VC Reputation

30 years of VC Leagues and Rankings

{
  "author": "Giovanni Liotta",
  "date": "30 Sep 2022" 
}

Our VC Reputation Index compares and ranks every institutional investors active in every VC deal from 1990 to 2019 by generating statistical traces of their track-records.

We define reputation as stakeholders perceptions of an organization’s ability to deliver value relative to rivals. In order to assess it, the Index evaluates and compares investments track-records across 5 metrics representing the quality and visibility components of reputation 1:

  • Investments (volume)

  • Investments (amount)

  • Fundraising (volume)

  • Fundraising (amount)

  • Exits (volume)

Each metric is measured on a 5-years rolling average basis, and for each metric we calculate a z-score — the number of standard deviations above or below average for that year. The similarity between investors’ performances is based solely on the average between each of their 5 z-scores. VC investors must have invested at least once (or have raised at least one fund) in a given year to be included. Group classifications are generated through k-means clustering.

Only completed investments, funds raised, IPOs and acquisitions (excluding what we could classify as fire-sales) are counted and data are adjusted to keep into account the vintage years of each fund.

The Index is computed following the methodology used for the LPJ VC Reputation Index with some adjustments:

  • Relied on metrics computed from different data sources including Thomson One’s VentureXpert, Crunchbase, Refinitiv, PitchBook, etc.

  • Excluded the VC Age metric from index computation for unrealability of data related to VC Firms founded years

  • Took into account VC Funds vintage years for fair cross-comparisons

  • Extended data until 2019 (included). Numbers will update after each year through the end of 2022

A visual dashboard with description of the Index can be accessed here:

A Jupyter notebook with ranking computations will be made available in our GitHub repo soon!

Contact us to learn more on how we use this index to predict outcomes for Startups and VC funds. Book a meeting with Dojo Science.

Statistical model by Giovanni Liotta. Design and development by Dojo Science Team.

1

Please refer to Management Economics and Entrepreneurial Finance literature for a complete overview of what Reputation is and how it can be measured in the VC context. Preliminary references: Nahata (2008); Hsu (2004);Liotta et al. (2022).