The 100 Most Notable People in Venture

Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, wrote Facebook's first outside check, and started Founders Fund, whose portfolio includes SpaceX, Stripe, Palantir, and Anduril. He chairs Palantir Technologies and is known for contrarian views on competition, progress, and politics. His startup handbook Zero to One remains one of the most widely read books in the field.

Ben Horowitz ran Loudcloud and Opsware through the dot-com crash and sold the company to HP for $1.6 billion before co-founding Andreessen Horowitz in 2009. He led the firm's investments in companies such as Okta, Databricks, and Nicira, and writes about management with a signature habit of opening chapters with rap lyrics. His two books on leadership and company culture are staples of startup reading lists.

Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn, served on PayPal's founding team, and has been a partner at Greylock since 2009, where his investments included Airbnb and Aurora. A prolific author and podcast host, he has written extensively on networks, scaling, and artificial intelligence, and co-founded the AI startups Inflection AI and Manas AI. In 2026 he announced he would leave Microsoft's board to spend more time on Manas AI's drug-discovery work.

Vinod Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems, spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins, and started Khosla Ventures in 2004 to back what he calls high-risk, high-consequence technology bets. His firm was the first venture investor in OpenAI, a position that put him at No. 1 on the 2026 Forbes Midas List. He is a longtime advocate for technology-driven solutions in climate, healthcare, and AI.

Bill Gurley spent over two decades as a general partner at Benchmark, where his board seats included Uber, GrubHub, Zillow, and Stitch Fix. A former Wall Street research analyst, he is known for his long-form blog Above the Crowd and for public warnings about late-stage valuations and market structure. He stepped back from active investing at Benchmark in 2020 and now co-hosts the BG2 podcast with Brad Gerstner.

Paul Graham co-founded Viaweb, one of the first web application companies, and sold it to Yahoo before starting Y Combinator in 2005 with Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell. YC's batch model reshaped how early-stage startups are funded, producing companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. His essays on startups, programming, and ambition are among the most-read writing in the technology industry.

Sam Altman ran Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019 before leaving to lead OpenAI, where as CEO he oversaw the launch of ChatGPT and the models that followed. Earlier he co-founded the location startup Loopt and the angel vehicle Hydrazine Capital, and his personal bets have included Stripe, Reddit, and Helion. He remains OpenAI's chief executive as of mid-2026.

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in 1981 and turned an early $20 million stake in Alibaba into one of the most profitable investments ever made. Through the $100 billion Vision Fund he rewrote the scale of venture investing, backing hundreds of companies including Arm, DoorDash, and Coupang alongside high-profile losses like WeWork. In recent years he has concentrated SoftBank's firepower on artificial intelligence, including major commitments to OpenAI and the Stargate data-center project.

Chamath Palihapitiya led Facebook's growth team before founding Social Capital in 2011, which he later converted into a holding company that no longer takes outside capital. He popularized the SPAC boom of 2020-2021, taking Virgin Galactic and others public, and co-hosts the All-In podcast. He continues to run Social Capital and, more recently, the industrial AI company 8090.

Michael Moritz began as a Time journalist who wrote an early book on Apple, then joined Sequoia Capital in 1986 and backed Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. He served as one of Sequoia's leaders alongside Doug Leone before stepping away from the firm in 2023 after nearly four decades. He now advises Sequoia Heritage, the independent wealth-management office he helped launch, and funds large-scale philanthropy through Crankstart.

John Doerr joined Kleiner Perkins in 1980 after selling chips at Intel and went on to back Google, Amazon, Netscape, and Sun Microsystems. He brought Andy Grove's OKR goal-setting system to Google and turned it into the management bestseller Measure What Matters. Now the firm's chairman, he devotes much of his time to climate technology and funded Stanford's school of sustainability.

Fred Wilson co-founded Union Square Ventures in 2003 after a decade at Flatiron Partners, anchoring New York's venture scene through investments in Twitter, Etsy, Tumblr, and Coinbase. His daily blog AVC, written for more than two decades, made him one of the most transparent practitioners in the business. USV's thesis-driven approach to networks and, later, crypto has kept him on the Forbes Midas List into 2026.

