Where Do “Super Venture Capitalists” Come From? — A Data-Driven Study on the Midas List Investors

We (Sofie, Hannah, and Heidi) were community interns with Foothill Ventures this past summer. As part of our first Venture Capital experience, we wanted to understand more about top-performing VCs and career paths into the industry. This article highlights some key learnings from our analysis. We hope it’s useful to others considering a career in VC; if you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop us a line.

Silicon Valley famously celebrates its entrepreneurs, and a lot of ink has been devoted to both individual profiles and aggregate analysis of founders’ backgrounds. DCVC’s partner, Ali Tamaseb, did an excellent job analyzing the backgrounds of unicorn founders in “Land of the ‘Super Founders’ — A Data-Driven Approach to Uncover the Secrets of Billion Dollar Startups” and the subsequent book. These studies sparked our curiosity for the other side of the table: where do “Super VCs” come from?

We decided to analyze US-based investors from the most recent Forbes Midas Lists (2021, 2022, 2023), yielding 94 individuals (many recurring). We manually collected information on these individuals by combing through their LinkedIn, Forbes profiles, company websites, and university pages, with a little help from artificial intelligence.

Disclaimer: It is important to keep in mind that there are limitations to this analysis due to data availability, accuracy, misjudgment and various sources of error. A myriad of factors could affect a VC’s development and success, and the ones studied here only represent our attempt to find some patterns.

TL;DR:

1. Over half of the investors earned a technical degree in their undergraduate studies, but the percentage is decreasing among the younger generation of investors, who have more degrees in business and liberal arts, and are starting their careers in banking and consulting. This trend is present even for those investing in more technical investment areas
2. Founder-turned investors seem more likely to get to their notable deal within the first five years of VC than their non-founder counterparts, especially founders with over five years of work experience.
3. Investors who have strong alignment between their investment sector and prior backgrounds on average spent longer time in industry than those with no or partial alignment. The younger generation are often investing insectors that they have no prior experience in, though.

We also identified three common profiles for top VCs: the “business”, the “startup” and the “engineer” paths

Timeline

What did a “Super VC” of today do before becoming a successful investor? We first calculated the average timing for several important milestones throughout a VC’s career, illustrated in the following chart. On average, a Midas List VC graduated college in 1994, went on to work for about 9 years in the industry before becoming an investor, led their first deal within 4 years, and hit the first notable deal 2 years later.

There are, of course, nuances among the group. Diving deeper, we analyzed the investors’ demographic distribution, education, professional experience and investment focus, before uncovering some trends across the generations and common profiles.

Demographics

The median age of the studied group is 51. Just 7 out of all 94 investors are in their 30s.

Only 6 females made the list. This is reflective of the broader U.S. VC industry, which remains male-dominated. Women only represent 8.6% of all venture capitalists, 8% of firm partners, and 7% of board seats at venture capital firms across the country.

An overwhelming 71.3% of the group are based in the Bay Area, with another 17% on the East Coast, three in Florida and three in the UK.

The most well-represented firms on the Midas list were Sequoia, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, and Benchmark. Combined, these five firms represent over 20% of the list.

Education

The most popular major is Engineering, followed by Economics / Business / Finance. 37% of all partners majored in some form of Engineering (in descending order: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical, Industrial, etc.). Some of the most popular liberal arts majors are: Psychology, Philosophy, Political Science, and History.

The PAC 12 conference has the most representation. This is thanks to Stanford (15), with the help of UC Berkeley (4). Our interns, by the way, are proud to be from the Ivy League (2), Big Ten (2), and PAC 12 (1).

70% of the investors attended graduate school. The most attended graduate school is Stanford (24), followed by Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. The vast majority of those who went to Harvard and UPenn obtained their MBAs there, while those who attended Stanford and MIT had some representation from the Master’s and PhD programs. It is worth calling out that both of the PhD investors are female.

Some interesting tidbits:

Pejman Nozad (55), Founding Partner at Pear VC, did not complete undergraduate university and has not received any degrees. You can read more about his interesting background here.

The three JDs — Keith Rabois (55, General Partner at Founders Fund, Harvard JD), Peter Thiel (56, Founding Partner of Founders Fund, Stanford JD) and Joel Cutler (66, Managing Director at General Catalyst Partners, Boston College JD) — are all based outside of the Bay Area, in Miami, Los Angeles and Cambridge, respectively.

The two PhDs: Mar Hershenson (52), Founding Partner at Pear VC, completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford. Ann Miura-Ko (47), Founding Partner at Floodgate, earned her PhD in Quantitative Modeling of Computer Security from Stanford

Work Experience

Most of the investors (65%) entered VC with less than 10 years of work experience, including 31% with less than five years of work experience. At least 13 Venture Capitalists entered the industry as Associates and gradually made it to the Midas list. The majority (83%) came into the industry as Partners, with seven founding their own funds after less than five years of work experience. (Disclaimer: This analysis has higher likelihood of inaccurate data, as many investors may list only the current title instead of the full progression in VC, especially those with longer tenure.)

