Enterprise Investors 2017: Meet The 100 Best Venture Capitalists In The World

Midas 2017: Meet The 100 Best Venture Capitalists In The World:  Goetz Remains on Top . . . Meeker First Woman

Forbes, in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, has released the 2017 edition of the The Midas List, which ranks the top 100 venture capitalists.

Apr 18, 2017 @ 09:45 AM 53,846 

Alex Konrad   Forbes Staff 

Enterprise investors are having a moment in 2017.
From AppDynamics' shock $3.7 billion acquisition by Cisco before it could go public in January to IPOs from Nutanix, MuleSoft, Okta and Twilio, it's never been a better time to bank on the predictability of software-as-a-service revenue. Just ask newcomer John Vrionis of Lightspeed Venture Partners, or his colleague Ravi Mhatre and Bessemer Venture Partners' Byron Deeter, both returnees after an absence from the list. Top 20

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And while firms such as Sequoia, Benchmark, Greylock and Accel continue to score multiple members on the list, new firms are starting to break out. Floodgate's Mike Maples Jr. is joined this year by his partner, Ann Miura-Ko. General Catalyst is fielding three list members, as is Lightspeed. Then there are investors like Theresia Gouw and Kirsten Green, who lead a Midas class of more women than ever before, and both of whom left mainstream investment careers to launch their own firms.

It's a Midas List with nine newcomers and six returnees, twelve billionaires, ten China-focused investors and standards that raise the bar higher than ever before. Look closely and you'll see a new guard of VCs emerging alongside the names already baked into Silicon Valley lore.

See the full 2017 Midas List here. 


Methodology:
With hundreds of funds considered across even more partners and thousands of deals, it's never been tougher to crack the Midas List. Forbes and TrueBridge Capital Partners collect data from publicly available sources as well as through many direct submissions from the firms themselves. Midas provides a five-year look-back at a partner's portfolio, with exits by IPO or acquisition of $200 million or more and private holdings that raised money at valuations of $400 million or more over that time period (with a discount for the unrealized return). Midas' formula favors earlier, bigger bets that return high multiples on an investor's initial money, though a string of later successes can still make a Midas portfolio. (More information can be found at our submission page for Midas here.)
For 2017, the average top 10 list members had 12 such companies to their name; the last 10 members had an average of 7. Across the entire list, the typical Midas Lister for 2017 scored 9 eligible portfolio companies.
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