Research Outline

Venture Capital Partners

Goals

To determine what to look for in a General Partner of a venture capital firm, or what qualities to work on personally, obtain case studies of three of the top General Partners in VC firms, including details on experience, unfair advantage, and ruthlessness.

Early Findings

  • CB Insights publishes an annual list of the top 100 venture capital partners in the world. The criteria used includes exits, connections to other investors, consistency, and recency of results. Although this list is performance based, it should provide a good starting point to find names for creating case studies.
  • The top ten partners on the list are Neil Shen, Lee Fixel, Bill Gurley, Alfred Lin, Jeffrey Jordan, Peter Fenton, Brian Singerman, Mary Meeker, Matt Cohler, and Mavi Mhatre.

Lee Fixel

  • Lee Fixel became a partner at Tiger Global Management in 2006. This gives him 13 years of experience. Since he is only 39 years old, he got involved with venture capital at an early age.
  • On June 30, 2019, Fixel left Tiger to possibly start his own firm.
  • Fixel is known to have an aggressive approach to investing and at times will decide to invest after just a brief Skype session with entrepreneurs.
  • Fixel has been described as ruthless when making investment decisions. He does not let emotion play apart in his decisions.
  • Reporting indicates that Fixel had promised a further investment in a company called Letsbuy, but did not follow through when he found another company he preferred to invest in.

Traits of Successful VC Partners

  • Valuewalk published an article on ten characteristics of a great venture capitalist that included intellectual curiosity, stamina, strong networking skills, emotional regulation, and open-mindedness.
  • Several top billionaire investors were asked which personality traits were most important to be a successful investor. The responses included confidence, drive, passion, optimism, conviction, and courage.