Mary Meeker was Morgan Stanley's lead internet analyst during the 1990s boom, earning the nickname 'Queen of the Net,' and her annual Internet Trends report became required reading across the industry. She moved into venture capital at Kleiner Perkins in 2010 and founded the growth firm BOND in 2019, backing companies such as Stripe, Canva, and Plaid. Her 2025 report on AI trends extended a research franchise that has run for three decades.

Doug Leone joined Sequoia Capital in 1988 and ran the firm for more than two decades, first with Michael Moritz and later as sole global managing partner, expanding it into India, China, and Southeast Asia. His own investments included ServiceNow, Aruba Networks, and Nubank. He handed firm leadership to Roelof Botha in 2022 but continues to invest, ranking in the top ten of the Forbes Midas List in 2025 and 2026.

Roelof Botha was PayPal's CFO before joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, where he backed YouTube, Square, MongoDB, and Unity and led the firm as steward from 2022. In November 2025 he passed the steward role to Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, staying on in an advisory capacity, and in June 2026 he joined the board of SpaceX shortly after its IPO. He appeared near the top of the Forbes Midas List throughout the 2020s.

David Sacks was PayPal's COO, founded Yammer and sold it to Microsoft for $1.2 billion, and co-founded Craft Ventures in 2017 to invest in SaaS and marketplace startups. He served as the White House AI and crypto czar from late 2024 until March 2026, when his special-government-employee term ended, and now co-chairs the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology while remaining a Craft partner. He is also a co-host of the All-In podcast.

Naval Ravikant co-founded AngelList, the platform that turned angel investing into infrastructure through syndicates and rolling funds. His own early checks included Twitter, Uber, and Postmates, and his writing and podcast appearances on wealth, leverage, and happiness have earned him an audience well beyond Silicon Valley. He remains AngelList's chairman and continues to invest personally.

Keith Rabois held early executive roles at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square before building an investing record that spans Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Faire. He co-founded the proptech company Opendoor and has alternated between Khosla Ventures and Founders Fund, returning to Khosla as a managing director in early 2024. He is known for strong opinions on startup talent density and for championing Miami as a tech hub.

Josh Kushner founded Thrive Capital in 2010 and built it into one of the defining growth firms of the era, with concentrated positions in OpenAI, Stripe, and Databricks and an early win in Instagram. He also co-founded the health insurer Oscar Health. Thrive's outsized OpenAI bet helped put him on the 2026 Forbes Midas List at No. 33.

Jason Calacanis sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL, then became one of the best-known angel investors of his generation with early checks in Uber, Robinhood, and Calm. Through LAUNCH he runs accelerator programs, syndicates, and funds, and his podcast This Week in Startups has run since 2009. He wrote Angel, a how-to guide for new startup investors, and co-hosts the All-In podcast.

Harry Stebbings started The Twenty Minute VC podcast as a teenager in London and turned its network into 20VC, a venture firm whose limited partners include dozens of unicorn founders. His 2024 fund closed at $400 million, split across seed and Series A investing in Europe and the US. He is one of the most visible advocates for European startups and interviews the industry's leading investors and founders weekly.

Garry Tan wrote the first check to Coinbase and backed Instacart and Flexport as co-founder of Initialized Capital, after earlier co-founding Posterous and designing at Palantir. He became Y Combinator's president and CEO in January 2023, winding down the Continuity growth fund and refocusing the accelerator on early-stage AI companies. He ranked No. 6 on the 2023 Forbes Midas List, his last appearance before returning to YC.

Jessica Livingston co-founded Y Combinator in 2005 and shaped its culture, running operations and famously screening founders for determination and honesty during interviews. Her book Founders at Work, a collection of candid interviews with startup founders, became a classic of the genre. She also created YC's Startup School and co-hosts the Social Radars podcast with fellow YC partner Carolynn Levy.

Ron Conway has been Silicon Valley's archetypal super angel since the 1990s, backing Google, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb, first through Angel Investors LP and then through SV Angel. He is also a fixture in San Francisco civic life, organizing the tech industry around local politics and philanthropy. In April 2026 he disclosed a cancer diagnosis and stepped back from day-to-day work, with his sons Topher and Ronny leading the firm.

