You can tell the quality of an organisation by the quality of questions it asks. Larry Page, co-founder of search engine provider Google, seems to have a habit of asking tough ones, including there are about 50 “ambitious” venture investors globally.
Ambitious is a loaded adjective, of course, but outside of him explaining more there has been some good work on trying to identify the most visible, hyperactive, and disruptive venture capital firms, which outperform the industry average across the board in risk appetite, leadership, and exit performance, according to research by Brian Park and Erik Vermeulen.
Their excellent paper published in February, We Know the Savior… and It Is Them: The Future Face(s) of Venture Capital, looks at the renaissance in the industry from investors returning the venture capital model to its “most traditional form” as a real partner to startups, as a risk-taker, and as an innovator and disruptor at the fund level.
Ambition, however, can also be judged by looking at which groups other investors want to connect with on deals. There are plenty of rankings out there, such as this, but VC firms SignalFire and Correlation Ventures since 2011 have seemed to lead the way in this area of spotting whom to connect with. Crowdfunding platforms, such as Angellist’s Syndicates, however, have since made it easier to spot and track investors at an early stage but later-stage deals require more connectivity as well as money. (Part two of this article will look in detail at this element while my colleague Toby Lewis, editor of Global Corporate Venturing, has been running the numbers from the GCV Analytics platform for next week.)
Ultimately, ambition probably remains the desire to impact the most people and it can be seen that the three sectors with greatest impact on the quality and length of life are: health, energy and communications/travel.
These three sectors are ones that can require decades of investment to deliver their promises, even if money can be made at different times.
But to start the conversation, here’s my list – let me know who you would pick and why by email:
Top 50 ambitious venture investors
500 Startups
Accel
Aeris
Alibaba
Andreessen Horowitz
Angellist (Syndicates)
Grupo Arcano
Atomico
Baidu
Coller
Esther Dyson
Felicis Ventures
First Round Capital
Bill Gates
GE
Grishin
Hillhouse
HTGF
Klaus Hommels
Horizons
IBM
IDG
IFC
Index
Innovation Works
Intel
Invoke
IQT
Jungle
Kauffman
Khosla
Millhouse Capital
Yuri Milner
Naspers
Omers
Qualcomm
Samwers/Rocket Internet
Sequoia
Softbank
SV Angel
SVB
Temasek/GIC
Tencent
Tiger
Union Square
Andreas von Bechtolsheim
Wellcome
Woodford
Y Combinator
Source: James Mawson