Ranking Venture Investors
A new methodology for ranking VC firms and individual VC investors. By Ilya A. Strebulaev (Stanford Graduate School of Business) and Blake Jackson (The Ohio State University)
Venture capital is one of the most important drivers of economic growth and innovation. It has funded many of today’s largest companies through early bets on young ventures — bets made by individual venture capitalists who sort promising ideas from unpromising ones and deploy the capital that shapes the economy of tomorrow.
And yet the industry has never had a transparent, data-driven way to answer its most basic question: which of these investors, and which firms, are actually best at what they do? Getting this right is important. By our estimates, 5% of VCs have generated 90% of the industry’s profits. For a founder choosing whom to take money from, a limited partner choosing a fund, or a young investor choosing where to build a career, picking the right VC is one of the most important decisions they will make. The list the industry leans on, the Forbes Midas List, is largely a black box, and the rankings it produces are hard to reconcile with the underlying record.
This article introduces a new methodology for ranking both VC firms and individual VC investors: parsimonious, transparent, data-driven, and built on six simple and intuitive factors. We apply it to produce preliminary 2023 rankings of the top 100 US-based VC firms and the top 100 US-based individual VCs, drawing on more than 230,000 investments by over 13,000 VCs. We then compare those results against the 2023 Midas List, and attempt to replicate Midas directly. The differences are stark.
These results are preliminary and intended to solicit feedback ahead of our 2026 rankings release. Here is what is coming, and when:
Now — Draft of the white paper and methodology released publicly
1st Half of June — 2026 VC firm rankings release
Post–June 15 — 2026 individual VC rankings release
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If you quote or reuse this article, please add Ilya Strebulaev, Substack: https://ilyastrebulaev.substack.com as the source.
VCs spot innovation early — and shape the economy
The case for caring about who the best VCs are starts with how much of the modern economy they built. Seven of the ten most valuable US public companies were venture-backed, and those seven hold 85% of the group’s market capitalization. Only Broadcom, Berkshire Hathaway, and Walmart were not VC-backed.
Top-10 US public companies, sized by market capitalization
The pattern holds well beyond the largest names. Among US public companies founded since 1979, venture-backed firms account for half the total number and more than nine-tenths of research and development. Venture capital, in other words, did not merely participate in the last four decades of growth — it caused much of it.
VC-backed share of US public companies founded since 1979. Source: Gornall and Strebulaev (2026).
Which VCs are the best?
If venture capital matters this much, the natural next question is who, inside it, is responsible for the returns. The answer is uncomfortable for anyone hoping the field is broadly meritocratic: profits are extraordinarily concentrated. By our estimates, the top 5% of VCs account for roughly 90% of the industry’s profits.
Cumulative share of industry profits across all VCs. Source: Jackson and Strebulaev (2026).
That concentration is exactly why identifying the right investors is so consequential, and exactly why the absence of a credible, transparent ranking is such a problem. Existing rankings don’t reliably identify who sits in the 5%.
A new generation of VC rankings
We set out to build a ranking method that the industry has lacked. Our algorithm rests on four commitments — it is parsimonious, transparent, data-driven, and unbiased — and it is designed to rank both VC firms and the individual investors who work at them on a single, consistent scale. Each factor it uses is straightforward to construct and to interpret, and we apply no editorial judgment and strive to avoid manual adjustments.
We apply that methodology to produce preliminary rankings of the top 100 US-based VC firms and the top 100 US-based individual VCs for the year 2023. We selected this year deliberately: it is recent enough to demonstrate the full methodology using high-quality data, but sufficiently stale that the results do not represent current rankings.
All results below are preliminary and provided for discussion and feedback only. They must not be quoted as final rankings of either VC firms or individual VC investors.
The top 100 US VC firms — 2023
Our highest ranking VC firm for 2023 is Sequoia, which — based on its attributed human capital — is awarded about 1.5 times as many points as DST Global, the second-highest firm. The rest of the top 15 is rounded out by Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger, Founders Fund, Index, ICONIQ, NEA, General Catalyst, Bessemer, General Atlantic, Sutter Hill, Lightspeed, and Ribbit.
Top 100 US VC firms — 2023
The top 100 individual US VCs — 2023
Our highest-ranking individual VC for 2023 is Yuri Milner, who worked at DST Global as of 2022. Alfred Lin is second, and Michael Speiser of Sutter Hill Ventures is third. The top 15 is rounded out by Meyer Malka (Ribbit), Doug Leone (Sequoia), Hemant Taneja (General Catalyst), Michael Moritz (Sequoia), Jan Hammer (Index), Scott Sandell (NEA), Peter Thiel (Founders Fund), William Ford (General Atlantic), Joshua Kushner (Thrive), Patrick Grady (Sequoia), Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), and Keith Rabois (Founders Fund).