A partner at Sequoia Capital since 2010, Alfred Lin led the firm's investments in Airbnb, DoorDash, and OpenAI. Before venture he was COO and chairman of Zappos through its sale to Amazon. He topped the Forbes Midas List in 2021, 2024, and 2025.

Brad Gerstner founded Altimeter Capital in 2008 and runs it as a crossover firm spanning public and private technology investing, with signature positions in Snowflake and ByteDance. He also launched Invest America, the initiative behind federally seeded investment accounts for American children, and co-hosts the BG2 podcast with Bill Gurley.

Chris Dixon co-founded the startups SiteAdvisor and Hunch before joining Andreessen Horowitz in 2013, where he built and leads a16z crypto, the firm's multi-billion-dollar web3 arm. His investments include Coinbase, Uniswap, and OpenSea, and he ranked first on the Midas List in 2022. His book Read Write Own makes the case for blockchain-based networks as the internet's next architecture.

Elad Gil is the most prominent of venture's solo general partners, raising billion-dollar funds under his Gil Capital and Cosmic-Aleph vehicles to back companies including Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Anduril, and Perplexity. A former Google and Twitter executive, he co-founded Color Health and wrote the High Growth Handbook. He ranked sixth on the 2026 Midas List.

Aileen Lee founded the seed-stage firm Cowboy Ventures in 2012 after more than a decade at Kleiner Perkins. She coined the term 'unicorn' for billion-dollar startups in a 2013 essay and co-founded All Raise, the nonprofit working to advance women in venture capital.

Jim Breyer made one of venture capital's defining investments when he led Accel's 2005 Series A in Facebook. He founded Breyer Capital in 2006 and later relocated the firm to Austin, where he invests across AI, healthcare, and fintech.

Peter Fenton has been a general partner at Benchmark since 2006, following early years at Accel. His investments and board seats have included Twitter, Yelp, New Relic, Elastic, and Zuora, making him one of the longest-tenured recurring names on the Midas List.

Sarah Tavel joined Benchmark in 2017 as the firm's first woman general partner, backing Chainalysis, Hipcamp, and 11x, and transitioned to a venture partner role in 2025 to spend more time exploring AI. Earlier she was a product leader at Pinterest and a partner at Greylock. She writes a widely read newsletter on marketplaces, consumer products, and AI.

Danny Rimer opened Index Ventures' London office in 2002 and its San Francisco office a decade later, becoming known for consumer and design-led investments including Figma, Discord, Etsy, and Glossier. Figma's 2025 IPO helped propel him back up the Midas List in 2026.

Hemant Taneja became CEO of General Catalyst in 2021 and has reshaped it into a global investment company focused on AI, healthcare, defense, energy, and financial services. His investments include Stripe, Samsara, Gusto, Ro, and Anduril, and he has co-written several books, most recently The Transformation Principles.

Neil Shen founded Sequoia Capital China in 2005 and now leads HongShan, the independent firm it became in 2023 and one of Asia's largest venture investors. A co-founder of Ctrip and Home Inns before turning to venture, he backed Meituan, Pinduoduo, and ByteDance, and has ranked first on the Forbes Midas List more times than any other investor.

Yuri Milner founded DST Global, whose large late-stage checks into Facebook and Twitter, taken without board seats, changed how growth investing works. The firm went on to back Alibaba, WhatsApp, Spotify, and Stripe. Milner also co-founded the Breakthrough Prize and wrote Eureka Manifesto, a short book on humanity's role in the universe.

Chase Coleman founded Tiger Global Management in 2001 as a descendant of Julian Robertson's Tiger Management and built it into a technology investor spanning public equities and private companies. Its venture business deployed capital at unprecedented pace into companies including Facebook, JD.com, Stripe, and Databricks.

Philippe Laffont, a Tiger Management alumnus, founded Coatue in 1999 and grew it into a technology-focused crossover firm investing from early venture rounds through public markets. Coatue's portfolio has included Snap, Spotify, ByteDance, and OpenAI, and Laffont has become a visible voice on AI's investment cycle.

