Meet Silicon Valley’s shrewdest talent spotters
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. What do Sam Altman and David Sacks have in common? Certainly not politics. Mr Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, is part of the transition team of Daniel Lurie, the Democratic mayor-elect of San Francisco.
David Sacks, an entrepreneur and polemical right-wing podcaster, will on January 20th become Donald Trump’s crypto and artificial-intelligence (AI) tsar. Yet both have the distinction of being among Silicon Valley’s best spotters of entrepreneurial talent. According to data from TRAC, a venture-capital (VC) firm, few are as good at picking promising startups at the very earliest stage.
Messrs Altman and Sacks stand out because of the whopping number of successful startups they have backed right from the beginning, when most investment tends to come from a founder’s friends and family. TRAC reckons that 28% of Mr Altman’s 322 early-stage investments have made at least ten times the original stake, and 27 have become unicorns, with valuations over $1bn. Mr Sacks’s hit rate is just as good.
Of his 92 bets monitored by TRAC, 27% have produced more than ten-fold returns, and 17 have become unicorns. The two men are among the best of an elite group of 250 or so early-stage investors who, according to TRAC, generate supersized returns. The list features a number of other well-known names, including Elon Musk, boss of Tesla and SpaceX; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, a VC giant.
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