We started working with The New York Times in late 2015 to identify and rank the top 100 venture capital professionals using the CB Insights Investor Mosaic algorithm.
It is a purely data-driven / algorithmic ranking that uses CB Insights data. We’d gathered this data via our machine learning technology (dubbed The Cruncher) as well as via several thousand direct submissions from firms and individual professionals using The Editor.
The Investor Mosaic page walks through the factors considered in the algorithm in some detail but at a high-level, it considers several factors including:
- An investor’s exits – the frequency/volume, size, and stage of entry
- Network centrality – connectivity to other investors. Think of it as akin to Google Pagerank.
- Consistency – stage, industry consistency of investments
- Illiquid portfolio company value – frequency, size and stage of entry in high value (but un-exited companies). Given relatively less weight as these are paper valuations
- Recency of performance – Our focus was on these metrics since 2008. As a result, we didn’t give a lot of credit to those who made glorious picks in the 80s, 90s, or early 2000s. This is a ranking of today’s best VCs — not the best VCs in history.
Below is the full list of 100 top venture capitalists.
We will do more analysis of the top 100 and also be unveiling the VC peer rankings in future posts.
Track these VCs and their firms with CB Insights.
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