Lee Fixel ran Tiger Global's private investing business for 13 years, where he championed Flipkart, Peloton, and a generation of Indian startups, before founding Addition in 2020. The New York firm raised more than $5 billion across its first four funds to back early and growth-stage companies, while Fixel kept his famously low public profile.

Katie Haun spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor, leading some of the government's first cryptocurrency cases, before becoming a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. She founded Haun Ventures in 2022 with one of the largest debut fundraises ever led by a woman, and closed another $1 billion in 2026 to invest across crypto, AI agents, and financial infrastructure.

Sarah Guo left a general partner role at Greylock to found Conviction in 2022, an early-stage firm built around the thesis of 'software 3.0' and AI-native companies. Her investments include Mistral AI and Harvey, and she co-hosts the AI podcast No Priors. She debuted on the Midas List in 2026.

Nat Friedman co-founded Xamarin and served as CEO of GitHub, where he oversaw the launch of Copilot. With Daniel Gross he ran the venture fund NFDG and the AI Grant program, backing startups including Perplexity and Safe Superintelligence, before Meta recruited the pair in mid-2025 to help lead Meta Superintelligence Labs, where he heads AI products.

Daniel Gross sold his startup Cue to Apple, became Y Combinator's first AI-focused partner, and founded the talent accelerator Pioneer before co-founding Safe Superintelligence with Ilya Sutskever in 2024. He invested alongside Nat Friedman through their fund NFDG until July 2025, when he left SSI to join Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies and Addepar before starting 8VC, which he runs from Austin with a portfolio concentrated in defense, logistics, life sciences, and government software. He also co-founded the University of Austin and the Cicero Institute, and is an active voice on technology policy.

Alexis Ohanian co-founded Reddit in 2005 and the venture firm Initialized Capital before launching Seven Seven Six in 2020 to invest at the earliest stages. He has become one of the most prominent backers of women's sports, including as a founding owner of Angel City FC, and wrote Without Their Permission about building on the open internet.

Tim Draper, a third-generation venture capitalist, co-founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson and now invests through Draper Associates. He is known for early bets on Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, and Twitch, a headline-making 2014 purchase of US Marshals-auctioned bitcoin, and Draper University, his entrepreneurship school in San Mateo.

Steve Case co-founded America Online, the company that brought much of the United States online, and led it through the AOL-Time Warner merger. He now chairs Revolution, the Washington, DC investment firm whose Rise of the Rest funds back startups outside the coastal tech hubs, a thesis he has laid out in two books.

Brad Feld co-founded the Boulder venture firm Foundry and the accelerator Techstars, after earlier partnerships at Mobius Venture Capital and years of angel investing. He is equally known for his writing, including Venture Deals, the standard reference on term sheets, and a long-running blog on startups, community building, and mental health.

Mike Maples Jr co-founded Floodgate with Ann Miura-Ko and helped establish seed investing as its own category, writing early checks into Twitter, Twitch, Lyft, and Okta. A former software executive at Tivoli Systems and Motive, he co-wrote Pattern Breakers on why startups that break with the past succeed, and hosts the Pattern Breakers podcast.

Ann Miura-Ko co-founded Floodgate with Mike Maples Jr. and helped define the modern seed-stage playbook, backing Lyft and Refactor Capital-era startups before micro-VC was mainstream. A Stanford PhD who lectures at the university, she is a frequent voice on what she calls 'thunder lizard' startups and co-founded the nonprofit All Raise to support women in venture.

Kirsten Green founded Forerunner Ventures in 2010 and built it into the definitive consumer-focused venture firm, with early bets on Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Glossier, Chime and Hims & Hers. A former equity analyst covering retail, she pairs consumer-behavior research with early-stage investing and has been a fixture on the Forbes Midas List for seven straight years.

Mamoon Hamid joined Kleiner Perkins in 2017 to lead the storied firm's return to early-stage form, after co-founding Social Capital and backing Slack, Box and Intercom in their earliest rounds. His Series A bet on Figma, acquired attention through its 2025 IPO, helped carry him to the top tier of the Forbes Midas List, where he ranked 12th in 2026.

