Career in PE & VC. Venture Associations. Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship: Private Equity Glossary. Venture Players. Private Equiteer. The Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists. Do venture investors with the biggest and best networks end up producing the best returns?
An academic paper from a few years ago by Yael Hochberg, Alexander Ljungqvist, and Yang Lu titled “Whom You Know Matters: Venture Capital Networks and Investment Performance” (embedded at the bottom of this post) suggests that is the case. They looked at historic venture returns and found that “better-networked VC firms experience significantly better fund performance,” as measured by how many of the companies in their portfolios exited via an IPO or acquisition.
A venture firm’s network in the study was defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds. The Top VC Blogs (According To Google Reader) Venture capitalists can be valuable sources of information about the tech community.
Not only do they have quality insider information but they also have a knack for figuring out how to evaluate startups. So it makes sense that their blogs can be compelling reads. Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, has compiled a list of the 100 top VC blogs, according to the number of Google Reader subscribers for each one. Cheng admits that the rankings don’t necessarily equate to the best quality of content and that there is fine content coming from VC blogs with less subscribers.
But the list is a good starting point.