While I was walking through an airport a couple of months ago, my eye caught the cover of a magazine heralding the top 50 venture capitalists--or at least that is my recollection. I thought, “Wow, should be a great article, I’ll read it when I get home,” thinking of course that I was a subscriber to that particular magazine. When I got home and looked for the article, I realized that I was a subscriber to the “other” magazine, not that one. Not a problem in the Internet age, though, I figured I would just look it up on the Internet.
Unfortunately, my memory did not serve me all that well. I typed in the title as I remembered it, but did not fine what I wanted, though some other similar articles appeared. So I went directly to the source itself--the magazine’s web site. Nowadays, though, magazine web sites don’t always make it easy to browse magazine covers, like in a real library for instance, preferring instead to distance the web site as far as possible from the print media.
After trying a few headlines in the site’s internal search engine, I finally found what I wanted. As it turns out, the title of the article is “The Midas List: 2011’s Top Tech Investors,” which appears on Forbes.com. The magazine that I have a subscription to is, of course, Fortune Magazine. I think it is important for readers of this newsletter to become familiar with the names on that list and the companies they represent. Your venture may or may not attract one of these top VCs, but if it does, you will know that you’re well on your way to a creating a successful technology business. You can find the article at http://www.forbes.com/lists/midas/2011/midas-list-techs-top-investors.html.
In the meantime, my errant searches brought up some interesting results. I found a site with the top 50 venture capital blogs. Ranked #1 is Paul Kedrosky’s Infectious Greed. He’s not a VC, but more a media guy, so he’s not on the Forbes list. In fact, none of the guys on the Forbes list are on the blog list, which I guess tells you something, probably leading to a headline, such as “Too Rich To Blog.” In any case, you can find the blog list at: www.invesp.com/blog-rank/Venture_Capital.
If you’re more interested in the company than the man himself or woman herself, you can check out the Venture Capital 100 at the AlwaysOn web site at www.aonetwork.com/AOStory/2010-Venture-Capital-100. The article itself is not all that interesting, but one of the ads on the site caught my eye. It’s an ad for the Summit at Stanford, presented by AlwaysOn and STVP called Meet the New Captains of Innovation. This is the ninth edition of the summit and I haven’t attended any yet, but think I’ll make plans to cover it this year.
Finally, the Entrepreneur web site has a listing of the top 100 VC firms, which they break down into the top firms for early stage companies and the top firms for later stage companies. The only caveat here is that the list is about four years old and the site doesn’t seem to have a newer list. You can find this one at www.entrepreneur.com/vc100/index.html.
Lists are great, and the ones referenced here, if not must reading, should be read at least for informational value. Again, you may or may not ever have the pleasure of meeting one of these investors or dealing with one of these firms, but if you do, you’ll know you’re dealing with one of the best.