Venture capitalists are handsomely rewarded for making accurate predictions and identifying a trend before others—these are the prominent names who played a pivotal role in the rise of some of the biggest companies and startups today
Making predictions is tough. So is spotting a pattern before it becomes a trend. There are a bunch of professionals whose job is to do both—venture capital (VC) executives.
Flipkart wouldn’t have possibly happened had someone at Accel Partners not believed that two young Amazon executives could build Amazon’s bête noire in India. Similarly, Oyo probably wouldn’t have become a behemoth under Ritesh Agarwal had somebody at Lightspeed Venture Partners not shown faith in the high school dropout’s business acumen.
These were risky calls. But, VC is a high stakes job. The pinstriped mavens of the private market are rewarded for the making the right calls, but failure isn’t taken kindly either.
Methodology: We have considered startups that have either raised funds at a valuation of at least ₹1,000 crore or were bought at a minimum valuation of ₹600 crore until December 2018. We accessed the cap tables of such companies from Tracxn to understand the firms’ current shareholding, how much they are currently worth and how much they have grown since the first investment. A premium was put on factors like early investments and high holding. Also, deals done by investors at their previous funds haven’t been taken into account. Investor names are in alphabetical order. Only India funds have been considered.
(This story appears in the 02 August, 2019 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)