To see how points accumulate, take Speiser. His most important company is Snowflake, which he first backed in its 2012 seed round and then through Series A to G in the run-up to its 2020 IPO at roughly $70 billion
Top 100 individual US VCs — 2023
A handful of companies anchor the whole list: across the top 100 investors there are only 65 distinct “most important” companies, and Snowflake and Robinhood lead, each the top company for five different VCs. Concentration shows up at the firm level too — the top 100 individuals work at just 54 firms, seven each at Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz and six at Accel — yet 49 of the top 100 firms place no individual in the individual top 100 at all, a sign that firm strength and individual strength are far from the same thing.
Six principles behind the ranking
The rankings above come out of a single framework built on six factors. The first three — valuation, dilution, and net profits — are standard considerations in evaluating investment performance, but each requires careful treatment in the VC context. The fourth, value add, captures the additional contribution of VCs who take board seats or lead rounds. The fifth, human capital decay, discounts the relevance of older investments to a current assessment of investor quality. The sixth takes into account potentially changing firm affiliations of individual VCs.
The six factors behind the ranking algorithm
Valuation. Valuation is the natural starting point, but it requires care. Picture two companies each reported at $100 billion: for one, that is a public market capitalization; for the other, a private company’s most recent post-money valuation. These two numbers are not directly comparable. The stock issued by VC-backed companies is convertible preferred, which carries valuable features beyond the conversion option and is therefore worth more than common stock — so post-money valuation, as a rule, overstates a company’s implied market capitalization. Gornall and Strebulaev (2020) put that gap at almost 50% on average for unicorns. We adjust private post-money valuations downward in a transparent and uniform way.
Dilution. VC-backed companies typically raise multiple rounds, and each one dilutes earlier investors — eroding the value of an initial stake even when the final outcome is identical. Consider two companies both sold for $1 billion. The first raised a single round, so its 10% investor still owned 10% at exit: a clean 10× return. The second raised three further rounds; if each diluted existing holders by 20%, that same 10% stake shrank to 10% × (1 − 20%)³ = 5.12%, leaving the first-round investment worth only about half as much. We adjust each round’s ownership for dilution from all subsequent rounds.
Net profits. Net profit is more informative of investment quality than gross profit, especially when investors deploy very different amounts of capital. Suppose Investor A put $10 million into a company that went public at $200 billion, and Investor B put $10 billion into a different one that also reached $200 billion. Both show the same $20 billion gross profit — but Investor A’s net profit is $19.99 billion against Investor B’s $10 billion. Subtracting the cost of each investment captures that distinction, and penalizes investors who deploy large sums to land few winners.
Value add. VC investors contribute to their portfolio companies beyond the capital they provide. We award additional points to individual VCs and the firms they represent when they hold full board seats or lead investment rounds — roles that reflect higher involvement and a greater contribution to the company’s success.
Human capital decay. Like physical capital, human capital depreciates, and we believe this factor is one of the most important for producing rankings relevant to practitioners. We set the decay rate so that VC human capital has a half-life of three years: a dollar of value created in 2022 is worth about $0.50 in 2025, $0.25 if created in 2019, and $0.125 if created in 2016. That is far faster than the rate in fields such as education, but VC cycles move quickly and skills deteriorate unless continuously practiced. Two investors who each turned a 20% stake into a $10 billion IPO can look identical on paper — yet if one invested in 2005 and the other in 2020, the second earned a far better return (an IRR of 141.9% versus 28.7%) and rests on human capital six years old rather than twenty-one. The natural objection, that experience compounds, actually cuts the other way here: if an old investment truly sharpened an investor, the better deals that followed are scored on their own.
Value allocation. The same framework ranks both firms and the individuals who work at them. Because individual VCs move across firms (or out of the industry), the value an investor creates belongs partly to the firm and partly to the person. When Mary Meeker left Kleiner Perkins to found Bond Capital in 2018, the investments she made at Kleiner stayed attributed to her as an individual — but for firm rankings we split them, giving 25% to the firm she represented at the time and 75% to the firm she went on to build.
Eligibility criteria
VC firms should be classified as institutional U.S.-based asset management companies with venture capital investment activity. Our rankings include, for example, growth equity and private equity firms such as General Atlantic that make considerable investments in VC-backed companies. Our rankings exclude accelerators, angel groups, corporate VC organizations, non-U.S. firmsor those primarily representing family offices.
