NEW YORK – Eleven influential Indo-American investors feature in Forbes magazine’s annual list of the 100 best venture capitalists with the “Midas” touch who are making big and early bets on the leading technology companies of tomorrow and earning outsized returns for their investors.
The Forbes 2015 Midas List represents the world’s 100 smartest technology investors with valuations greater than $1 billion and a total of 766 deals.
Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital maintained the number 1 spot for the second year in a row due to WhatsApp, the mobile messaging company acquired by Facebook for $22 billion.
He was the only institutional backer in the messaging service and “struck gold”, returning more than $3 billion to Sequoia in the deal, Forbes said.
Leading the Indo-Americans on the list is 49-year old Aneel Bhusri, CEO and Cofounder of 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 $1.22 billion.
A notable exclusion from the list is Vinod Khosla, who founded Khosla Ventures in 2004. Khosla had been a regular on the Midas list till now, raking 63rd last year.
“A steady top 20 Midas lister,” Forbes said Bhusri is the only venture capitalist to have cofounded and taken a multi-billion dollar company public while also working as a venture capitalist.
On the 24th spot is Salil Deshpande, Managing Director of Bain Capital Ventures.
Deshpande, 46, has had two big exits in 2014 with technology company Dropcam that was sold to Google and the IPO of peer-to-peer lending company LendingClub, both early-stage bets made while at his prior firm Bay Partners.
Norwest Venture Partners Senior Managing Partner Promod Haque comes in at the 26th rank.
