Written by Alex Iskold and edited by
Richard MacManus.
Whether you like the bubble mentality of the current era or not, it’s hard to deny
that VCs play a big role in the Web ecosphere. Many prominent venture firms have funded
startups in social networking, online video and vertical search – helping to jumpstart
the current excitement about new social technologies.
With that in mind we prepared a comparison of VC portfolios. We included VCs that we
think are most active in the space, but please note that this is not an exhaustive
list. Also we have not attempted to include all of their investments, just the main social web ones. Bearing all that in mind, we encourage you to use the comments section to suggest
VCs and companies you think should be added.
We’ve put the portfolio companies into 4 major categories. Some compromises where made
in order to keep the list of categories short – for example Digg would be more precisely
categorized under Social News and Flock as Social Browsing, but to keep the chart simple
we filed both under Social Networking and Bookmarking.
In addition to the linked logo of each company, the table below also contains its
current Alexa traffic rank – a basic (if controversial) measure of popularity. The VC
listings include the links to their company, as well as partners working in Web space.
Also, we’ve included links to their blogs and Technorati ratings of the popular VC
blogs.
The (*) means that more than one VC participated and so the exact amount by this firm is not known. Other things: Angels are indicated in parenthesis. The transaction amounts/links for Angels are not listed since they are typically small and not publicized. Also, note the distinct links to the partner’s bio, his blog and the Technorati rating of his blog.
What do you think – is there enough data here to draw conclusions? For example we can see that the most popular category is Search and Classifieds. This makes sense since there are many verticals to apply search to and classifieds is likewise popular. Social Networking and Bookmarking is also very crowded and competitive. What other trends do you see?
UPDATE 18/9/06: Version 2 of the chart has now been published, incorporating the feedback received.