Jeremy Liew wrote the first venture check into Snapchat and backed Affirm and The Honest Company as Lightspeed's original consumer specialist, having joined the firm in 2006. He stepped back from making new investments in 2021 and remains a partner, focused on supporting his existing portfolio and mentoring Lightspeed's next generation of consumer investors.

Josh Kopelman founded First Round Capital in 2004 and turned it into a model for institutional seed investing, with early checks into Uber, Square, Roblox and Notion. A serial entrepreneur who sold Half.com to eBay, he built First Round's community-driven approach to supporting founders and remains a partner at the Philadelphia-based firm.

Steve Jurvetson co-founded Future Ventures in 2019 to make long-horizon bets on deep tech, after two decades at Draper Fisher Jurvetson where he backed SpaceX, Tesla and Hotmail. He is one of the longest-serving board members at SpaceX, and his frontier-tech portfolio returned him to the Forbes Midas List in 2026 at number 62.

Balaji Srinivasan is a prolific angel investor and technologist who served as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and as Coinbase's chief technology officer. Author of The Network State, he now runs The Network School, a residential program for founders in Forest City, Malaysia, while continuing to write seed checks into crypto infrastructure and AI tooling. He has no institutional fund, operating instead as a solo angel and essayist.

Kai-Fu Lee founded Sinovation Ventures in 2009 after leading Google China, and became one of the most influential voices bridging the US and Chinese technology worlds. He remains chairman of the firm while running 01.AI, the large-language-model company he founded in 2023, and has written widely read books on artificial intelligence including AI Superpowers and AI 2041.

Jenny Lee is a senior managing partner at Granite Asia, the Singapore-based multi-asset investment platform that emerged from GGV Capital's 2024 split. A former jet engineer, she built her reputation on early bets in Chinese and Southeast Asian technology companies and was among the first women to reach the upper ranks of the Forbes Midas List, appearing on it every year from 2020 through 2025.

Hans Tung is a managing partner at Notable Capital, the US-focused firm formed when GGV Capital split its American and Asian operations in 2024. Known for early investments in Xiaomi, Airbnb, StockX and Affirm, he reached as high as number 3 on the Forbes Midas List in 2021 and hosts a popular podcast interviewing founders on company building.

Niklas Zennström co-founded Skype and then built Atomico into one of Europe's largest venture firms, backing companies like Klarna, Supercell and Stripe from its London base. The Swedish entrepreneur remains Atomico's CEO and founding partner, and has spent two decades arguing that Europe can produce technology companies of global scale.

Micky Malka founded Ribbit Capital in 2012 as a fintech-only venture firm and backed Coinbase, Robinhood, Nubank and Revolut before financial technology was fashionable. The Venezuelan-born investor held the number 2 spot on the Forbes Midas List for three consecutive years from 2022 to 2024, one of the most sustained runs near the top of the ranking.

Fred Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase and later Paradigm, the crypto investment firm he started with Matt Huang in 2018. He stepped back from Paradigm's day-to-day management in 2023 and now serves as its senior advisor while running Nudge, the neurotechnology startup he founded to build non-invasive brain interfaces using focused ultrasound.

Matt Huang co-founded Paradigm with Fred Ehrsam in 2018 and leads the firm as its sole managing partner, building one of the largest investment platforms dedicated to crypto and frontier technology. A former Sequoia partner who made an early personal investment in ByteDance, he has steered Paradigm's positions in Uniswap, Optimism and other core crypto infrastructure.

Brian Singerman spent over 15 years as a general partner at Founders Fund, where he led the firm's investments in Anduril, Oscar Health and The Boring Company, before moving to partner emeritus at the end of 2024. In 2025 he co-founded GPx with Quiet Capital's Lee Linden, closing a $500 million debut fund backed by Peter Thiel that invests in emerging seed managers and doubles down on their breakout companies.

