What Unicorn Rankings Miss

Stanford just revealed which investors are best at picking unicorns.
The data is fascinating!

Professor Ilya Strebulaev – whose work on venture capital I’ve followed and respected for years – ranked investors by their odds of backing a billion-dollar company.
His research genuinely deserves a separate shelf in the library of human economic history.

The top firms are reportedly 4.1x more likely to back a unicorn than a random VC.
But here’s the funny part nobody talks about:
The “best” investors are often not really playing the same game.

Fidelity (18.5x) and T. Rowe Price (16.3x) top the rankings.
Sounds incredible.
Until you realize many of these firms invest very late – sometimes when the company is already worth $900M 🤡

That’s less “visionary seed investing” and more:
“arriving 5 minutes before the fireworks.”

The real difficult sport is early-stage conviction. Our market.
That’s why Y Combinator’s 3.4x is actually kind of insane.
Because betting on thousands of chaotic founders with half-broken decks, identity crises, unfinished products and no traction…
is very different from writing checks after everyone already agrees the company is hot.

That’s where venture capital still becomes human.
Not spreadsheets.
Conviction.
Taste.
Pattern recognition.
The ability to see something before consensus forms around it.

And honestly, founders should remember this too:
The best investor is not always the one with the highest Stanford score.
It’s often the one who understands your strange vision when everyone else thinks you’re slightly delusional 😅

Data explains the past beautifully.
But venture is still a people business trying to predict the future.

Curious – if you were fundraising, would you choose:
the prestigious late-stage giant,
or the weird early believer who actually “gets” you?

#VC #startups #investing