hi I'm David jeans. I'm a tech reporter at Forbes. Uh, today I'm uh very happy to be joined by Alex Conrad, who is the editor of the Midas list. And uh, I'm wondering Alex if you could give us a bit of a primer uh on the Midas list for those of us at home who are not living, breathing, eating Venture Capital. Yeah, no problem David. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Um, so I've been the editor of the Midas list for 10 years, and Forbes has been doing the list for 23 years. If you're wondering what the heck it is, why we've done it for so long, it is the ranking of the top Tech investors in the World, Venture capitalists, we call them. And Forbes has been making that definitive, data-driven ranking since 2000, with one year off during the financial crisis of the ODS. Wow, but for a very long time is um, I guess I mean maybe just before we launch into this year's list, could you give me a bit of an idea of like

what you've seen over the past 10 years from when you when you started working on the list to now. Like what's the major shift that you've sort of saying? You know, it's interesting to see these different companies and investors kind of have these highs and lows over the list. You know, in the years we've seen three prominent people retire from last year's list. So, some Titans of the industry, who people may have heard of before, like Gary Tan, who retired because he's now a president and COO of Y Combinator, a big startup accelerator. He's off the list this year. You know, then you have folks like Michael Moritz and Bill Gurley, who are investors in companies like Stripe and Uber. They have retired and they're off the list. Then you have all these new faces come on over the years, thanks to newer companies, whether it's OpenAI or Airbnb going public or ByteDance in China. So, in the past year, there's been a lot that has changed in the

tech space at large. I wonder what you, how this, uh, appears in the list, and what, what's been the major shift of the past 12 months. On the one hand, the Midas list has been a little more stagnant in the last couple of years than I would have liked to see. I feel a little bit sometimes like that meme of John Travolta standing in the empty room, kind of looking around because we want to see more IPOs, and IPOs have been historically the biggest driver of the list, whether it was Google back in the day, to Facebook, to, you know, more recently, a company like Airbnb or Snowflake in Enterprise. Those IPOs create huge liquidity events for their investors, and for the Midas list, that is the pinnacle. You want to be returning money to investors. That is what a venture capitalist is ultimately supposed to do. Lately, it's been more podcasting and tweeting, but making money is ultimately the name of the game for them, and so those IPOs are what you really want to see. And so one thing

that's interesting. With this year's list, you're seeing a couple companies like Snowflake and Airbnb on their last legs, but they were just so big that the IPOs that we've seen more in more recent months haven't really had that effect on the list yet. You know, a company like Rubric was a great IPO or Klaviyo last year, but they were kind of small compared to those Airbnb, and so we're still seeing those older companies being big drivers on the list with a big caveat of private companies like SpaceX and Open AI starting to push people up the ranks. Well, talking about Open AI, I wonder just the AI question, is AI driving up certain investors on the list this year? It definitely is, and AI is a big theme on this year's Midas list. It starts with our number one of the list, Alfred Lin from Sequoia, who was number one two years ago and then dropped to number three. He is one of a couple investors who are key backers of

Sam Altman at OpenAI. Obviously, Sam and OpenAI have been in the news quite a lot recently, and not only for good news. Plenty of kind of tougher news too, but it's a huge company in the AI space. And SEOA and Alfred were instrumental in that behind-the-scenes effort last year to try to kind of keep Sam in power there. So, it's a theme with him. You also see people like Reed Hoffman and Vinod Khosla move into the top 10. Vinod is the biggest mover of people who are already on the list this year, going all the way into the top 10 from the 80s because he was the first institutional check into OpenAI. But then you see Hugging Face, Anthropic, other companies are starting to drive investors higher up on the list as well. Any surprising newcomers that you've noticed? We have actually more returnees, people who had dropped off the list and then are coming back on like Randy Glein and Key SpaceX.