Trae Stephens is a partner at Founders Fund and a co-founder and chairman of defense technology company Anduril, whose rise to a $61 billion valuation propelled him to number 7 on the 2026 Forbes Midas List. A former Palantir engineer, he focuses on national security and government-facing startups and has become one of the leading voices for Silicon Valley's return to defense work.

Delian Asparouhov is a partner at Founders Fund and the co-founder and chairman of Varda Space Industries, which manufactures pharmaceuticals in orbit and returns them to Earth in reentry capsules. The Bulgarian-born MIT dropout and former Khosla Ventures principal is among the most visible younger investors in venture, known for an unfiltered online presence and a focus on aerospace and hard tech.

Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he has led or co-led the firm's investments in SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company and stablecoin platform Bridge, acquired by Stripe in 2025. A Caltech physics PhD who previously worked at DARPA-backed ventures and GV, he jumped to number 22 on the 2026 Forbes Midas List and is one of the most outspoken investors on X.

Jess Lee is a partner and chief product officer at Sequoia Capital, where she focuses on early-stage consumer companies and built the firm's product-minded approach to founder programs like Arc. Previously the CEO of fashion community Polyvore, acquired by Yahoo, she co-founded All Raise to expand the ranks of women in venture capital.

Pat Grady leads Sequoia Capital's growth investing practice and has backed a run of enterprise software standouts including Snowflake, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Zoom and OpenAI. A seven-year regular on the Forbes Midas List, he climbed to number 25 in 2026 as Sequoia's growth portfolio rode the AI wave.

Jim Goetz is a partner at Sequoia Capital best known for leading the firm's investment in WhatsApp, where a roughly $60 million position returned $3.5 billion in Facebook's 2014 acquisition. He stepped back from Sequoia's leadership in 2017 but continues to invest and serve on boards, with a long enterprise track record spanning AdMob, GitHub and Palo Alto Networks.

Luciana Lixandru became Sequoia Capital's first Europe-based partner in 2020 and anchors the firm's London office, after making her name at Accel with early investments in UiPath, Miro and Deliveroo. The Romanian-born investor has appeared on the Forbes Midas List every year since 2021, reaching the top 20 in 2023 and 2024.

David Sze joined Greylock in 2000 and led the firm's defining consumer bets, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Pandora, Roblox and Discord, serving as senior managing partner from 2012 to 2017. He has since transitioned to advisory partner, continuing to sit on boards including Discord and Nextdoor while stepping back from new investing.

Michael Seibel spent more than 12 years at Y Combinator, serving as CEO of its accelerator and as a group partner who worked with over a thousand startups, before transitioning to partner emeritus in 2025 with an eye toward public-sector work. He co-founded Justin.tv, which became Twitch, and Socialcam, and became one of the most recognizable startup advisors of his generation through YC's videos and office hours.

Paul Buchheit created Gmail as Google employee number 23 and coined the company's 'Don't be evil' motto before becoming an angel investor in over 200 startups and a longtime Y Combinator partner. In 2025 he left YC to co-found Standard Capital with Dalton Caldwell, a Series A firm that closed a $425 million debut fund and invests on standardized, founder-friendly terms.

Dalton Caldwell spent more than a decade at Y Combinator as a managing director and group partner, running admissions and advising thousands of founders across 25 batches. A founder himself (imeem, App.net), he stepped back to emeritus status in 2025 to launch Standard Capital, an AI-native Series A firm, with Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and Bryan Berg. His YC office-hours videos on pivots and 'tarpit ideas' have become standard viewing for early-stage founders.

Cyan Banister was an early angel investor in Uber, SpaceX and Postmates, and later became the first female investing partner at Founders Fund. She now invests through Long Journey Ventures, the early-stage firm she runs with Arielle Zuckerberg and Lee Jacobs, which closed its fourth fund in 2025. Largely self-taught after a period of homelessness in her youth, she is known for backing unconventional founders on instinct honed outside traditional networks.

Arlan Hamilton founded Backstage Capital in 2015 while she was homeless, building it into a fund that has backed roughly 200 startups led by women, people of color and LGBTQ+ founders. She has become one of venture's most visible advocates for underestimated founders through her podcast and two books on wealth-building. Backstage has deployed close to $30 million across its portfolio since inception.

