11 Indian-Americans In Forbes List Eleven Indian-Americans feature in Forbes magazines annual list of 100 best venture investors with the ‘Midas’ touch, who made savvy investments in start- ups and then sold off their stakes to pocket nearly USD 95 billion in profits. The Midas List of the 100 best venture capitalists in the world for 2014 has been topped by Jim Goetz, partner at firm Sequoia Capital who was the only institutional backer in messaging service WhatsApp. The top 10 list is dominated by Facebook and Twitter investors. New faces to the top ten for 2014 include seed investor Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners on the strength of Twitter and Facebook respectively.LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman stays in the top 10 at number 7 thanks to Facebook.WhatsApp was the largest acquisition on the list since it is the largest venture-backed private exit ever. Forbes said Goetzs combined USD 60 million in three rounds to support WhatsApp epitomises the Midas touch, and WhatsApps 19 billion dollar price tag in an announced sale to Facebook means Sequoias sitting on USD 3 billion in Facebook stock, over twice the total of Sequoias billion-plus 2010 fund. This years Midas List features technologys best investors, whose savvy investments have a made a total of USD 95.2 billion in exits. According to Forbes, With 20 fresh faces and seven returnees, the 2014 Midas List is a testament to the big dollars and even bigger bets investors are making today in tech. Time will tell whether the frothy market can keep rolling into 2015.” Among the Indian-Americans on the list is Aneel Bhusri, co-chief executive officer, Workday - a cloud-based financials and human resources software firm.Stanford business school graduate Bhusri is ranked 17th on the list and has a net worth of USD 1.3 billion. On the 22nd spot is Wharton School graduate Deven Parekh, Managing Director of Insight Venture Partners. The 44-year old debuts high on the Midas List this year, thanks to an early 2009 investment in Twitter as well as investments in microblogging platform Tumblr and personalised magazine Flipboard. Parekh also helped steer Tumblr to its sale to Yahoo last year and manages investments in e-commerce, consumer internet data, and application software businesses. In 2012, Parekh led a USD 165 million equity investment in Drilling Info, an Austin-based data intelligence provider the for oil and gas industry. The other Indian-Americans on the list are Promod Haque ranked 27, Navin Chaddha (30), Neeraj Agrawal (37), Sameer Gandhi (41), Asheem Chandna (55), Venky Ganesan (57), Vinod Khosla (63), Salil Deshpande (67) and Gaurav Garg (86). Haque, 65 is Senior Managing Partner at Norwest Venture Partners has more than 20 years experience as a venture capitalist, generating 40 billion dollars in exits so far. More than 10 of his venture firms portfolio companies had exits, most notably cyber security company FireEye (second-best performing IPO in the US last year). Chaddha, 43 heads Mayfield Fund and invests in consumer, enterprise infrastructure and energy technology in the US, India and China, Forbes noted. He has invested in 35 companies in his career, of which 12 have gone public and 12 have been acquired. Chaddha recently raised Mayfields second dedicated India fund and successes there include online travel site MakeMyTrip (IPO 2010). An avid cricket watcher and Bollywood movie fan, Chaddha has currently invested in cloud storage company Swiftstack, social media company Gigya, fashion app Poshmark and Indias Bharat Matrimony. Agrawal, 41, is General Partner at Battery Ventures and has some promising investments lined up in furniture e-tailer Wayfair and Nutanix, each of which is verging on an IPO. Gandhi, 48 is an MIT alumnus and partner at Accel Partners, where he has led the firms investments in file hosting service Dropbox and e-commerce company Quidsi, which Amazon.Com acquired for USD 545 million in 2011. Before Accel, Gandhi was a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he made the firms seed investment in Dropbox. Chandna, 49 is partner at Greylock Partners, which he joined in 2003 after serving as vice-president of business development and product management at Check Point Software, a Tel Aviv IT security firm. He is now Greylocks specialist in enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and security. Ganesan, 40 is Managing Director at Menlo Ventures and his standing on the Midas List is thanks to an early bet on network security company Palo Alto Networks in 2007, which had one of the largest IPOs of 2012. Forbes said, From his first job washing dishes in a restaurant to advising companies like Palo Alto Networks, Ganesan says humble beginnings are where he gets his passion for building companies.”
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 10:05:13 +0000
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