Almost 40% of investors have experience working at big tech firms and 35% have experience working at startups, while nine of them have both big tech and startup experience. Another combined 43% have experience in professional services such as banking and consulting.

The investors with technical degrees largely passed through big tech, while those who studied business pursued careers in banking. Interestingly, the most represented industry for those with liberal arts degrees is startups, followed by banking.

A large portion of bankers and consultants only spent between two and four years at their first job, with the exception of two bankers staying for over 10 years. People who began their careers in software stayed at the first job for varying lengths of time, mostly under six years.

Entrepreneurial tenure seems to contribute to greater success as a VC, as proxied by rank on the Midas list. However, when we look at industry tenure in general, not just as a founder, the relationship is weaker.

Investment Focus

Many VC investors have leveraged their industry and academic backgrounds to understand the companies they invest in. We found that most successful IT investors have experience working in the IT industry and continue to focus primarily on the field, while consumer and fintech investors span their focus across sectors beyond their expertise.

The more work experience investors had, the faster they were to get their first deal and notable deal. The ex-founders seem more likely to hit their notable deal within the first five years of VC than their non-ex-founder counterparts, especially those who have had more than five years of work experience. Those who have strong alignment had a wider range of time spent in industry, but the extremely deep practitioners (~30 years of experience) almost nailed the notable deal right off the bat. Those who have no alignment typically started VC with fewer years of work experience, but many were also able to hit their notable deal within five years.

Observed Trends and Predicted Changes

While studying the data, we cannot help but notice differences in education and work experience among the “generations” of investors. The percentage of technical undergraduate degrees is decreasing over time, as younger investors (aged 35–44) pursued liberal arts and Business/Economics degrees. This is even true for the more technical investment areas like IT.

The younger generation is also entering the VC industry earlier in their career. They are more likely to have a background in banking or consulting than, and fewer are choosing to be founders straight out of school.

Three Common Profiles

There are several common patterns of work journeys. Specifically, we have observed three repeated profiles: a business-focused background, a startup-rooted background, and an engineering-centered background. We noted the recurring events for each of these backgrounds including trends in education, regions of the world they studied in, and previous jobs held.

Below are examples from each profile:

Business: Tom Loverro (42), General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners. Tom graduated from Stanford with degrees in Political Science and History before earning his MBA from Northwestern Kellogg. Tom started off as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before hopping over to VC as an Associate at RRE Ventures and joining Drobo, a data storage startup. He returned to RRE as Principal in 2011 and joined IVP in 2015, focusing on consumer and enterprise investments during the growth stage. His notable deals include Coinbase, Datadog, GitHub and NerdWallet.

Startup: Navin Chaddha (53), Managing Partner at Mayfield Fund. Navin is an Indian immigrant and graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi majoring in Electrical Engineering before receiving his Master’s in EE from Stanford. After graduation, he became cofounder/CTO of his first company, VXtreme: a video software company acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media. He worked at Microsoft for two years before founding another software company, iBeam Broadcasting. In 2006, he founded Mayfield Fund with 9 years of experience, focusing on consumer and enterprise investments in inception and early stage. Navin has invested in over 45 companies, of which 16 have gone public and 18 have been acquired, including Lyft, Poshmark and Alchemy.

Engineering: Mike Volpi (57), Partner at Index Ventures. Mike is a triple Stanford-graduate with a BA in Mechanical Engineering, an MS in Manufacturing Systems Engineering and an MBA. The Italian immigrant started off as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard before working at Cisco for 12 years to the executive level. In 2009, he joined Index Ventures with 18 years of experience working at big tech companies. He focuses on IT and enterprise investments during the growth stages. His notable investments include Confluent, Sonos, Aurora, Scale AI and Slack.

We really enjoyed learning about the backgrounds of the accoladed performers in VC. Though the industry constantly evolves with the startups that emerge in the waves of technological innovation, we were able to catch a glimpse of what could make great investors, past, present and future.

At Foothill Ventures, our investment team represents business, engineering and founder backgrounds, striking a balance for holistic evaluation and support. Follow us for more studies and thought pieces around our investment thesis, observations of the industry and more.

Foothill Ventures is a $200M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies.

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Questions, thoughts, reflections? Let us know in the comments below. We’re always looking for great entrepreneurs and early-stage ideas, and we’re always interested in having a discussion about venture, technology, and anything related. To see more about Foothill Ventures, please visit our website: foothill.ventures.