Peter Fenton (Benchmark Capital)

Competitive triathlete is also most productive venture capitalist on our list. In one 24-hour period, Fenton was the lead partner behind SpringSource's $420 million sale to VMWare and FriendFeed's sale to Facebook. He also led investments in Wily Technology (acquired by CA), Coremetrics (acquired by IBM), JBoss (acquired by RedHat), Reactivity (acquired by Cisco), Xensource (acquired by Citrix) and Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo!). He backed Twitter when it was a 25-person company and now serves on the board. He also serves on the board of Yelp and led investments in portfolio companies Zendesk (on demand helpdesk), Terracotta (open-source software), Pentaho (open-source business intelligence), Lithium (CRM solutions) and New Relic and EngineYard (both are applications for Ruby on Rails). Fenton earned his chops as a Bain consultant before working at Accel Partners, where he spent seven years before jumping ship to Benchmark.