experiments until iterating to the current version of Uber Eats so many of us depend on, which he launched in Toronto in December 2015. By March 2016 Uber Eats had launched in 10 more markets. And by the end of 2017, in over 100 markets. When Jason left Uber in June 2020, just four and a half years after launching Uber Eats, Uber Eats had scaled to an extraordinary $19B GMV run rate globally.
Before Uber, Jason played a critical role re-imagining Taser’s business by developing Taser’s cloud strategy. Jason helped re-imagine Taser from a hardware and weapons company, into a hybrid hardware and software company. The strategy was so successful that Taser renamed itself Axon, the name of Taser’s cloud product.
Jason’s entrepreneurial career began in college, when he co-founded Scour, one of the first peer to peer file sharing companies (“Napster before Napster”). Scour reached 150k DAUs during a time when there were probably 200–300m global internet users.
At Benchmark, we remain focused on serving the extraordinary founders with whom we work. We act as a team, with each partner bringing a unique point of view that makes the collective stronger. We have the highest conviction that Jason 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 Benchmark.
Chetan, Eric, Miles, Peter, and Sarah
