The Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists

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Do venture investors with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns? An academic paper from a few years ago by Yael Hochberg, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Yang Lu titled “Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance” (embedded at the bottom of this post) suggests that is the case. They looked at historic venture returns and found that “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition.

A venture firm’s network in the study was defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds. The more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. The correlation between the size of a venture firm’s network and its returns may have something to do with better access to deal flow, talent, advisers, potential customers, and potential exits.

If this is true, then who are the most connected venture firms and angel investors today? Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. “In summary,” says Dondeti, “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.”

So which venture investors have the best networks? Here are the top 10:

1. Draper Fisher Jurvetson
2. Sequoia Capital
3. Accel Partners
4. Intel Capital
5. First Round Capital
6. Dag Ventures
7. New Enterprise Associates
8. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
9. Benchmark Capital
10. Ron Conway

Draper Fisher Jurvetson takes the top spot. Will its returns beat everyone else’s, or is it just that its spray-and-pray investing strategy gives it an advantage in this type of ranking system? Top-tier firms such as Sequoia, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and Benchmark also score highly, as does First Round Capital and angel investor Ron Conway.  Other individual investors a little further down the list include Reid Hoffman (No. 18) and Marc Andreessen (no. 31).

Below is a ranking of the Top 100, or you can review the entire data set for all 2,700 investors here.

(Image: Flickr/Steve Jurveston)

Rank VC Investor Raw Score Scaled Score

1 draper-fisher-jurvetson 6721 100.00

2 sequoia-capital 6608 98.33

3 accel-partners 6505 96.80

4 intel-capital 5849 87.03

5 first-round-capital 4881 72.62

6 dag-ventures 4857 72.28

7 new-enterprise-associates 4746 70.61

8 kleiner-perkins-caufield-byers 4695 69.8

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9 benchmark-capital 4685 69.71

10 ron-conway 4484 66.71

11 charles-river-ventures 4124 61.37

12 goldman-sachs 3926 58.42

13 redpoint-ventures 3915 58.25

14 general-catalyst-partners 3814 56.75

15 bessemer-venture-partners 3622 53.89

16 index-ventures 3469 51.62

17 khosla-ventures 3258 48.47

18 reid-hoffman 3232 48.10

19 sigma-partners 3227 48.01

20 mayfield-fund 3186 47.40

21 oak-investment-partners 3150 46.87

22 norwest-venture-partners 2996 44.57

23 lehman-brothers 2983 44.38

24 greylock 2946 43.83

25 highland-capital-partners 2917 43.40

26 jafco-ventures 2912 43.33

27 omidyar-network 2856 42.50

28 fidelity-ventures 2841 42.27

29 sap-ventures 2831 42.12

30 venrock 2742 40.80

31 marc-andreessen 2462 36.64

32 lightspeed-venture-partners 2446 36.39

33 roger-ehrenberg 2412 35.89

34 foundation-capital 2404 35.76

35 shasta-ventures 2395 35.63

36 us-venture-partners 2378 35.3

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37 union-square-ventures 2336 34.76

38 canaan-partners-3 2298 34.19

39 atlas-venture 2285 34.00

40 bay-partners 2277 33.88

41 menlo-ventures 2263 33.67

42 mohr-davidow-ventures 2230 33.18

43 interwest-partners 2224 33.10

44 globespan-capital-partners 2209 32.88

45 trident-capital 2203 32.78

46 steamboat-ventures 2183 32.48

47 focus-ventures 2166 32.22

48 atomico-investments 2096 31.18

49 spark-capital 2083 30.99

50 draper-richards 2076 30.89

51 amadeus-capital-partners 2041 30.36

52 greycroft-partners 2039 30.34

53 allen-and-company 1991 29.62

54 founders-fund 1979 29.45

55 meritech-capital-partners 1974 29.38

56 dcm 1974 29.37

57 labrador-ventures 1924 28.63

58 european-founders-fund 1856 27.61

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59 esther-dyson 1844 27.44

60 jeff-clavier 1802 26.81

61 3i-group 1784 26.55

62 motorola-ventures 1764 26.25

63 jeff-stewart 1749 26.03

64 mission-ventures 1740 25.88

65 cisco 1734 25.81

66 time-warner-investments 1729 25.72

67 comcast-interactive-capital 1726 25.68

68 marc-benioff 1692 25.18

69 martin-varsavsky 1685 25.07

70 betaworks 1684 25.06

71 polaris-venture-partners 1682 25.02

72 trinity-ventures 1673 24.89

73 bezos-expeditions 1667 24.80

74 hummer-winblad-venture-partners 1624 24.17

75 hearstcorporation 1612 23.99

76 presidio-stx 1604 23.86

77 y-combinator 1596 23.75

78 sutter-hill-ventures 1567 23.32

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79 baseline-ventures 1552 23.09

80 advanced-technology-ventures 1549 23.05

81 wellington-partners 1543 22.96

82 walden-international 1533 22.81

83 granite-ventures 1518 22.58

84 hercules-technology-growth 1504 22.38

85 morgenthaler-ventures 1497 22.28

86 northgate-capital 1491 22.19

87 battery-ventures 1486 22.11

88 scale-venture-partners 1486 22.11

89 crescendo-ventures 1456 21.66

90 emergence-capital-partners 1451 21.60

91 azure-capital-partners 1445 21.51

92 mike-maples 1433 21.32

93 glg-partners 1428 21.24

94 ariel-poler 1418 21.10

95 vantagepoint-venture-partners 1414 21.04

96 north-bridge-venture-partners 1407 20.94

97 matrix-partners 1405 20.90

98 bluerun-ventures 1405 20.90

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99 waldenvc 1399 20.82

100 rustic-canyon-partners 1384 20.59

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Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance