forbes-midas-list
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George Bischof
George Bischof is a General Partner at Meritech Capital, one of Silicon Valley's leading late-stage venture firms focused on enterprise software, SaaS, cloud infrastructure, and cybersecurity. With over two decades in technology investment - first as a tech investment banker at Robertson Stephens (helping 60+ companies raise $4.5B+), then as a General Partner at Focus Ventures, and since 2008 at Meritech - he has backed category-defining companies including Box, Coupa, Auth0, FloQast, and Outreach. A Stanford and Kellogg alumnus, Bischof has been named to Forbes' Midas List of top tech venture capitalists multiple times and is known for concentrating on mission-critical, 'painkiller' enterprise applications at the Series B through D stage.
Jon Auerbach
Jon Auerbach is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in the US. A former Pulitzer Prize-nominated technology journalist who covered conflict zones for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, Auerbach pivoted into venture capital in 2000, co-founding M-Qube (acquired by VeriSign for $275M) before joining CRV in 2004. Over two decades at CRV, he has backed transformative companies including Zendesk, DoorDash, and Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft for $1.35B), earned a spot on the Forbes Midas List (ranked #16 in 2020), and now leads the firm's founder support operations spanning legal, finance, marketing, and talent.
Mike Carusi
Mike Carusi is a General Partner at Lightstone Ventures, a leading life sciences venture capital firm based in Portola Valley, California, with $847 million in assets under management. With a career spanning over three decades in healthcare investing, Carusi has built a reputation as one of the most active early-stage investors in biotech and medical devices, appearing on the Forbes Midas List for top technology and life science investors. He co-founded Lightstone Ventures in 2014 after years at Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), and has overseen landmark exits including Plexxikon (acquired by Daiichi Sankyo for ~$1 billion), Ardian (acquired by Medtronic for $800 million), Ra Medical Systems (acquired by UCB for $2.3 billion), and dozens more. He teaches healthcare venture capital at Dartmouth Tuck and is a faculty member of the Stanford Biodesign Emerging Entrepreneurs Forum.
Rob Ward
Rob Ward is the co-founder and General Partner of Meritech Capital Partners, one of the first venture funds built exclusively around growth-stage technology investing. Since co-founding the firm in 1999, he has led investments in some of the most defining enterprise and consumer technology companies of the past 25 years, including Snowflake, Salesforce, Tableau, Fortinet, and Roblox. A repeat Forbes Midas List honoree, Ward focuses on analytics, data services, infrastructure, and enterprise applications, typically investing $5M-$25M at Series B with a sweet spot around $12M. Beyond capital, he tutors algebra at Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto and was added to the Buffalo Bills ownership group in December 2024.
Stuart Peterson
Stuart Peterson is the Founder and Managing General Partner of ARTIS Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he launched in 2001 that coined and trademarked the term 'TechBio.' A 2017 Forbes Midas List honoree, Peterson led early-stage investments in YouTube (acquired by Google) and StemCentrx (acquired by AbbVie for $10.2 billion - the largest-ever venture-backed life sciences acquisition), and has since focused ARTIS at the convergence of computer science and life science, closing a $200 million TechBio II Fund in December 2023 to back next-generation health and medicine companies deploying AI, machine learning, and deep learning to transform human health.
Adeyemi Ajao
Adeyemi 'Ade' Ajao is a Nigerian-Spanish serial entrepreneur turned venture capitalist who co-founded Base10 Partners, the first Black-led VC firm to surpass $1 billion in AUM. Before building Base10, he sold Tuenti (Spain's dominant social network) to Telefónica for ~$100M and co-founded Identified, acquired by Workday. In 2023, he became the first Black investor ever named to the Forbes Midas List, and his fund's portfolio includes Nubank, Figma, Instacart, and Rappi. His contrarian bet on automating the 'Real Economy' — logistics, food, healthcare, retail — has generated over $3 billion in portfolio returns.
Ann Miura-Ko
Ann Miura-Ko is co-founding partner at Floodgate, the seed-stage VC firm behind Lyft, Twitch, Twitter, and Okta. A NASA rocket scientist's daughter who went from painfully shy piano prodigy to national debate champion to Forbes' 'most powerful woman in startups,' she holds a PhD in mathematical modeling of cybersecurity from Stanford and has spent 15+ years betting on founders before anyone else believes in them. She co-founded AllRaise to diversify venture capital, teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, and invests in roughly 3-5 companies per year with a philosophy built on secrets, stories, and world-class effort.
