midas-list
(10)
Gordon Ritter
Gordon Ritter is Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he co-founded in 2003 that became one of the defining forces in enterprise SaaS investing. He backed Salesforce in its earliest days, co-founded a SaaS company with Marc Benioff, championed Veeva Systems when it had 25 employees and under $1M in revenue (now a $35B public company), and helped land Zoom's first institutional check. A four-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Ritter closed Emergence's seventh fund at $1 billion in March 2025, focused on AI-native enterprise software. Away from the portfolio, he has summited Denali, run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps, and serves on Princeton's Board of Trustees, where he shapes AI and education curricula.
Rick Kimball
Rick Kimball is a Founding General Partner at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), the growth-equity firm he co-founded with Jay Hoag in 1995. Over four decades as a technology investor, he backed category-defining companies including Netflix, GoDaddy, Spotify, and eHarmony. Before TCV, he spent more than a decade at Montgomery Securities as a Managing Director covering telecommunications and data communications. He has appeared multiple times on the Forbes Midas List as one of the top technology investors in the world, and currently serves on the UC San Francisco Board of Trustees and the Ohana Foundation board.
Ted Schlein
Ted Schlein is Chairman and Founding General Partner of Ballistic Ventures, a cybersecurity-dedicated venture capital firm based in Daly City, California. After nearly 30 years at Kleiner Perkins where he became Silicon Valley's foremost cybersecurity investor, Schlein launched Ballistic in 2021 with a $300 million inaugural fund, followed by a $360 million second fund in 2024 and a $100 million third raise in 2025. A former operator at Symantec and founding CEO of Fortify Software, he sits on the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Council and the CIA's InQTel board, bridging the gap between Silicon Valley capital and national security infrastructure.
Woody Marshall
Woody Marshall is a General Partner at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), one of the world's leading growth equity firms. With nearly three decades in venture capital, he has backed some of the defining technology companies of the internet era - including Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Nubank, and Peloton. He joined TCV in 2008 after 12 years at Trident Capital and today sits on the boards of Spotify, Payoneer, GoFundMe, Nerdy, Newsela, and onX. A multiple Forbes Midas List honoree, Marshall focuses on fintech, mobile, and digital media investments with a philosophy rooted in backing exceptional entrepreneurs and patient, long-term capital deployment.
Alfred Lin
Alfred Lin is the Managing Partner of Sequoia Capital, one of venture capital's most storied firms, where he co-steers a $7 billion AI-focused expansion fund alongside Pat Grady. A Taiwanese immigrant who resold Tony Hsieh's pizza by the slice at Harvard, Lin went on to be CFO, COO, and Chairman of Zappos - guiding it to its first profitable year and a $1.2 billion Amazon acquisition - before joining Sequoia in 2010. His portfolio reads like a decade of defining bets: Airbnb, DoorDash, Uber, Instacart, Reddit, and OpenAI. A three-time Forbes Midas List #1, he is the rare investor who has lived the operator's grind and brings that lens to every founder he backs.
Byron Deeter
Byron Deeter is a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the defining voices in cloud and SaaS investing over the past two decades. A former founder who built and sold Trigo Technologies to IBM, he brings hard-won operator empathy to backing companies like Twilio, DocuSign, Box, ServiceTitan, Canva, and Anthropic - with 26 unicorn investments and 13 IPOs to his name. A four-time NCAA rugby national champion and former Ironman triathlete, Deeter applies an athlete's discipline to both portfolio management and founder wellness, having created STRIVE, Bessemer's holistic health program for CEOs. He is also a minority owner of the San Francisco 49ers.
David Sze
David Sze is an Advisory Partner at Greylock Partners who built the firm's consumer investing franchise from scratch, backing Facebook at a $500M valuation in 2006, LinkedIn when it had 1 million users in 2004, Discord in 2016, and Roblox before it became a household name. A former operator at Excite, Electronic Arts, and HBO, he ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List in 2012 and remains one of Silicon Valley's most decorated consumer internet investors. He is a Yale trustee, Rockefeller University board member, and advisor to McLaren Racing.
Mitch Lasky
Mitch Lasky is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital and one of the most successful gaming investors in venture capital history. A Harvard-educated IP lawyer turned game studio executive, he rose through Activision and took mobile gaming startup JAMDAT public before selling it to EA for $680M. At Benchmark he backed Riot Games (~$7M early investment, now $20B+), Snap (led Series A at $70M valuation, IPO'd at $24B), Discord, and dozens of other landmark gaming and consumer internet companies. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree, LAFC co-owner, and host of the GameCraft podcast, Lasky's career is a master class in recognizing non-obvious founders before the market does.
Mamoon Hamid
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins, the legendary Silicon Valley VC firm he helped resurrect from near-irrelevance after joining in 2017. A Pakistani-born, Frankfurt-raised engineer turned investor, he was the first outside investor in Slack, wrote the first Kleiner check into Figma (his first deal at the firm, before it had revenue), and led the Series A into Rippling - the largest early-stage check KP had ever written. His quiet, measured style belies an extraordinary track record: under his tenure, Kleiner has returned approximately $13 billion to LPs and raised over $6 billion in fresh capital, including a $3.5B fund announced in March 2026.
Bryan Schreier
Bryan Schreier is a partner on Sequoia Capital's seed and early-stage team, where he's spent nearly two decades building category-defining companies from their earliest days. After launching Google's European headquarters and serving as interim President of Sales in China, he joined Sequoia in 2008 and became the first institutional investor in companies like Dropbox, Qualtrics, and Thumbtack. Known for hands-on board work and detailed founder playbooks, he specializes in marketplace and services infrastructure businesses that transform how work gets done, often partnering with bootstrapped or non-Bay Area founders to help them use data to find product-market fit and scale into category leaders.