A meteoric rise for AI startup valuations and a smattering of IPOs, old and new, signal the beginning of a changing of the guard atop the Midas List, Forbes’ ranking of the world’s top venture capitalists.
Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the 23rd annual Midas List sees the return of investor Alfred Lin to its top spot. The Sequoia partner retakes No. 1 after two years with a portfolio bookended by a 2020 IPO in its last year of eligibility — Airbnb — and one of 2024’s few newer offerings — Reddit. Lin also gets a boost from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, where he played a role in returning CEO Sam Altman to power after a brief coup attempt in 2023.
The AI unicorn, recently valued at $86 billion, helps 7 investors onto Midas overall. They include early backer Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, who moves up a whopping 76 slots to No. 9 on this year’s list. (And that doesn’t count fellow billionaires No. 8 Reid Hoffman, who invested in OpenAI through his foundation, or No. 36 Marc Andreessen, whose firm has also purchased shares.)
You’ll find other AI standouts, such as Anthropic and Cohere, sprinkled throughout. But it’s the soaring valuation of Elon Musk’s space business, SpaceX, that helps DFJ Growth investor Randy Glein return the list at No. 14 after a decade away, one of 8 investors to reappear on Midas after dropping off. They’re joined by six newcomers, including No. 91 Trae Stephens, who cofounded and then backed defense tech unicorn Anduril for Founders Fund, and No. 98 Wesley Chan of FPV Ventures, an early Canva investor.
The 2024 Midas List features 13 women investors, matching 2021’s record number. They include No. 99 Annabelle Yu Long, a China-based newcomer at BAI Capital, and No. 86 Annie Lamont, Connecticut’s First Lady and cofounder of Oak HC/FT, appearing for the fifth time, but her first in nine years.
A data-driven ranking, the Midas List is produced annually from a combination of public data sources and the submissions of hundreds of investment partners across dozens of firms. To qualify, investors are ranked by portfolio companies that have gone public or been acquired for at least $200 million in the past five years, or that have at least doubled their private valuation to $400 million or more over the same period. Forbes and TrueBridge allow firms to share credit for a deal between up to two investors, and put a premium on liquid exits over unrealized returns. Early stage investors who deliver large multiples on money invested, and later-stage investors who return large sums of cash, can both make the list. Top Midas investors typically achieve both, across a dozen or more eligible investments.
0:00 Introduction
0:48 What Is The Major Shift Of The Forbes Midas 2024 List?
3:11 What Top AI Innovators Are On This Year's List?
6:49 Women In Tech: Are There More Women Present On The Midas 2024 List
9:20 What Surprises Were Discovered When Building The Midas 2024 List
Read the full story on Forbes: https://ww
Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the 23rd annual Midas List sees the return of investor Alfred Lin to its top spot. The Sequoia partner retakes No. 1 after two years with a portfolio bookended by a 2020 IPO in its last year of eligibility — Airbnb — and one of 2024’s few newer offerings — Reddit. Lin also gets a boost from ChatGPT maker OpenAI, where he played a role in returning CEO Sam Altman to power after a brief coup attempt in 2023.
The AI unicorn, recently valued at $86 billion, helps 7 investors onto Midas overall. They include early backer Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, who moves up a whopping 76 slots to No. 9 on this year’s list. (And that doesn’t count fellow billionaires No. 8 Reid Hoffman, who invested in OpenAI through his foundation, or No. 36 Marc Andreessen, whose firm has also purchased shares.)
You’ll find other AI standouts, such as Anthropic and Cohere, sprinkled throughout. But it’s the soaring valuation of Elon Musk’s space business, SpaceX, that helps DFJ Growth investor Randy Glein return the list at No. 14 after a decade away, one of 8 investors to reappear on Midas after dropping off. They’re joined by six newcomers, including No. 91 Trae Stephens, who cofounded and then backed defense tech unicorn Anduril for Founders Fund, and No. 98 Wesley Chan of FPV Ventures, an early Canva investor.
The 2024 Midas List features 13 women investors, matching 2021’s record number. They include No. 99 Annabelle Yu Long, a China-based newcomer at BAI Capital, and No. 86 Annie Lamont, Connecticut’s First Lady and cofounder of Oak HC/FT, appearing for the fifth time, but her first in nine years.