Asheem Chandna
Asheem Chandna is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he has spent over two decades backing category-defining companies in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and AI. Since joining Greylock in 2003, he has never lost capital on a single investment he led - a streak spanning Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.85B), Rubrik (IPO 2024), Abnormal Security, and Wiz. A Mumbai-raised engineer who cut his teeth at Bell Labs and scaled marketing at Check Point Software from $10M to $550M in revenue, Chandna brings an operator's instinct to early-stage bets, often writing checks before a deck exists. Named to the Forbes Midas List nine times, he is among the most respected cybersecurity investors in the world.
Bill Gurley
Bill Gurley is one of Silicon Valley's most consequential venture capitalists - a 6'9" Texan who played college basketball, led the analyst team on Amazon's IPO, and then bet Benchmark's money on a then-tiny black-car startup called Uber. As a General Partner at Benchmark from 1999, he built a track record that includes Uber, GrubHub, OpenTable, Zillow, Stitch Fix, and Nextdoor. He writes the 'Above the Crowd' blog, has appeared consistently on the Forbes Midas List, and in 2026 published 'Runnin' Down a Dream,' a career guide ten years in the making. After stepping back from active investing, he relocated to Austin, Texas - where his wife Amy always wanted to end up.
Hans Tung
Hans Tung is a Managing Partner at Notable Capital (formerly GGV Capital), one of the most decorated venture capitalists in the world with 13 consecutive appearances on the Forbes Midas List - peaking at #3 globally. A Taiwanese immigrant who moved to Los Angeles at 13, Stanford-trained, and one of the first Silicon Valley VCs to relocate full-time to China in 2005, Hans has backed over 16 unicorns including Airbnb, Coinbase, Slack, ByteDance, Xiaomi, and Anthropic across three decades and three waves of technology: internet, mobile/cloud, and now AI.
Jennifer Fonstad
Jennifer Fonstad is a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of Owl Capital Group, with a 25+ year career that spans DFJ, Aspect Ventures, and her current early-stage fund. She helped grow DFJ's AUM from $150M to $3.5B, co-founded Aspect Ventures with Theresia Gouw in 2014, and is a champion of diverse founding teams. A Kauffman Fellow mentored by Tim Draper, she has backed companies including Tesla, SpaceX, Athenahealth, and ForeScout, racking up 8 IPOs and 23 M&A transactions. She co-founded Broadway Angels, is a founding member of All-Raise, serves on the Mastercard Foundation board, and was named to Forbes 50 Over 50 in 2025.
Jenny Lee
Jenny Lee is a Singapore-born venture capitalist and co-founder of Granite Asia, formerly Senior Managing Partner at GGV Capital, where she spent nearly two decades building Asia's most formidable tech investment franchise. A Cornell-trained electrical engineer who bought out her government scholarship bond for S$300,000 to chase her VC calling, she has backed over 21 unicorns and facilitated 16 IPOs across five global stock exchanges, including early bets on Alibaba, Xiaomi, Didi, and Grab. The first woman ever to crack the top 10 of Forbes' Midas List, Lee now runs Granite Asia - a $5 billion multi-asset platform investing across Asia's next technology wave.
Jim Goetz
Jim Goetz is a legendary venture capitalist and former partner at Sequoia Capital who became one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors by backing WhatsApp — the only outside investor in the company — delivering a $3.5 billion return when Facebook acquired it for $19 billion in 2014. A five-time consecutive Forbes Midas List #1 (2013-2017) and TechCrunch VC of the Year (2015), Goetz also nurtured Palo Alto Networks from inception and led investments in HubSpot, GitHub, and AdMob. A Strongsville, Ohio native who described himself as a 'scattered and ill-prepared freshman' at the University of Cincinnati, he now runs Casimir Holdings (family office) and Mae Philanthropies, having donated $25 million to UC in honor of his transformative professor mentor.
Joel Cutler
Joel Cutler is the co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst, one of the most influential venture capital firms in the world. Since co-founding the firm in 2000 with David Fialkow - a partnership forged at summer camp at age 8 - Cutler has backed transformative companies including Airbnb, Warby Parker, Venmo, Lemonade, and KAYAK, which he literally conceived and assembled from scratch. A law school graduate who never practiced law, a self-described non-visionary who keeps a 'Wall of Shame' of deals he missed, and a travel obsessive who attended Phocuswright for 20+ consecutive years, Cutler operates with a contrarian philosophy: he only wants 'exciting, different, and risky' bets, believes great teams beat great ideas every time, and insists that if you don't fail, you're a bad investor.
