Which VCs Have the Most Midas Wins? Why Does it Matter to You?

Forbes Midas List Meta Analysis: 2011-2024

The Forbes’ Midas List is a helpful way to understand the pecking order of the top venture capitalists in the world. Picking a top investor for your company can give you access to sell to their portfolio of companies and to recruit people they have seen perform well in their portfolio. Their level of prestige can grant you credibility to help with sales and recruiting. As an employee, succeeding in a portfolio company of a top investor can propel your career there and at subsequent companies.

But what is one year in the lifetime of an investor? Why isn't the Forbes Midas list keeping track of these investors over the long haul? I thought seeing the long-term impact of top investors and firms would be more interesting. Who has won the most Midas mentions throughout time? I compiled all of the data from 2011 to 2024 with help from Hank Taylor, analyzing all of the investors, firms, and wins into the following rank lists. Here is what we found:

What’s Interesting?

First, mad props to Sameer Gandhi of Accel and Peter Thiel for making the Midas list every year - a stunning achievement. Several top investors are also well-known: Mark Andreeson, Mary Meeker, and John Doerr, for instance. But as a VC outsider, I was surprised by how many amazing investor’s names I didn’t know. The research project continues!

The order of magnitude number of wins for Sequoia and Accel surprised me. Sequoia’s # of wins would be even higher if I included Sequoia China and its 13 incremental mentions (The firms officially separated late last year.) I knew Sequoia was a top firm, but not by this order of magnitude.

Accel’s strength also was a pleasant surprise. I stumbled into the Accel portfolio when I joined Atlassian and have been lucky to have been involved with several of their portfolio companies. The network of bright and experienced people and successful companies in their network was one of the reasons Silicon Valley outsider 1Password chose them as their lead investor when they didn’t even need the money. I took Accel for granted, not realizing its market dominance.

As expected, many other top firms rank high, but the order is interesting.

I ran the firm ranking first but realized that the investor view was a more helpful supplement. The investor view brings out the story of firms' evolution, including the trend of top investors starting their own smaller partnerships. For instance, Mary Meeker’s newer fund, Bond, doesn’t make the top 30 list based on # of wins, but the investor rank shows her dominance, extending her reign after Kleiner Perkins. Similarly, Salil Deshpande is running his new firm, Uncorrelated Ventures, completely solo. His firm is unlikely to show up on the firms list, but he ranks very high as an investor himself.

There also might be some missing firms. ICONIQ Capital, for instance, is missing from all years. Given their huge success with Snowflake, Github, Datadog and others, they may not participate in the Forbes lists.

What I Want

I loved seeing the last 14 years of data compiled for a longer-term view of VC performance. But even better would be a stack-ranked view of the firms’ and investors’ actual fully-accounted returns for 1, 3, 5, 10, 20 years. Gotta love public company transparency, where companies can be compared apples to apples. Do institutional investors get to see this head-to-head comparison for VCs? I wonder.

What surprised you? Anything?

---

Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the head of marketing that took Atlassian public. She currently advises CEOs and CMOs of high-growth tech companies. Carilu helps leaders operationalize the chaos of scale, see around corners, and improve marketing and company performance.

---