investor who dropped off the list for 10 years, and he's back. Um, he was on the first one I worked on, and then I never saw him again, and now he's back. Um, so, we're seeing some of these rures eight of them back on the list and only six true newcomers this year. But one of the more interesting true newcomers is someone I think you know, uh, the co-founder of Anduril Defense Tech, Trey Stevens, at Founders Fund. So he's on the list, uh, for his investment in Anduril as well as some other bets, um, and I think that's interesting to see maybe defense Tech getting represented on the list. Um, he's someone that you've also reported around as well in your coverage, right David? Yeah, um, I think that especially recently we've been focusing a lot of our reporting efforts on looking at the defense tech space and more broadly that, uh, sort of clashing of ideologies of Silicon Valley and Pentagon, and it's actually born huge, uh, multi-billion dollar companies. We've seen a lot of

unicorns emerge. Um, but I think that there remain the big question mark over, uh, how investors, uh, and the general sector is going to view Andre at, at a potential exit because, you know, if Andre makes a really solid exit, then it will boost the rest of the defense Tech space. But if it's lukewarm or not what people are expecting, then it'll have a ripple effect that I don't think, um, you know, we can foresee at the moment. So, well, Trey, Trey being on there is now our, our flag planted for that category with Midas. But we have seen paler be a big driver on the list in the past. Peter teal is always pretty high on the Midas list. And what's interesting is that you don't get on Midas if you're a co-founder of one of these companies just for the equity of founding the company, although that is how a lot of these people become billionaires, not necessarily just their Investments. But then folks like Trey and Peter also work at Venture funds.

invest in the companies that they've co-founded as well, and that's how they get on to Midas. Which is why you'll see Peter there, you'll see Trey there, but not necessarily someone like Joe Lawdale who's been on the list in the past for Paler, but is not on this year. So that's one kind of interesting quirk of venture capital. What about how many are we seeing more or less women on the list this year? So we have 13 women on the list this year, that's two more than the past couple years. So slight improvement. Of course, we would like to see even better representation moving more to that 50/50 over time, but 133% is a small improvement. One of the more notable returnees is Annie Lamont, the first lady of Connecticut, who is the co-founder of a firm called Oak HTFC and has done some interesting digital health companies. We've also seen a notable newcomer woman from China, Annabelle U Long of Buy.

Capital, which used to be Burman's investment arm, there. China, interestingly, has the same number of investors this year as last year: 17. But I would say it's kind of a softer year for China because a couple of those investors, from what we've heard, are spending more of their time in Singapore and are increasingly not really China-based anyway. And we've seen Chinese investors drop down on the list a little bit; they're not quite as high up. Um, and interestingly enough, uh, two of the firms on the Midas list this year didn't exist last year because they are splinters of international firms that wanted to divest their Chinese business. So, I'm, as you've written about, as we both know, um, for our audience to know, there's been a lot of pressure, uh, to divest certain Chinese businesses in the US. And so, Sequoia and GGV Capital, which both put a lot of people on the list each year, splintered off their Chinese firms. So, you see Hong Shan, which is formerly Sequoia's China.

business and granite Asia, which was part of GGV, both now putting the same people on the list but under a new banner. Um, where do you expect that we're going to see that trend go? I mean, are we going to see less Chinese investors on the list in the years to come, or do you think it will be harder for Chinese investors to make Midas moving forward? I think that, you know, we're waiting to see if ByteDance and Xiaomi, if these companies can actually go public. You know, there was an interesting report just this week that Xiaomi has had to maybe table hopes of going public in the US, and that historically was how these Chinese investors did so well on Midas. Their companies would get really big, they'd do business in the US, they'd go public in the US. I don't know if that's still going to happen, and I think what happens to ByteDance is a huge question mark, you know, with the TikTok potential shutdown. So I would say maybe tougher times for China.

on the Midas list in the next few years, is there one big surprise that you came across when you putting the list together where you were like what happened there well I do think SpaceX is a really interesting company here because it is so big you know it's valued approaching $200 billion that it's already as powerful as some public companies in putting people on the Midas list but is it ever going to go public you know Does Elon really want it to go public there's been chatter that maybe uh starlink you know the satellite business that you've written about might get spun out and go public um maybe SP SpaceX goes public what what do you think do you think that's a possibility because that would be a massive driver on Midas you know in future years it's another sort of TBD on on the future of that company there too awesome yeah I mean all in all I would say it was an interesting year for Midas where we saw AI moving up maybe China moving down um

some notable names saying goodbye to the list um becoming you know alumni of the list moving forward. But I do think that in the next couple years, if we do see companies like SpaceX or others, you know, Stripe is a great example, finally going public, that's when you may see a whole new herd of faces onto the Midas list in the future. Alex thanks for joining us e.

These Billionaire VCs Are The World's Most Powerful Investors: Inside The Forbes Midas List

Forbes highlights success through the lens of business, entrepreneurship, wealth, investing and leadership with a focus on the people shaping our world.

Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
 
Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes:  http://forbes.com