VC Leaderboard: Top 25 Most Active Dealmakers Of 2009. Which venture capitalists funded the most companies last year?
We went through our funding data in CrunchBase to come up with the Dealmaker Rankings below. The most active VC was Draper Fisher Jurvetson , which invested in 57 deals throughout the year by our count, followed by Kleiner Perkins (49), New Enterprise Associates (47) Intel Capital (46), Sequoia Capital (42), First Round Capital (34), and Accel (33). You can see all top 25 in the interactive table below, which is followed by another table for just the fourth quarter of 2009. Mohr Davidow and DAG Ventures broke into the top ten for the quarter. You can compare those to the tables we published for the third quarter . The rankings are based on the number of deals each firm participated in during each time period.
Click on each VC firm name in the table to get to their CrunchBase profile, which lists all of their deals. Most Active VCs 2009 Most Active VCs Q4 09. 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 more co-investors a venture firm has, the better its network. The better its network, the better its overall returns. If this is true, then who are the most connected venture firms and angel investors today? So which venture investors have the best networks? 1. (Image: Flickr/Steve Jurveston) Global VC Blog Directory – Ranked By # of Google Reader Subscribers (May 2009) 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. My Thoughts On "Startup Depression" I received a bunch of requests yesterday to address Jason Calacanis’ "startup depression" email that was sent out over the weekend.
Alley Insider had the full text of it online but they took it down yesterday, apparently at Jason’s request. Fortunately Jason also chose to put it up on his blog so we can all read his thoughts. Thanks Jason. I think Jason’s email is a great "wakeup call" for everyone in the startup business. Life is going to get tougher for everyone in the US and possibly in all parts of the world that are tightly linked to the US economy. I particularly like Jason’s "10 specific things you can do" section. But I do think Jason’s missing one important point in his email. All startups are going to have to batten down the hatches, get leaner, and work to get profitable, but the venture backed startups are going to get more time to get through this process than those that are not venture backed.
This has gone on longer than I generally like in a post. A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms. The “Crisis” In Venture Capital. There were no venture-backed IPOs in the second quarter, and M&A deals are down.
The last time there were no VC-backed IPOs in a quarter was in 1978. The liquidity drought for venture-backed startups is so bleak that the National Venture Capital Association is calling it a “crisis.” Last quarter there were only 5 IPOs that brought in a piddling $283 million. That compares to 43 IPOs during the first half of 2007 that brought in $6.3 billion. (During the first half of 2008, 42 companies were in registration for an IPO, but they never pulled the trigger—versus 70 for the same period in 2007). The other exit avenue for startups, getting acquired, is also getting narrower. Before you cry yourself a river, consider that if VCs cannot get their money out of startups they may start to put less money into them.
—Skittish investors: 77 percent —Credit crunch/mortgage crisis: 64 percent —Sarbanes Oxley regulation: 57 percent Here are some of the other responses: National Venture Capital Association.