A data-driven ranking, the Midas List is produced annually from a combination of public data sources and the submissions of hundreds of investment partners across dozens of firms. To qualify, investors are ranked by portfolio companies that have gone public or been acquired for at least $200 million in the past five years, or that have at least doubled their private valuation to $400 million or more over the same period. Forbes and TrueBridge allow firms to share credit for a deal between up to two investors, and put a premium on liquid exits over unrealized returns. Early stage investors who deliver large multiples on money invested, and later-stage investors who return large sums of cash, can both make the list. Top Midas investors typically achieve both, across a dozen or more eligible investments.
0:00 Introduction
0:48 What Is The Major Shift Of The Forbes Midas 2024 List?
3:11 What Top AI Innovators Are On This Year's List?
6:49 Women In Tech: Are There More Women Present On The Midas 2024 List
9:20 What Surprises Were Discovered When Building The Midas 2024 List
Read the full story on Forbes: https://ww
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TechTranscript
00:00 (upbeat music)
00:03 - Hi, I'm David Jeans, I'm a tech reporter at Forbes.
00:06 Today I'm very happy to be joined by Alex Conrad,
00:09 who's the editor of the Midas List.
00:11 And I'm wondering, Alex, if you could give us
00:14 a bit of a primer on the Midas List
00:16 for those of us at home who are not living,
00:19 breathing, eating venture capital.
00:21 - Yeah, no problem, David, thanks for having me.
00:24 So I've been the editor of the Midas List for 10 years,
00:27 and Forbes has been doing the list for 23 years.
00:30 If you're wondering what the heck it is,
00:31 why we've done it for so long,
00:32 it is the ranking of the top tech investors in the world,
00:36 venture capitalists we call them,
00:37 and Forbes has been making that
00:39 definitive data-driven ranking since 2000,
00:42 with one year off during the financial crisis of the aughts.
00:45 But for a very long time.
00:47 - I guess, I mean, maybe just before we launch
00:50 into this year's list, could you give me a bit of an idea
00:52 of what you've seen over the past 10 years,
00:55 from when you started working on the list to now?
00:58 What's the major shift that you've sort of seen?
01:00 - It's interesting to see these different companies
01:04 and investors kind of have these highs and lows
01:07 over the list in the years.
01:09 We've seen three prominent people retire
01:11 from last year's list, so some titans of the industry,
01:14 who people may have heard of before, like Gary Tan,
01:17 who retired because he's now president and CEO
01:19 of Y Combinator, a big startup accelerator,
01:22 he's off the list this year.
01:23 Then you have folks like Michael Moritz and Bill Gurley,
01:26 who are investors in companies like Stripe and Uber,
01:30 they have retired, and they're off the list.
01:33 Then you have all these new faces come on over the years,
01:36 thanks to newer companies, whether it's OpenAI,
01:39 or Airbnb going public, or ByteDance in China.
01:43 - So in the past year, there's been a lot that has changed
01:47 in the tech space at large.
01:49 I wonder how this appears in the list,
01:52 and what's been the major shift of the past 12 months?
01:55 - On the one hand, the Midas list has been
01:57 a little more stagnant in the last couple years
01:59 than I would have liked to see.
02:00 I feel a little bit sometimes like that meme
02:02 of John Travolta standing in the empty room,
02:04 kind of looking around, because we want to see more IPOs.
02:08 And IPOs have been historically
02:10 the biggest driver of the list,
02:11 whether it was Google back in the day, to Facebook,
02:14 to more recently a company like Airbnb,
02:16 or Snowflake and Enterprise.
02:18 Those IPOs create huge liquidity events for their investors,
02:22 and for the Midas list, that is the pinnacle.
02:25 You want to be returning money to investors.
02:27 That is what a venture capitalist
02:28 is ultimately supposed to do.
02:30 Lately, it's been more podcasting and tweeting,
02:33 but making money is ultimately
02:34 the name of the game for them.
02:35 And so those IPOs are what you really want to see.
02:38 And so one thing that's interesting with this year's list
02:40 is you're seeing a couple companies
02:42 like Snowflake and Airbnb on their last legs,
02:44 but they were just so big that the IPOs
02:47 that we've seen in more recent months
02:50 haven't really had that effect on the list yet.
