When the Midas List began in 2001, Silicon Valley was still coming to terms with the “tech wreck.” The excitement in early internet companies led to public flameouts and a long and painful reset that saw the Nasdaq drop 39.3%, its worst one year drop to date. But as any Midas investor knows, market downturns are when generational companies are built: Google, Amazon and Netflix, founded and built in this era, have become some of the world’s most valuable companies, and made their founders and investors vast fortunes.
The next two decades brought waves of innovation: social media, smart phones, electric cars, and now artificial intelligence. Only a handful of investors have enduring track records of picking the best founders and startups over the 25- year history of the Midas List. Just 15 have appeared on the Midas List 15 times or more.
Those include Vinod Khosla, who topped the inaugural list for bets on networking startups like Juniper, and now again for writing the first institutional check into OpenAI in 2019. The AI company was last valued at $852 billion, and is now reportedly fast-tracking its initial public offering. He’s in good company alongside former Kleiner Perkins colleague John Doerr (who stepped back in 2016), and Bond Capital’s Mary Meeker, some of the biggest names in the biz. There’s an even bigger dog on the block: Sequoia Capital. A total of four investors associated with Silicon Valley’s most famous venture fund landed a spot on our all-time all-star ranking.
Silicon Valley was a smaller place 25 years ago. U.S. funds collectively managed only $262 billion. Sequoia in its early days had a mantra that it wouldn’t invest in a company that its partners couldn’t bike to from its Sand Hill Road office. The fund’s founder Don Valentine once quipped that past Denver, Colorado, “you go off the edge into technological oblivion.”
That’s not the case today. Waves of infrastructure and cloud computing breakthroughs mean that it's never been easier to start a company. Though the Bay Area remains the gravitational center of VC and startups, lowering the barriers to entry has sparked fierce competition that now extends to most corners of the world.
Venture funds in the United States alone now manage $1.38 trillion drawn by two decades of massive outcomes from a growing herd of unicorns, and a handful of companies like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic that are racing for trillion-dollar IPOs (even though to date venture funds collectively have underperformed against public markets). But while companies, trends and markets have continued to evolve, one constant remains the handful of investors who have proven an enduring ability to spot the best and boldest entrepreneurs emerging from every generation.
ERIC MILLETTE FOR FORBES
Sequoia Capital
Brandon McGanty
Erin Beach
Levon Biss for Forbes
Benchmark Capital
New Enterprise Associates
Mayfield
Sequoia Capital
John Lamparski/Getty Images
Cody Pickens for Forbes
Martin Schoeller/August Images
Mary Meeker
Benchmark
Benjamin Horowitz
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