Start Your Venture Capital Job Search with These Firms

Chris Farmer, who holds a venture capital job at General Catalyst Partners in Cambridge, MA, has come up with a unique way of ranking the top venture capital firms. He’s modeled his approach after Google’s PageRank system, which ranks search results based on how many links each webpage gets from other sites.

In Famer’s system, InvestorRank, it looks at the number of connections between venture capital firms. For example, if two VC firms co-invest in the same deal, that creates a link between the two firms. Or if another VC firm follows with funding at a later stage that boosts the rank of the first VC firm that invested in a start-up. And the more that a venture capital firms invests in syndicates with other highly ranked firms, the higher the ranking they achieve.

Unlike other systems, which often rank VC firms based on previous financial returns, Farmer’s system ranks a VC firm based on its “connectedness” and level of trust with the VC community. Based on his system, the top 10 VC firms by InvestorRank are:

1. Andreessen Horowitz
2. Sequoia Capital
3. Accel
4. Benchmark Capital
5. Union Square Ventures
6. General Catalyst Partners
7. NEA
8. Kleiner Perkins
9. Khosla Ventures
10. Greylock

What is interesting in this list, according to a review in TechCrunch, is that a relatively new firm such as Andreessen Horowitz ranks near the top. While one of the most venerable of VC firms, Kleiner Perkins, rounds out the bottom of the list. The TechCrunch article also ranks the top VC firms to emerge in the past 10 years. They include:

1. Andreessen Horowitz
2. Union Square Venture Partners
3. General Catalyst Partners
4. Khosla Ventures
5. First Round Capital
6. Spark Capital

There is research that suggests that mapping how connected a group of investors is may be a better way to predict the future performance of their overall investments. The data for the TechCrunch article came from CrunchBase, a free database of technology companies, people, and investors and a useful tool for anyone searching for a venture capital job in the tech sector.

Any VC firms missing from the lists above that you think should be represented? How valid do you think “connectedness” is as a measure of potential investment performance in the VC space? Add your comments below.