Over the course of the past three months, we’ve published 10 venture capital teardowns to provide a data-driven view into venture capital firms ranging from industry pioneers Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins to newer investors Spark Capital and Formation 8. Each was featured in our tri-weekly newsletter. We dug into our analytics data to understand which firms were most popular. Yes – this is content about our content. Very meta.
Based on unique pageviews, Sequoia Capital comes out on top. The top 3 is rounded out by Fred Wilson’s Union Square Ventures & highly active corporate VC Google Ventures. Note: General Catalyst Partners’ teardown was not included in the chart below given the recency of its publication.
Of course, purely looking at unique pageviews ignores the fact that some of the teardowns have been published earlier than others and so had more of a window to be read and/or shared. For example, Sequoia Capital’s teardown analysis was published on June 16, 2014 while Benchmark’s was published in August. So to get a better sense of which VC brands were of interest to our audience, we took a look at unique page views in the first week of publication to make an apples-to-apples comparison between each VC teardown.
While Sequoia still tops the list – Accel actually jumps ahead of Google Ventures into the top 3. Of note, Formation 8 – the VC firm founded by a team that includes Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale just a couple years ago – garnered more traffic than prominent VCs Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark in the first week.
Interestingly, Spark ranked last by this measure.
Some notes:
- USV’s teardown was featured in Fred Wilson’s AVC blog post ‘Tearing Down the Teardown‘ a few days after being published, which referred close to 30% of traffic to the post.
- To view the VC data underlying these briefs, login or create an account below and then visit Investor Analytics.