Ashton Kutcher turned early angel bets on Uber, Airbnb and Spotify into a full venture career, co-founding Sound Ventures with Guy Oseary in 2015 and later raising a dedicated AI fund that backed OpenAI and Anthropic. In July 2026 he announced he was leaving Sound, where he remains an adviser, to start a new firm with former NFX partner Morgan Beller focused on early-stage AI infrastructure, energy and deep tech.

After a tennis career that included 23 Grand Slam singles titles, Serena Williams formalized years of angel investing by raising a $111 million debut fund for Serena Ventures in 2022. The firm, whose day-to-day operations are led alongside partner Beth Ferreira, has backed more than 85 early-stage companies including Esusu and the women's basketball league Unrivaled, with an emphasis on founders overlooked by traditional venture. She has said the majority of her portfolio founders are women or people of color.

Martin Casado co-founded software-defined networking pioneer Nicira, which VMware bought for $1.26 billion in 2012, before joining Andreessen Horowitz in 2016 to lead its infrastructure practice. He has become one of the firm's most prominent voices on AI, backing companies such as Cursor, World Labs, Thinking Machines and Safe Superintelligence. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford and began his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Katherine Boyle co-founded Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice, which invests in defense, aerospace, manufacturing, energy and other companies tied to the national interest. A former Washington Post reporter, she previously co-led the seed practice at General Catalyst, where she invested in the earliest rounds of Anduril and Vannevar Labs. Her essays on dynamism and seriousness in American institutions have shaped how a generation of founders talks about building for the state.

Andrew Chen led Uber's rider growth team before joining Andreessen Horowitz, where he is a general partner investing in consumer startups, games and AI, including through the firm's Speedrun accelerator. He is the author of The Cold Start Problem, a widely read book on network effects, and has published essays on growth and marketplaces at andrewchen.com for two decades. His newsletter and writing made him one of the best-known thinkers on user acquisition before he ever wrote a check.

Erik Torenberg was Product Hunt's first employee, co-founded Village Global and On Deck, and built the Turpentine podcast network into a hub for tech commentary. Andreessen Horowitz acquired Turpentine in April 2025 and named him a general partner, where he invests and runs the firm's marketing and ecosystem organizations. His podcasts and essays have made him one of the most prolific media operators working inside a venture firm.

Logan Bartlett is a managing director at Redpoint Ventures, where he invests in enterprise software and works with companies across the firm's early and growth funds. He previously invested at Battery Ventures and has become widely known as host of The Logan Bartlett Show, one of the most-listened-to interview podcasts in venture. His conversations with founders and investors double as a public record of how the software industry thinks.

Tomasz Tunguz spent well over a decade at Redpoint Ventures before founding Theory Ventures in 2022, a research-driven firm focused on data, AI and software infrastructure. His daily blog at tomtunguz.com, full of benchmarks and SaaS metrics analysis, has been required reading for software founders for years. He co-authored Winning with Data with former Looker CEO Frank Bien.

Mark Suster sold two startups, the second to Salesforce, before joining Upfront Ventures in 2007 and eventually leading the firm as managing partner. He is one of Los Angeles tech's most active champions, hosting the annual Upfront Summit and writing the long-running blog Both Sides of the Table. His posts on fundraising and board dynamics have been passed between founders for more than fifteen years.

Hunter Walk led consumer product management at YouTube before co-founding the seed firm Homebrew with Satya Patel in 2013, backing companies such as Chime and Plaid. The pair later converted Homebrew to an evergreen, self-funded model and co-founded Screendoor, which invests in new fund managers. His blog on startups and venture has made him one of the most approachable voices in seed investing.

Aydin Senkut was Google's first product manager and international sales lead before founding Felicis in 2006, growing it from a solo angel operation into a firm managing over $4 billion. Felicis was an early backer of Adyen, Shopify, Canva and Notion, and roughly 65 of its portfolio companies have crossed $1 billion valuations. The Istanbul-born investor has appeared on the Forbes Midas List thirteen consecutive years.

