VC
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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.
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 Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists
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.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.”