For Midas Newcomers, VC Network Effect Led To Big Gains

Forbes

27-05-2025

The founders of Chime trudged into Amino Capital's bare-bones office early one Saturday morning in the summer of 2013, steeling themselves for disappointment. Their pitch to other investors had fallen on deaf ears, and they needed a win.
They found one in the fledgling venture firm and its founder Larry Li who saw in Chime an early-stage financial tech company that might someday make banks more efficient, modern and accessible through the internet. Li, had helped build a major data infrastructure and processing system for Wachovia, then one of America's largest banks, and had been a keen observer of startups like WeChat and Alibaba that had transformed payments and banking in his native China.
Cody Pickens for Forbes
More than a decade later, Chime is preparing for an IPO at a $25 billion valuation, an offering that will transform Aminos's $50,000 stake into a windfall of hundreds of millions and prove Li's decision to invest in it a prescient one. 'He was able to see that sort of disruption was also going to happen in the United States,' Chime CEO Chris Britt told Forbes. 'And so he's able to bring that perspective,'
Savvy bets like that helped Li earn his debut on the Midas List this year alongside other venture capitalists turning industry acumen, deep networks and friendships into major wins. 'Those kinds of networks help a lot,' Li said. 'You invest only when you stay together with smart people.'
This is a proven strategy for Li, whose friends and partners have led him to the Chime investment, and launching an angel fund that made an early investment in Zoom in 2011, which now boasts a $25 billion market cap. The video conferencing behemoth's founder, Chinese American billionaire Eric Yuan, was a friend in his soccer group. Without the support and friendship of Chinese American executives, founders and scientists, Li's career might look different, he told Forbes.
To date, Li has backed more than 15 unicorns, including workforce management company Rippling (valued at more than $16.8 billion) and generative AI software firm Replit (valued at more than $1.16 billion).
Pete Sonsini, the co-founder and general partner of Laude Ventures, a firm he started in 2024 after leaving a more than two-decade-long career at global venture firm New Enterprise Associates (one of the biggest in the world by assets), took a more traditional path. He started his career in sales and management at Hewlett-Packard in the 1990s. Later, he joined virtual computing software firm VMware as a dealmaker, which led to his recruitment into the venture business. These days he's looking for promising bets in the technology infrastructure behind the biggest platforms and trends in the space, such as Laude's participation in a $100 million seed round for LMArena, an platform for AI benchmarking with academic roots.
It's still early days for Laude, but Sonsini has a solid track record: at NEA, he backed AI startup Perplexity (worth $18 billion in 2025) and software firm Databricks, which has toyed with going public in 2025 and is reportedly valued at $62 billion. He also invested in the Series B for AI firm Anyscale in 2020 and plenty of startups like advertising firm Teracent (which sold to Google in 2009) and Upstart, which went public after his investment and currently has a market cap of $4.2 billion.
With Laude, Sonsini is leaning into a sector that might have been considered boring before the AI boom: computing infrastructure and backend systems. The firm is interested in 'deeply technical entrepreneurs' and research-driven startups, also taking advantage of its relationship with UC Berkeley's research lab. 'It's actually more relevant than it ever has been in my venture career,' Sonsini said. Laude has invested in more than a dozen early stage startups.
Newly listed on the 2025 Midas List, Ilya Fushman isn't new to the space. He's worked as a partner and led Kleiner Perkins with Mamoon Hamid since 2018, though he began his career as an applied physicist at Stanford and later as the first hire at a semiconductor firm Solar Junction. 'I was initially going into science,' he said. 'Most people do that because they want to invent something truly new that'll have a disproportionate impact.'
Stanford exposed him to the world of entrepreneurship, and his first foray into venture capital as a principal at Khosla Ventures showed him he needed to experience a high-growth software startup from the inside. He joined Dropbox as one of its first 50 employees. He later helped build Index Ventures' San Francisco office, and that's where he started investing in unicorns.
As an investor, he's led a $11 million Series A funding round for the video communications software startup Loom, which Atlassian acquired for nearly $1 billion in 2023, and he's invested in Cameo and unicorns Harvey, Rippling, Slack and Robinhood.
Adam Ross, another Midas newcomer and partner at Goldcrest Capital, found his way into venture via the Stanford Review, a college newspaper started by billionaire Peter Thiel. While studying economics at Stanford, he served as its editor in chief, working alongside Thiel and Midas listers Keith Rabois and David Sacks. 'Venture capital was not even like a thing that I was aware of back then. We were just friends,' Ross said.
And what good friends to have. After running his father's plastics company (Poly America) for eight years and selling it in 2006, he was invited to invest in Facebook and Palatir.
Today, Ross's investments include early stage startup Anthemet, a firm selling a constellation of cell towers, law enforcement tech startup Peregrine, which recently raised at a $2.5 billion valuation, and SpaceX, deals he attributes to relationships built decades ago. "That's who we are. That's what we do. We're network-based people,' he said. 'We back people.'