The VC League

Sidhant Joshi

What us college students seek in our parents in our initial stage of an independent life, i.e. guidance, resources and trust, Start-ups seek from Venture Capitalists(VCs). VCs are defined to be proficient and heavily resourceful investors, betting in their resources and funds on a Start-up or a business which doesn’t have a solid backing portfolio or collateral for the banks to approve them of a loan. Since it is a high-risk business, the gain/loss scale is rather of a humongous amount. Any successful VC has strict and high standard standards expected out of their investment interests. In return for their investment, they are provided a hefty Equity share in the company.

It takes considerable sense of foreseeing the future of a new volatile brand, to study their prospect and knowing what it could lead to. It’s not just whom they invest in, it’s also about what’s the perfect amount to invest, what’s the trust factor and various other factors. Here we recognise some such eclectic visionaries, who have chosen and then nurtured to-be-successful start-ups from when they are a small risky business with a great idea.

1.      1.  David Marquadt – A humble business graduate from Columbia and Stanford University, he went on to work as Design Engineer and Development Manager at a tech firm which was later acquired by Xerox. He went on to co-found his first VC firm Technology Venture Investors(TVI), which was the sole investor in the giant conglomerate we now know as Microsoft. He was on Microsoft’s Board of Directors up until 2014, that’s more than 30 years. His portfolio includes now tech giants like Sun Microsystems, Seagate and Adaptec. He is now serving as co-founder and senior partner at August Capital.

2.      2.  Jim Goetz – Known as Midas Hand among the VC culture, Jim Goetz boasts of one of the “best deals” in venture capital history, the Facebook acquisition of WhatsApp. He is currently a VC at angelic VC firm Sequoia Capital based in Silicon Valley. He has also served as General Partner at Accel Partners. He sits on board of directors for over 5 of Billion-plus companies. Other of his notable exits are Wipro’s $500 Million acquisition of Appirio, HubSpot’s IPO.

3.     3.   Steve Anderson – You know someone’s a VC mogul when their investments are bought by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Electronic Arts, eBay, LinkedIn, Autodesk and Google. Instagram, started as an uncertain photo-sharing tool, handled by two even unsure coders. Steve Anderson wrote them a $250,000 cheque, which we all know now formed to be the market leader in social media. He went on to start his own VC firm by the name of Baseline Ventures which focusses on seed and growth-stage investments in tech companies. Baseline, went on to fund companies like Twitter, Heroku. He is also a prominent name in the Forbes Midas VC list.

4.     4.   Reid Hoffman -  Hoffman is Silicon Valley’s LinkedIn, and also the co-founder of LinkedIn. Unanimously, he is often defined by the phrases “the most connected person in Silicon “Valley” and “the person you want to talk to when you are starting a company”. If that doesn’t prove his proficiency, his boastful portfolio of investments like PayPal, Airbnb, Facebook, Edmodo, Coupons.com, Change.org, Zynga, Flickr and Last.fm certainly do the job. He joined Greylock Partners to run their $20 Million fund. His According to venture capitalist David Sze, Hoffman "is arguably the most successful angel investor in the past decade."

5.     5.   Peter Thiel – Born in Germany, educated at Stanford, and rocking the economic market since co-founding PayPal and being an initial investor at Facebook. His current net worth exceeds $2 Billion, and has been featured in the Forbes VC Midas List. After his $1.5 Billion sale of PayPal to eBay, he went on to find Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund. He now sits in the Board of 8 companies like Facebook and Palantir Technologies. Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which rewards and mentors students who opt to pursue their ideas and businesses and drop out of college. 

6.     6.   Kirsten Green – An associate at investment bank Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette and then Vice President at Bank of America(Securities), Kirsten Green has a professional history which has given her due experience in the investment market. She went on to launch San Francisco- based Forerunner Ventures in 2010, where she currently serves as Founder and Managing Director. Her personal and partner investments count around 50 Ventures. Her claim to VC fame have been her investments in Dollar Shave Club and Jet.com, two of the most high-profile e-commerce exits in the recent years, selling to Walmart and Unilever.