Stay small, hire deep
Benchmark famously runs a tiny partnership. When it adds a chair, it tends to add somebody whose work multiplies the whole. Hu was already running an office full of lawyers - hiring partner, Silicon Valley, Goodwin.
The investing partners at Benchmark invest. An-Yen Hu does almost everything else, and has done it since the summer of 2020, when he replaced a man who had held the chair since 1999.
Spend an afternoon reading about Benchmark and you will meet the same five names. Bill Gurley. Peter Fenton. Mitch Lasky. Eric Vishria. Sarah Tavel. The firm is built around the idea that a small number of investing partners, each with equal say, will pick the next decade's important companies. The model has worked since 1995. eBay. Uber. Snap. Twitter. Discord. Asana. Benchmark's reputation rides on those bets.
None of those bets get made if someone is not closing the funds, signing the documents, hiring the assistants, and reading every word of every side letter before it leaves the building. That person, since the summer of 2020, has been An-Yen Hu. His title is Operating Partner and General Counsel. The job is to take the unglamorous half of the firm and run it well enough that nobody outside Sand Hill Road has to think about it.
The hire was a small earthquake. Benchmark had not changed general counsel since 1999. Steven Spurlock, a co-founding partner of Gunderson Dettmer, had run the seat from the dawn of the dot-com era through three Benchmark fund cycles and a decade of mobile-internet boom. When Spurlock stepped back, Benchmark did not pull from another VC firm. It pulled from Goodwin Procter's Redwood City office, where Hu had spent the previous nine years working on the other side of the deal table - representing the lawyers who handle Benchmark, and the companies and underwriters and banks Benchmark cares about.
Hu started his career in 2007 as an associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, the law firm whose initials have appeared on more Silicon Valley term sheets than anybody else's. He stayed four years, then jumped to Goodwin in 2011 when the East Coast firm was building out its California startup practice in earnest. The bet for both sides paid off fast. By 2014, three years in, Hu was named partner.
From there the work piled up. Capital markets. Corporate governance. Life sciences. Securities compliance. Technology transactions. Venture financings. Hu became the kind of lawyer founders text on a Friday night and underwriters call on a Sunday morning. In 2017, he led the Goodwin team representing the underwriters on Snap's $3.4 billion initial public offering, one of the most-watched US tech IPOs of the decade and a deal whose dual-class share structure became a permanent reference point for governance debates.
He was also Goodwin's hiring partner for the Silicon Valley office, which is the polite way of saying he ran the office. The Daily Journal noticed. In 2018 it named him to its Top 40 Under 40 list of California attorneys. By the time the call from Benchmark came, Hu had two clear paths in front of him: stay in private practice and keep building, or do something more unusual.
Venture firms talk about operating partners the way restaurants talk about sommeliers - everyone has one, no one quite agrees on the job description. At some firms the operating partner is a former founder kept on retainer to coach portfolio CEOs. At others it is a former CFO who builds the firm's data infrastructure. At Benchmark the job, paired with general counsel, is closer to chief of staff for a private partnership.
Funds need to close. LPs need quarterly reports. State and federal regulators need filings. Compliance walls need to stand up between the firm and its portfolio companies. Side letters need to be honored. Diligence on a hot Series A needs to clear by Tuesday. The investing partners cannot do that work and also be in the room when a founder pitches them at 9 a.m. on Wednesday. Hu is in the room where that infrastructure gets built.
When he joined, Hu gave the only public quote of the announcement and it doubles as a job description. "In my role, I will be focusing on the legal and operational elements of firm matters, so that the investing partners can focus on investing and working with management teams." Read that twice. It is the entire deal in a single sentence. The investing partners invest. He does the rest.
Hu's path through school is the kind of route the legal industry quietly favors and rarely advertises. Undergrad at Pomona College, one of the small liberal-arts holdouts in Claremont, California. JD at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. No Ivy stamp, no Stanford lab, no Harvard Yard. Just a careful run through California schools that turn out plenty of working lawyers and very few of the press-release variety.
That matters because Benchmark is a firm with a specific bias. It does not chase fashion. It does not run forty associates. It does not stamp itself across every panel at every conference. When it hired a new general counsel for the first time in twenty-one years, it picked somebody whose résumé is the document, not the noise around it.
Hu's value to Benchmark is partly that he knows what it looks like to be on the other side of the deal. For nine years at Goodwin he watched VCs negotiate, push, retreat, win, lose, and explain themselves to their LPs after both. He helped underwriters price the most-scrutinized social IPO of the decade. He has seen what works in cap tables that hold up under stress and what does not. Now he sits inside the kind of firm whose lawyers used to call him.
That is unusual. Most firm general counsels arrive from another firm or from a corporate legal department. Benchmark hired one whose entire career was advising the people Benchmark deals with on every transaction it does. The information asymmetry, if you want to call it that, runs in the firm's favor.
If you search his name, you will not find a podcast tour. You will find a LinkedIn account that mostly congratulates other people - new general partners, portfolio milestones, hires inside Benchmark's circle. He has faculty status at the Practising Law Institute, where lawyers go to learn from lawyers, and he occasionally surfaces in legal-trade press. Otherwise the silence is the point. The point of the job is for the partners' deals to make the news, not the partner who closed the paperwork.
It is a kind of professional discipline that the rest of the industry does not reward and so does not produce in volume. Benchmark needed somebody who could keep doing it indefinitely, and found him a half-hour up Highway 101.
Benchmark's last raised fund closed in mid-2024 with publicly reported new capital in the hundreds of millions, the kind of disciplined size the firm has held to for almost three decades. Each new fund means a new wave of filings, side letters, LP onboardings, regulatory housekeeping, and compliance plumbing. Each new general partner - Victor Lazarte's arrival in 2023 was the most recent - means a new working relationship to set up, a new governance entry, a new internal cap to maintain on the firm's careful equal-partnership model. Each new portfolio company means a fresh round of conflict checks.
An-Yen Hu's job is to make all of that boring. So far, by every visible measure, it is.
Benchmark famously runs a tiny partnership. When it adds a chair, it tends to add somebody whose work multiplies the whole. Hu was already running an office full of lawyers - hiring partner, Silicon Valley, Goodwin.
Hu spent thirteen years representing the companies, banks, and underwriters across from VC investors. He knows where the seams of a deal are because he was the one stitching them.
Underwriters' counsel on a $3.4B IPO with a brand-new dual-class structure is not a routine assignment. It is a public stress test of a lawyer's judgment. Hu passed it in 2017.
Hu's predecessor at Benchmark, Steven Spurlock, was a co-founding partner of Gunderson Dettmer. He held the GC seat from 1999.
Pomona undergrad, USC Gould law. A California education, all the way down.
Faculty at the Practising Law Institute - the place lawyers go to teach lawyers what private practice actually looks like.