Thursday, March 24, 2016
Forbes Midas List Skips SoCal, Again
In what has been a familiar refrain, the annual Midas List ranking by Forbes Magazine of the most influential venture capitalists has completely skipped Southern California's venture capital community, although it did credit the position of at least four of the VCs on the list to their investments in Southern California startups, and highlighted Ashton Kutcher and Guy O'Seary for their investment efforts. Forbes credited investment in Snapchat for placing former executive Mitch Lasky of Benchmark at #59, an investment in Laguna Hills-based Glaukos for the #63 ranking of Orbimed's Jonathan Silverstein, an investment in Santa Barbara's Sonos for the #93 ranking of Redpoint's Satish Dharmaraj, and an investment in SpaceX for the #97 ranking for DFJ's Steve Jurvetson. The last time Forbes has placed a Southern California venture capitalist on the Midas List appears to have been in 2009, when Jim Gauer of Palomar Ventures made the list.
Notable omissions of local VCs include William Link of Versant Ventures, Olav Bergheim of Fjord Ventures/Domain Ventures and Robert More, formerly of Domain, all who were early investors in Glaukos ahead of Orbimed; UpFront Ventures' Steven Dietz (TrueCar IPO) or Greg Bettinelli (HauteLook IPO); Sumant Mandal of March Capital Partners/Clearstone (Rubicon Project IPO), among many others with significant IPOs and exits under their belts in the last couple of years.