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Meet The Top Women Investors On Midas In 2018

This article is more than 5 years old.

Forbes

Forbes

Nine female investors have claimed spots on this year’s Midas List, a record for the annual ranking and an increase from six women a year ago. The list also has two female newcomers, Aileen Lee, founder and partner at Cowboy Ventures, and Sonali De Rycker, partner at Accel.

The Midas List, coproduced by Forbes with TrueBridge Capital Partners, ranks VCs on the number and size of exits over the past five years, with a premium on bolder early-stage deals. The ranking counts only exits over $200 million or private rounds valuing companies at $400 million or more.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partner Mary Meeker was once again Midas’ top-ranked woman VC, claiming the #6 spot, thanks to her shrewd bets on companies like Airbnb, Chinese commerce site JD.com, Slack, Spotify and Facebook. Since top Kleiner partner John Doerr stepped away from the firm’s new funds, Meeker has taken on more responsibility and helps lead the team’s digital growth equity team, which focuses on surging Internet companies. Meeker first took the spot of the top female on Midas in 2016 from GGV Capital’s Jenny Lee, who ranked #10 in 2015.

Two Newcomers

The top woman Midas newcomer, Accel partner Sonali De Rycker, took the #95 rank thanks in part to her early investment in Avito, the Russian version of Craigslist, which was purchased by South African newspaper conglomerate Naspers in 2015 for $2.7 billion. De Rycker, who coleads Accel’s London office with Harry Nelis, also invested in Stockholm, Sweden-based Spotify. The streaming service is expected to go public in April and was valued in February at an estimated $22.6 billion. De Rycker also led Accel’s investment in e-commerce startup Wallapop, which merged with competitor Letgo in 2016, and serves as an independent director on the board of Match.

Originally from Bombay, India, De Rycker attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and then worked for Goldman Sachs and Atlas Venture before joining Accel in 2008. What De Rycker always tries to remember: "The next big thing could look very different from the last big thing."

The second woman Midas newcomer is Aileen Lee, founder and partner at San Francisco-based Cowboy Ventures. Lee secured the #97 rank thanks in part to her investments in Bloom Energy, which could list on the public markets as soon as May and was most recently valued at about $3 billion; Dollar Shave Club (acquired by Unilever for $1 billion in 2016); and Rent the Runway, which raised funding this year at an estimated valuation of nearly $800 million.

Lee spent 13 years at Kleiner Perkins before founding Cowboy Ventures in 2012. In July 2017, Lee started a community of female VCs called “All Raise,” the subject of Forbes’ most Midas issue cover story. The group has launched a multi-pronged effort to support and elevate women investors and entrepreneurs, who are starkly underrepresented within venture firms and their portfolio companies. All Raise’s current mission is to double the percentage of women in VC partner roles over the next 10 years and increase total VC funding to female founders by 10% in five years. All Raise was already the invisible catalyst behind two of tech’s most notable diversity efforts in recent months: the mentoring series Female Founder Office Hours and a 600-startup pledge for diversity called Founders for Change, featuring tech titans like billionaire Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and Dropbox CEO Drew Houston.

The Returnees

The six other women Midas VCs are all list returnees: Rebecca Lynn, cofounder and partner at Canvas Ventures (#31), Ann Miura-Ko, cofounder and partner at Floodgate Fund (#55), Beth Seidenberg, partner at Kleiner Perkins (#62), Jenny Lee, founder and partner at GGV Capital (#74), Kirsten Green, founder and partner at Forerunner Ventures (#77) and Theresia Gouw, partner at Aspect Ventures (#89).

Lynn rose to the #31 rank from a the #44 rank last year in part because she and her firm Canvas raised their second fund for $300 million in the second half of 2016. Canvas has used the fund to invest in startups such as Eden Technology Services, mentoring platform Everwise and Luminar Technologies, a LiDAR sensor maker that emerged from stealth this year. Lynn saw earlier key exits with the 2014 IPO of Lending Club as well as the sale of FutureAdvisor, which was acquired by BlackRock for a reported $150 million in 2015.

The next highest-ranking returnee, Miura-Ko of Floodgate Fund, is also a founding member of All Raise. The Palo Alto, Calif. native was an early spotter of ride-hailing unicorn Lyft and also invested in machine intelligence software maker Ayasdi and Xamarin, which Microsoft acquired in February 2016 for a reported more than $400 million.

Another standout returnee Kleiner Perkins’ Seidenberg, is back on the Midas list on the strength of big deals including Flexus Biosciences, which was acquired in 2015 for $1.25 billion, and rare disease biotech company TrueNorth Therapeutics, which sold to Bioverativ for about $400 million last year. Thirteen years since joining Kleiner Perkins, the in-house biotech expert has incubated eight companies and serves on the board of directors of 12.

Next at #74, Lee, who joined Chinese firm GGV thirteen years ago, is one of the most respected VCs in China. Six of GGV’s portfolio companies were acquired in 2016 alone, including China Talent Group, a human resources services provider, game publisher Gamespedia and U51, a consumer credit loan rating shop.

Another returnee, Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, secured the #77 spot thanks to scoring two of the biggest e-commerce exits in recent memory: Dollar Shave Club, (acquired for $1 billion in July 2016), and e-commerce site Jet.com, which Walmart purchased for more than $3 billion a month later. Forerunner was the only VC firm to have invested in both.

The final returnee, Gouw of Aspect Ventures, is a seven-time Midas lister. Gouw (#89), focuses on software and security technology at Aspect, which she cofounded in 2014 with Jennifer Fonstad. She invested early in real estate search engine Trulia, which went public in 2012, and more recently Cato Networks, which offers next-generation security services on demand, as well as ForeScout, a cybersecurity unicorn.

A Male-Dominated Industry

Midas’ nine female VCs are important role models in an industry that’s stacked against women. Only about 9% of venture capitalists are female, and more than half of the largest funds lack any female investor at all. Leadership numbers are slimmer. Only about 5 to 8% of VC firm partners are female, a drop from 10% over the last decade according to a recent study by Columbia University. The study concluded that having more female decision-makers in the industry would improve VC firms’ returns and substantially boost funding opportunities for female entrepreneurs. More female VCs would not only lead to more equal and inclusive workplaces, they’d drive better returns too.

A study by Babson College in 2014 found that VC firms with women partners were more than twice as likely as firms without women partners to invest in companies with a woman on the management team or in the CEO role. Women still raise significantly less funding than male entrepreneurs. VCs invested $66.9 billion in companies with all-male founders in 2017, while women received just $1.9 billion in VC funding the same year, according PitchBook. Last year, Women-led companies made up 4.4% of all VC deals and raised just 2.2% of total VC dollars.

See The Full 2018 Midas List Here.

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