Josh Kopelman
Josh Kopelman is the co-founder and managing partner of First Round Capital, one of the world's most influential seed-stage venture firms, and a serial entrepreneur who sold Half.com to eBay for $300 million in 2000. A Wharton grad who started his first company as a sophomore in 1992, Kopelman has backed over 500 startups including Uber, Square, Warby Parker, and Notion. Known for the legendary Half.com/Halfway-Oregon PR stunt and the 'Penny Gap' essay, he is a consistent Forbes Midas List honoree who describes his career as a deliberate effort to stay permanently in the first 18-24 months of company-building - the phase he loves most.
Kevin Efrusy
Kevin Efrusy is a Stanford-trained engineer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist best known for personally sourcing Accel's $12.2M Series A investment in Facebook in 2005 - widely cited as one of the most profitable VC bets in history. A former co-founder of Corio (SaaS pioneer, IPO'd, acquired by IBM) and first CEO of IronPlanet, Efrusy joined Accel in 2003 and ranked #6 on the Forbes Midas List in 2011. He pioneered Accel's Latin America investment thesis after a year-long family sabbatical across South Africa, Brazil, and Japan in 2012, and has since backed unicorns including QuintoAndar ($5.1B), Gympass ($2.2B), and Nuvemshop ($3.1B). He transitioned to Emeritus Partner at Accel in 2019 and continues as an active angel investor and philanthropist through the Efrusy Family Foundation.
Mar Hershenson
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Pejman Nozad
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.
Peter Fenton
Peter Fenton is a General Partner at Benchmark, Silicon Valley's most storied early-stage venture firm, where he has spent nearly two decades backing audacious founders building transformative technology companies. A Stanford philosophy graduate who once dug sanitation trenches in rural Brazil, Fenton has a gift for identifying the exact moment when a company's rising adoption curve meets its declining risk curve. His track record - Twitter, Yelp, Zendesk, New Relic, Elastic, Hortonworks, and now Sierra and Exa - places him consistently on the Forbes Midas List, peaking at #2 in 2015, and he was named VC of the Year at the 2014 Crunchies.
Rich Wong
Rich Wong is a General Partner at Accel, one of the world's premier venture capital firms, where he has invested since 2006. A self-described 'accidental' venture capitalist with roots in mobile technology operations, he was the first outside investor and board member at Atlassian and led bets on UiPath, Rovio (Angry Birds), AdMob, and dozens of enterprise software companies globally. Known for his 'prepared mind' investment philosophy, his belief that the best companies can hide anywhere on earth, and his conviction that great VC is fundamentally a human business, Rich is one of Silicon Valley's most globally-minded and relationship-driven investors.
Sonali De Rycker
Sonali De Rycker is a General Partner at Accel's London office, one of the most influential venture capitalists in Europe. Originally from Mumbai, India, she joined Accel in 2008 after stints at Goldman Sachs and Atlas Venture, and has since backed some of the continent's most defining tech companies — Spotify, Monzo, BeReal, Synthesia, and Speak among them. Ranked No. 2 on Forbes Midas List Europe in 2019 and consistently in the top 15, she is known for her founder-first investment philosophy, her global deal-sourcing across 45+ cities, and a sharp conviction that Europe's next chapter will be written in AI.
Jeremy Liew
Jeremy Liew is a legendary consumer venture capitalist and Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, best known as the first institutional investor in Snapchat — turning an $8.1M bet into nearly $2 billion at the 2017 IPO. Born in Singapore and raised in Perth, Australia, Liew competed at the International Math Olympiad alongside future Fields Medalist Terence Tao before pivoting to business. After stints at McKinsey, IAC, and AOL, he joined Lightspeed in 2006 as its first consumer specialist, backing Affirm, Bonobos, GIPHY, and Epic Games along the way. A 9-time Forbes Midas List honoree, he stepped back from new investments in 2021 — just before turning 50 — to preserve the family time COVID had unexpectedly given him.
Ravi Mhatre
Ravi Mhatre is a Partner and Co-Founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the world's premier venture capital firms. Over 25 years, he has built Lightspeed's enterprise practice into a powerhouse, backing transformative companies like Anthropic, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Nutanix, Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, and Zscaler. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree (2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2025), Mhatre led Lightspeed's $1 billion investment in Anthropic's $3.5B Series E and helped raise over $9 billion across six funds in 2025. The son of an Indian immigrant and a Brooklyn-born mother who lived on three continents before turning 18, Mhatre holds three degrees from Stanford and has dedicated his career to partnering with founders innovating in enterprise IT, AI, blockchain, and cloud technologies.
