In new research, Blake Jackson and Ilya Strebulaev track the careers of 100,000 people working at venture capital firms in the United States to ask which investors succeed and why. They find that five percent of VCs generate 90 percent of the industry’s profits, that the backgrounds investors bring with them predict who ends up in that group, and that public recognition itself opens the doors to the deals that keep them at the top.
Much of the United States economy today is made up of companies and innovators that raised their initial financing from venture capitalists (VCs). VC-backed companies account for 41 percent of total U.S. market capitalization and 62 percent of public U.S. companies’ R&D spending. Seven of the top ten largest companies by market capitalization as of December 2025 were primarily backed by VC funds earlier in their lifecycle.
One important feature of the VC industry is the prominence of individual venture capitalists who make and manage investments on behalf of VC firms. Don Valentine, founder of the VC firm Sequoia, is a well-known early backer of Cisco and Apple. Michael Moritz, also of Sequoia, is widely credited for making early investments in Google and PayPal. Marc Andreessen, of a16z, is famous for highly successful venture investments in Airbnb and Lyft. But their reputations rest on more than a handful of smart bets. Each is known for picking winners repeatedly, across many years and market cycles.
What is, perhaps, most interesting to an observer of the VC industry, or someone seeking to invest in a VC fund, is that existing empirical evidence bears out this reputation. The ability of individual venture capitalists to make successful investments is persistent. For example, the identity of the venture capitalist sitting on the board of a startup is far more important for explaining whether an investment in a startup subsequently succeeds or fails than which VC firm the venture capitalist represented or the year they took a board seat.
However, surprisingly little is known about these individual venture capitalists. Are there persistent differences in the backgrounds of successful venture capitalists? What individual characteristics of venture capitalists, if any, can explain investment outcomes, career paths, and returns? Insofar as these characteristics and experiences are costly to replicate or acquire, to what extent are returns to investing in the VC industry concentrated among a relatively small number of professionals?
In our new paper, we aim to answer these questions. Such a research agenda has historically been hampered by incomplete, potentially biased, and opaque data. To combat this, we assembled the largest and most comprehensive dataset of individual venture capitalists based in the U.S. to date by tracking their entire careers, deals, and outcomes. We also collected data on their individual characteristics and relevant biographical details based on existing collections of commercial VC data as well as the historical, archived websites of U.S. VC firms.
To collect our data, we made use of a system of large language models (LLMs) designed to crawl, parse, and scrape these historical websites. We paired this process with large-scale manual collections that helped validate the reliability of our process. All in all, we tracked about 100,000 individual VCs, 37,000 of whom are professional investors. By our estimates, about half of our data points covering the backgrounds and investments of these professionals are not available in standard commercial datasets alone.
Our new dataset reveals the striking degree to which VC investment success is concentrated among venture capitalists in the U.S. Only 38 percent of the venture capitalists in our sample were ever credited with a successful investment (an investment in a startup that later went public, was acquired for at least five times the amount invested, or achieved a valuation of at least $1 billion). Only about seven percent have made five or more. And no more than three percent of U.S. venture capitalists have ten or more successes to their name. In net profits terms, the top one percent of venture capitalists account for roughly 57 percent of the approximately $1.2 trillion in inflation-adjusted net profits generated across the sample, while the top five percent account for about 90 percent. This distribution is very unlikely to arise from randomly assigning investments to venture capitalists.
As the concentration implies, venture capitalists who previously made successful investments are more likely to succeed again. Deals made by investors with one prior successful investment are two percentage points more likely to have a successful outcome, and those with five prior successes are about seven percentage points more likely to succeed. This is almost a 50 percent jump relative to the average rate of investment success.
Given this striking distinction between the “best and the rest,” we asked what are the backgrounds of the venture capitalists that find themselves in the rarefied tier of having made repeat successful investments? In the data, female venture capitalists are credited with 37 percent fewer successful investments on average than male VCs from the same entry cohort, and successful investors disproportionately come from higher-ranked schools, hold top MBA or advanced degrees, previously served as CEO or founder of a successful startup, or transitioned from technology or investment banking careers. Interestingly, these background factors that predict lifetime career success are just as, if not more, powerful predictors of deal-level success compared to the track record of the VC alone.
The observed importance of differing background factors can arise for multiple reasons. For instance, the negative correlation between whether a VC is female and investment success could be driven by differences in access to successful startups or public credit awarded on deals. The positive correlation between school prestige and investment success could similarly be driven by access that comes from the schools’ network or training, or from the tendency of higher performers to seek out and gain admission to top schools.
We also find that reputation itself can contribute to why those venture capitalists who achieved success once are more likely to do so again. To tease this out of the data, we separated between the venture capitalists that just made the Forbes Midas List, a prominent ranking for 100 of the most successful VC tech investors, and those that just missed it (in our estimation). This list started in 2001 and has been updated every year since then except for 2010. Its limited size gives a natural cutoff from which we can estimate our experiment: the difference between venture capitalists #100 and #101 should be close to arbitrary, allowing us to isolate the reputational effect.
When compared to venture capitalists that just missed the cut, venture capitalists that are marginally included on the list are about four to eight percent more likely to have made successful investments in the few years following their inclusion. These results represent about a ten percent increase in investment success relative to the sample mean, equivalent to about 0.13 new successful investments per year. Their increased success is driven primarily by new investments in companies that later go public or report high post-money valuations, not by companies that have high exit multiples. This effect further concentrates in new investments rather than existing ones, suggesting that recognition improves a VC’s access to high-quality startups.
Taken together, our study creates a brand new dataset which lets us study, in quite some detail, the individual VCs responsible for financing some of the most innovative startup companies in the U.S. over the past few decades. We document that most industry profits can be traced back to investments made by just a relatively small group of highly successful VCs. These superstar venture capitalists are repeatedly successful and tend to share common educational and work experiences from before they became VCs.
Authors’ Disclosures: Ilya A. Strebulaev has consulted for the participants in the VC industry. You can read ProMarket’s disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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