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The Peel with Turner Novak

The Peel with Turner Novak

Benchmark’s Chetan Puttagunta on the Past, Present, & Future of Software

Mar 4, 2026 · 1h 30m

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On this episode

About this episode

Chetan Puttagunta is a General Partner at Benchmark. We talk about investing in Manus, the AI company that went from zero to $100M ARR in eight months and was recently acquired by Meta. We also talk through the full history of application software, from mainframes to client-server, to the internet to cloud, why each wave reduced the barrier to entry and created an explosion in the number of new software, why legacy SaaS companies are making the same mistake on-prem vendors made at the dawn of the cloud, why software companies should be making big AI acquisitions, and how public market investors are begging private AI companies to go public. We also talk about what Benchmark actually looks…