Sarah Guo
Sarah Guo is the founder of Conviction, an AI-native venture capital firm that has backed some of the most valuable AI startups including Harvey ($3B), Mistral ($6B), and Sierra ($4.5B). A former general partner at Greylock - where she became one of the youngest and first female GPs in the firm's 53-year history - Guo co-hosts the influential No Priors podcast with Elad Gil and ranks #21 on Forbes' 2025 Midas Seed List. Before venture, she worked at Goldman Sachs helping take companies like Workday public.
Astasia Myers
Astasia Myers is a General Partner at Felicis, a 10x Forbes Midas list honoree, and 4x New York Times Top 20 VC who invests in early-stage AI, infrastructure, and developer tools companies. She previously founded Quiet Capital's enterprise practice, backing Modal, Chroma, and Langchain, and led investments in unicorns like LaunchDarkly at Redpoint Ventures. With dual degrees from Stanford and a master's from Cambridge, she's partnered with 10 unicorns and achieved 9 IPOs, bringing over a decade of enterprise software experience from startups, equity research at Baird, and Cisco's corporate development team.
Bill Trenchard
Bill Trenchard is a Partner at First Round Capital, a top-tier seed-stage venture capital firm. A serial entrepreneur turned VC, he sold his first company (Jump Networks) to Microsoft at 23, scaled LiveOps to $100M in sales, and made early-stage bets on category-defining companies including Uber, Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Flexport, Notion, Verkada, and Superhuman. Known for creating First Round's Pitch Assist program, he's a fundraising savant who teaches founders his process-driven approach to raising capital. He was named to Forbes Midas List in 2017 (#41) and 2020 (#17), and BusinessWeek's Best Young Technology Entrepreneurs in 2006.
Devdutt Yellurkar
Devdutt Yellurkar is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and Co-founding Partner at Propeller VC, a $100M ocean-climate tech fund. A former early Infosys employee who helped sell the offshore software model, and co-founder/CEO of Yantra Corporation (acquired by Sterling Commerce/IBM), Yellurkar has spent 15+ years as a venture investor backing iconic companies including Zendesk (first institutional investor), Airtable, and Postman. He was named to the Forbes Midas List in 2020, 2021, and 2022. His investing style blends deep operator empathy with a team-first philosophy forged on cricket pitches in India.
Michael Moritz
Sir Michael Moritz is a Welsh-born billionaire venture capitalist who spent nearly four decades at Sequoia Capital turning early bets on Google, Yahoo, PayPal, YouTube, Stripe, and Klarna into some of the greatest returns in VC history. A former Time journalist who wrote one of the first books on Apple, he arrived at Sequoia in 1986 and never looked back - topping the Forbes Midas List in 2006 and 2007. Knighted in 2013, he departed Sequoia in July 2023 and remains chairman of Klarna. His Crankstart Foundation has donated hundreds of millions to Oxford, the National Gallery, the ACLU, and the Booker Prize. In 2026, the son of Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany applied for German citizenship - protesting the rise of antisemitism in Britain.
Murat Bicer
Murat Bicer is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest and most storied early-stage venture firms. Born in Turkey and educated at Middle East Technical University and Babson College, he has spent two decades hunting for the next breakout enterprise software company. His signal achievement: backing Datadog at the seed stage in 2011 - before cloud monitoring was a recognized category - and riding it to a $30B+ public company that burned under $25M to get there. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked #24 in 2024), Bicer is known for investing in developer-first companies, his contrarian willingness to back pre-product teams, and a portfolio that spans Datadog, Signal Sciences (acquired by Fastly for $775M), Iterable, Voyage AI (acquired by MongoDB), LanceDB, and Gorgias.
Rebecca Lynn
Rebecca Lynn is a veteran venture capitalist and the managing director of Canvas Prime, a solo-GP early-stage fund she launched in August 2025 after co-founding Canvas Ventures in 2013. A chemical engineer turned nuclear reactor researcher turned Procter & Gamble marketer turned JD/MBA turned VC, Lynn has backed Lending Club, Doximity, and Luminar and appeared on the Forbes Midas List for five consecutive years - earning recognition in 2022 as the top female investor in the history of the list. She focuses on fintech, digital health, and AI, and describes herself simply as 'energized by chaos.'