Neil Mehta co-founded Greenoaks in 2012 after starting his career at D.E. Shaw, building the firm around concentrated, long-hold positions in companies like Coupang, Stripe, Databricks and Rippling. Greenoaks backed Wiz in every growth round before its $32 billion sale to Google in 2026, and Mehta sat on Coupang's board through its $60 billion IPO. Outside investing, he funds a nonprofit that preserves historic San Francisco storefronts through affordable leases.

Mike Speiser practices a rare incubation style of venture at Sutter Hill, where he has co-created companies inside the firm and served as their first CEO — most famously Snowflake, which he ran from 2012 to 2014 before its record-setting 2020 software IPO. His other incubations include Pure Storage, Sigma Computing, Observe and Lacework. The model has made him a fixture near the top of the Midas List, including a No. 5 finish in 2021.

Jeff Horing co-founded Insight Partners in 1995 and helped grow it into one of the world's largest software investors, with roughly $90 billion under management. A former Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs investor, his personal deal sheet includes Wix, Qualtrics, monday.com, Shutterstock and Darktrace. He remains one of the quietest major figures in venture, rarely giving interviews despite three decades of top-tier returns.

Scott Sandell joined NEA in 1996, became managing general partner in 2016, and now serves as the firm's executive chairman and chief investment officer. His investments span Salesforce, Workday, Tableau and Robinhood, with Cloudflare — where he is lead independent director — standing out as his defining deal. A Dartmouth and Stanford GSB graduate, he is also a public advocate for employing people with disabilities, drawing on his own experience with dyslexia.

Navin Chaddha leads Mayfield, where he has backed 18 companies that reached the public markets, including Lyft, Poshmark and HashiCorp. A former entrepreneur who co-founded VXtreme (acquired by Microsoft), he has appeared on the Midas List 18 times, ranking in the top five for several consecutive years. He now directs much of Mayfield's energy toward AI through its $250 million AI Start seed program.

Byron Deeter is Bessemer's best-known cloud investor, with 13 portfolio IPOs including Twilio, DocuSign, HashiCorp and ServiceTitan, plus stakes in Canva and Anthropic. A SaaS founder himself — his company Trigo was acquired by IBM in 2004 — he helped create Bessemer's State of the Cloud reports and the Cloud 100 ranking. He led ServiceTitan's Series A a decade before its roughly $9 billion IPO in late 2024.

Jeremy Levine has spent over two decades at Bessemer's New York office, where he led the firm's Series A investment in Pinterest and earlier backed LinkedIn, Yelp, Shopify and MindBody. In recent years he has focused on companies built outside the United States or serving international customers, such as Korean fintech Toss. He is one of the longest-tenured consumer and internet investors on the East Coast.

Neeraj Agrawal has invested in enterprise software at Battery Ventures since 2000, with exits including AppDynamics' $3.7 billion sale to Cisco, Marketo's acquisition by Adobe, and IPOs for Nutanix and Coupa. He is an eleven-time Midas List honoree and one of Boston's most recognizable SaaS investors. His 'T2D3' framework for how software companies should scale revenue became a standard planning tool across the industry.

Laela Sturdy runs CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund, which she took over as managing partner in 2023 — becoming the first woman to lead an Alphabet investing arm. Her portfolio includes Stripe, Duolingo, Gusto, UiPath and Whatnot, and under her leadership the fund has leaned into AI-era growth companies. She joined CapitalG shortly after its founding, following operating roles at Google.

Theresia Gouw became Accel's first female partner during 15 years at the firm, then co-founded Aspect Ventures in 2014 and Acrew Capital in 2019, which now manages about $1.7 billion. Her early bets included Trulia, Imperva and Forter, and Forbes has recognized her as venture capital's first woman billionaire. She is a seven-time Midas List honoree and chairs the education nonprofit DonorsChoose.

Fabrice Grinda built and sold three companies — including OLX, one of the world's largest classifieds sites — before co-founding FJ Labs with Jose Marin to invest at high volume in marketplaces. With well over a thousand investments including Alibaba, Coupang and Flexport, he ranks among the most prolific angel-style investors anywhere. He shares his marketplace theses and macro views prolifically on his personal blog and podcast.