02:52 You know, a company like Rubrik was a great IPO,
02:55 or Klaviyo last year, but they were kind of small
02:58 compared to those Airbnbs.
03:00 And so we're still seeing those older companies
03:02 being big drivers on the list,
03:04 with a big caveat of private companies like SpaceX
03:08 and OpenAI starting to push people up the ranks.
03:11 - Well, talking about OpenAI,
03:13 I wonder just the AI question.
03:15 Is AI driving up certain investors on the list this year?
03:20 - It definitely is.
03:21 AI is a big theme of the Midas list.
03:23 Alfred Lin is back at number one.
03:25 He was on number one on the, let me start that over.
03:29 It definitely is, and AI is a big theme
03:31 on this year's Midas list.
03:32 It starts with our number one of the list,
03:34 Alfred Lin from Sequoia, who was number one two years ago
03:37 and then dropped to number three.
03:39 He is one of a couple investors
03:41 who are key backers of Sam Altman at OpenAI.
03:44 Obviously, Sam and OpenAI have been in the news
03:47 quite a lot recently, and not only for good news,
03:50 plenty of kind of tougher news too,
03:53 but it's a huge company in the AI space.
03:55 And Sequoia and Alfred were instrumental
03:58 in that behind-the-scenes effort last year
04:00 to try to kind of keep Sam in power there.
04:03 So it's a theme with him.
04:05 You also see people like Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla
04:08 moving into the top 10.
04:10 Vinod is the biggest mover of people
04:12 who are already on the list this year,
04:14 going all the way into the top 10 from the '80s,
04:16 because he was the first institutional check into OpenAI.
04:20 But then you see Hugging Face, Anthropic,
04:23 other companies are starting to drive investors
04:25 higher up on the list as well.
04:27 - Any surprising newcomers that you've noticed?
04:31 - We have actually more returnees,
04:33 people who had dropped off the list
04:35 and then are coming back on, like Randy Glein,
04:37 a key SpaceX investor who dropped off the list for 10 years
04:41 and he's back.
04:42 He was on the first one I worked on,
04:44 and then I never saw him again, and now he's back.
04:46 So we're seeing some of these returnees,
04:49 eight of them back on the list,
04:51 and only six true newcomers this year.
04:53 But one of the more interesting true newcomers
04:55 is someone I think you know,
04:57 the co-founder of Anduril and Defense Tech,
04:59 Trey Stevens at Founders Fund.
05:01 So he's on the list for his investment in Anduril
05:04 as well as some other bets.
05:05 And I think that's interesting to see maybe Defense Tech
05:09 getting represented on the list.
05:11 He's someone that you've also reported around as well
05:13 in your coverage, right David?
05:15 - Yeah, I think that especially recently,
05:18 we've been focusing a lot of our reporting efforts
05:21 on looking at the Defense Tech space
05:23 and more broadly that sort of clashing of ideologies
05:27 of Silicon Valley and Pentagon.
05:29 And it's actually born huge multi-billion dollar companies.
05:33 We're seeing a lot of unicorns emerge.
05:36 But I think that there remains the big question mark
05:40 over how investors and the general sector
05:44 is going to view Anduril at a potential exit.
05:47 Because if Anduril makes a really solid exit,
05:51 then it will boost the rest of the Defense Tech space.
05:55 But if it's lukewarm or not what people are expecting,
05:58 then it'll have a ripple effect
06:00 that I don't think we can foresee at the moment.
06:04 - Well, Trey being on there is now our flag planted
06:08 for that category with Midas.
06:10 But we have seen Palantir be a big driver
06:12 on the list in the past.
06:13 Peter Thiel is always pretty high on the Midas list.
06:16 And what's interesting is that you don't get on Midas
06:19 if you're a co-founder of one of these companies
06:21 just for the equity of founding the company.
06:23 Although that is how a lot of these people
06:24 become billionaires, not necessarily just their investments.
06:28 But then folks like Trey and Peter
06:30 also work at venture funds and invest in the companies
06:33 that they've co-founded as well.
06:35 And that's how they get onto Midas.
06:37 Which is why you'll see Peter there, you'll see Trey there,
06:40 but not necessarily someone like Joe Lonsdale
06:42 who's been on the list in the past for Palantir,
06:44 but is not on this year.