Individual VCs should have been full-time investment professionals at a firm qualified for the VC firm rankings at some point during the year preceding the ranking year. Our rankings therefore exclude angel investors, those working for corporate VC investors, non-U.S. VCs, or in family offices.
The largest dataset of VCs and their investments
The 2023 rankings already draw on more than 230,000 investments made by over 13,000 US-based VCs across more than 5,000 firms — roughly 53,000 companies in all. The data combine standard commercial sources (PitchBook, VentureSource, Preqin, and Jay Ritter’s IPO dataset) with S-1 filings and biographical data from LinkedIn and Revelio. The distinctive ingredient is a large archive of historical VC firm websites, assembled from more than three million URL requests spanning 1996 to 2026 and reconciled by hand for some 1,600 firms; it adds roughly 17% more investment affiliations than commercial data alone, and covers the firms responsible for 96% of US VC capital.
Almost 75% of companies had investment costs that exceeded the value of their VCs’ stakes, and the average individual VC scores about 18 points — while the top 100 average roughly 1,000, more than fifty times as much. The companies that generate the most points for their investors are a familiar set: Coupang (over 23,000 points), Kuaishou, Pinduoduo, Snowflake, Rivian, and DoorDash.
The forthcoming 2026 US rankings expand this foundation considerably.
Our goal is to release timely rankings annually starting in 2026 (for the 2025 year), and to study the time series of rankings over approximately the previous 25 years. Global VC rankings will follow shortly.
Some attribution data is missing
We are candid about the methodology’s limits. The relative paucity of attribution to individual VCs — especially for still-private companies — is the biggest empirical challenge in implementing it. Our current assessment is that, for the average VC-backed company in our sample, about 25% of the points allocated to a firm are attributed to “anonymous” individual VCs whose identity we cannot yet recover. To sharpen the rankings, we intend to solicit and welcome verifiable data submissions from firms and individual investors. Any advice is very welcome.
What’s wrong with the Midas List?
The natural benchmark for any VC ranking is the Forbes Midas List, so we compared our 2023 results against the US-based VCs of 2023 Midas. The differences are stark. Among the investors who appear on both lists, the correlation of rankings is only about 0.27 — and Midas misses 58 of our top 100 outright, including one of our top 10 (Yuri Milner). We would not expect every investor to be on each, of course, but the differences seem substantial.
How many of our top-ranked VCs are absent from the 2023 Midas List
Bill Gurley of Benchmark, who ranks 53rd on our list but is absent from the 2023 Midas, has a widely documented early investment in Uber (first invested 2011, IPO 2019) that should be more valuable to Midas given the recency of the exit, not less. Greg McAdoo, 39th on our list and likewise absent, was an early investor in DoorDash in 2009 (IPO 2020) while at Sequoia. Joshua Kushner, Marc Andreessen, and John Walecka are missing too.
Because the overlap is so low, we tried to reverse-engineer Midas — building a best-fitting replication from every assumption consistent with the information Forbes discloses about its methodology. Even that replication leaves 49 of its own top 100 absent from the actual Midas list, including four of the top 10. Given our concentration on US-based investors, we would not expect all these 49 to be placed in the 2023 Midas. However, the inconsistency is undoubtedly large and puzzling.
How many of our Midas replication’s top-ranked VCs are still absent from Midas
To provide some context, Yuri Milner, Marc Andreessen, and John Doerr have each been affiliated with more IPOs than almost all the 73 US-based VCs Midas does include; each would have had to play an implausibly small role in the IPOs they are credited with to be left off. This leaves us with conjectures. Forbes may heavily weigh data from those VCs and firms that opt to submit it, a procedure that would introduce substantial selection bias. Forbes may use additional eligibility criteria. The methodology may incorporate idiosyncratic manual adjustments that are more than sporadic. Or there may be a consistent component, qualitative or quantitative, that its creators simply do not disclose.
What’s next
We believe a rigorous, replicable alternative is overdue, and that our methodology is a more economically grounded and transparent way to measure the human capital and success of VC firms and individual investors. What we have presented here is a first look, published to invite scrutiny. We plan to release current rankings, extend coverage internationally and by industry, incorporate verified submissions from individual VCs and firms, and study the time series of rankings over the previous 25 years.
Our methodology is open to evaluation and discussion by all, and we welcome engagement from everyone across the VC ecosystem.
Our white paper:
https://docsend.com/view/s/qmakz7ad3v9aqyn9
The key question isn't whether some VCs are better than others. What matters is whether some VCs consistently outperform random portfolios of venture investments.
One factor made me confused - using IRR instead of Human capital decay looks more reasonable and straightforward. Human capital decay rates are too subjective.