Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists. Khosla was named the top venture capitalist on the Forbes Midas List in 2001 and has been listed multiple times since that time. As of August 2024, Forbes estimated his net worth at US$7.2 billion.
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and often come from high technology industries such as information technology (IT) or biotechnology.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) is an American venture capital firm. In January 2019, DFJ Venture, the early-stage team, spun out and formed Threshold Ventures. DFJ Growth continues to be managed by co-founder John Fisher and co-founders Mark Bailey, Randy Glein, and Barry Schuler.
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
Stephen T. Jurvetson is an American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly a partner of the firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), he was an early investor in Hotmail, Memphis Meats, Mythic and Nervana Systems. He is currently a board member of SpaceX among others. He later co-founded the firm Future Ventures with Maryanna Saenko, who worked with him at DFJ.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with headquarters in both San Francisco and London. It invests primarily in tech companies.
John William Gurley is an American businessman. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in San Francisco, California. He is considered one of the top dealmakers in the American technology industry.
Matt Cohler is an American venture capitalist. He worked as Vice President of Product Management for Facebook until June 2008 and was formerly a general partner at Benchmark. Cohler has been named to the Forbes Midas List of top technology investors and in 2019 was named to the New York Times and CB Insights list of top 10 venture capital investors. Cohler made the Forbes 'America's 40 Richest Entrepreneurs Under 40' list in 2015.
AH Capital Management, LLC is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management, with $42 billion as of May 2024.
SOSV is a venture capital firm that provides pre-seed, seed, Series A and later stage funding to deep tech startups that join its startup development programs, which are located in New York City, Newark, New Jersey, and San Francisco. SOSV was founded in 1995 by Sean O'Sullivan. It is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, with additional offices in Cork, Pune, Shenzhen and Tokyo.
Uncork Capital is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California, founded by Jeff Clavier. Considered one of the most active established seed funds in Silicon Valley, it has invested in companies such as Postmates, Eventbrite, Fitbit, and SendGrid.
Rothenberg Ventures, known briefly as Frontier Technology Venture Capital, was an American venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2012 by Mike Rothenberg, who was later convicted of fraud and money laundering.
Adeo Ressi is the founder and CEO of Decile Group and Executive Chairman of Founder Institute. Decile Group is a full-stack venture capital platform for emerging managers worldwide and helped launch nearly 50% of all VC firms in 2023 with the VC Lab accelerator. Founder Institute, a pre-seed accelerator, operates chapters in over 250 cities and supports more than 7,000 portfolio companies. Ressi’s previous startups, including Methodfive, Game Trust, and Total New York, resulted in nearly $2 billion in exits by the age of 30. He has also launched 14 venture capital funds, served on the board of the X Prize Foundation, and created TheFunded.
Aileen Lee is a U.S. venture capital angel investor and co-founder of Cowboy Ventures.
Women in venture capital or VC are investors who provide venture capital funding to startups. Women make up a small fraction of the venture capital private equity workforce. A widely used source for tracking the number of women in venture capital is the Midas List which has been published by Forbes since 2001. Research from Women in VC, a global community of women venture investors, shows that the percentage of female VC partners is just shy of 5 percent.
Theresia Gouw is an entrepreneur and venture capital investor in the technology sector. She worked at Bain & Company, Release Software and Accel Partners before co-founding Aspect Ventures, a female-led venture capital firm, in 2014. According to Forbes, Gouw is the richest female venture capitalist, with a net worth of approximately $500 million, primarily due to her involvement with Accel's early investment in Facebook.
Cyan Banister is an American angel investor and entrepreneur. She is a partner at Long Journey Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund. She was an early investor in Uber, Niantic, Postmates, DeepMind, Carta, Thumbtack, Flexport, Affirm, and SpaceX, and co-founded Zivity, an adult-themed social networking site. Banister was the first woman investing partner at the venture capital Founders Fund, where she led seed and early-stage investments.
Pear VC is a seed-stage venture firm based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Pejman Nozad and Mar Hershenson in 2013. Pear VC works with early-stage companies. The company was originally based in Palo Alto, California before relocating to Menlo Park.
Roy Bahat is a venture capitalist, educator, and activist. He is currently the head of Bloomberg Beta, the venture capital arm of Bloomberg. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
General Catalyst is a global investment and transformation company that makes seed to growth stage investments and beyond. The firm has invested in 700+ businesses, including global companies such as Airbnb, Anduril, Applied Intuition, Commure, Glean, Guild, HubSpot, Kayak, Datalogix, Datto, Livongo, Gusto, Zepto, Ramp, Sword, Deliveroo, Samsara, Stripe, Snap, Mistral, and Helsing.