06:45 So that's one kind of interesting quirk of venture capital.
06:49 - What about, how many are we seeing more or less women
06:52 on the list this year?
06:54 - So we have 13 women on the list this year.
06:56 That's two more than the past couple years.
06:58 So slight improvement.
07:00 Of course, we would like to see even better representation
07:03 moving more to that 50/50 over time.
07:05 But 13% is a small improvement.
07:09 One of the more notable returnees is Annie Lamont,
07:12 the first lady of Connecticut,
07:13 who is the co-founder of a firm called Oak HTFC
07:16 and has done some interesting digital health companies.
07:19 We've also seen a notable newcomer woman from China,
07:23 Annabelle Yu Long of Bicapital,
07:25 which used to be Bertelsmann's investment arm there.
07:28 China, interestingly, has the same number of investors
07:31 this year as last year, 17.
07:33 But I would say it's kind of softer year for China
07:36 because a couple of those investors, from what we've heard,
07:39 are spending more of their time in Singapore
07:41 and are increasingly not really China-based anyway.
07:44 And we've seen Chinese investors drop down
07:47 on the list a little bit.
07:48 They're not quite as high up.
07:50 And interestingly enough, two of the firms
07:53 on the Midas list this year didn't exist last year
07:56 because they are splinters of international firms
08:00 that wanted to divest their Chinese business.
08:02 So as you've written about, as we both know,
08:06 for our audience to know, there's been a lot of pressure
08:10 to divest certain Chinese businesses in the US.
08:13 And so Sequoia and GGV Capital,
08:16 which both put a lot of people on the list each year,
08:19 splintered off their Chinese firms.
08:21 So you see Hongshan,
08:22 which is formerly Sequoia's China business,
08:25 and Granite Asia, which was part of GGV,
08:28 both now putting the same people on the list,
08:31 but under a new banner.
08:33 - Where do you expect that we're gonna see that trend go?
08:36 I mean, are we gonna see less Chinese investors
08:40 on the list in the years to come?
08:42 - I do think it will be harder for Chinese investors
08:44 to make Midas moving forward.
08:46 I think that we're waiting to see if ByteDance,
08:48 Xi'an, Timu, if these companies can actually go public.
08:52 There was an interesting report just this week
08:54 that Xi'an has had to maybe table hopes
08:58 of going public in the US.
09:00 And that historically was how these Chinese investors
09:02 did so well on Midas,
09:03 is their companies would get really big,
09:05 they'd do business in the US,
09:06 they'd go public in the US.
09:08 I don't know if that's still gonna happen.
09:09 And I think what happens to ByteDance is a huge question mark
09:12 you know, with the TikTok potential shutdown.
09:15 So I would say maybe tougher times for China
09:18 on the Midas list in the next few years.
09:20 - Is there one big surprise that you came across
09:24 when you were putting the list together,
09:25 where you were like, what happened there?
09:29 - Well, I do think SpaceX is a really interesting company
09:31 here because it is so big, you know,
09:33 it's valued approaching $200 billion
09:36 that it's already as powerful as some public companies
09:40 in putting people on the Midas list.
09:43 But is it ever gonna go public?
09:44 You know, does Elon really want it to go public?
09:46 There's been chatter that maybe Starlink,
09:50 you know, the satellite business that you've written about
09:52 might get spun out and go public.
09:54 Maybe SpaceX goes public.
09:56 What do you think?
09:57 Do you think that's a possibility?
09:58 'Cause that would be a massive driver on Midas,
10:01 you know, in future years.
10:03 - It's another sort of TBD on the future
10:05 of that company there too.
10:07 - Awesome, well, yeah, I mean, all in all,
10:09 I would say it was an interesting year for Midas
10:11 where we saw AI moving up, maybe China moving down.
10:16 Some notable names saying goodbye to the list,
10:19 becoming, you know, alumni of the list moving forward.
10:22 But I do think that in the next couple of years,
10:25 if we do see companies like SpaceX or others,
10:27 you know, Stripe is a great example, finally going public,
10:31 that's when you may see a whole new herd of faces
10:34 onto the Midas list in the future.
10:36 - Alex, thanks for joining us.
10:37 (upbeat music)
10:40 (upbeat music)
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