Reaction Wheel

The Forbes Midas list just came out today. But it doesn’t answer the question I know you have: who do you know that can get Jim Breyer to take a look at your go-go somoloco robofoto co?

We at Neu VC decided to help you out. We scoured the Crunchbases to find out which investors coinvest with or invest prior to the Midas List investors’ firms. You can think of these firms as the Midas List feeder firms.

The firms are ranked by the percentage of the companies they invested in over the past five years that a Midas List firm invested in at the same time or later.

The usual caveats: the data from Crunchbase is woefully incomplete. It doesn’t include all deals. It doesn’t have most angel investors, who might be the best way to get to some of these firms (because of the spotty angel coverage I decided to exclude anyone Crunchbase did not consider a ‘financial organization,’ so almost all angels are not on the list.)

I excluded firms that were primarily life sciences/biomedical and firms that invested primarily in non-US companies. I looked at investments for the last five years and weeded out firms that made fewer than five initial investments in that period or fewer than three in the last year.

I’m sure there’s some signal in here, but there’s also a ton of noise. Treat it as entertainment. There are many explanations for why these firms are here and others are not. Some good, some eh. For instance, note that Google Ventures is number 52; Google Ventures is making some solid bets and adding a ton of value. Why are they 52? I don’t know.

Also note that the 40 firms from the Midas List that were used to generate this list are not themselves on the list. So, if you’re like “why isn’t SV Angel here?” the answer is that they are on the Midas List itself.