Latest news with #TheresiaGouw
Forbes
08-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Amid DEI Backlash, This Pro-Diversity Venture Capitalist Is Now A Billionaire
Venture capitalist Theresia Gouw is 'smart, opinionated and the only woman in the room,' says Heather Fernandez, cofounder and CEO of healthtech startup Solv and former executive at real estate tech firm Trulia, which Gouw backed in 2005. She's also become a woman of many firsts. Born in Indonesia to parents of Chinese descent, Gouw immigrated to the U.S. when she was three. She later became the first person in her high school to attend Brown University, the first female partner at venture capital powerhouse Accel and cofounder of one of the first female-led VC firms in Silicon Valley. 'The American dream is so central to my personal story,' she told Forbes in 2023. She now has another 'first' to add to her list. Gouw is America's first female billionaire venture capitalist, worth an estimated $1.2 billion. Much of her fortune stems from her 15-year tenure at Accel, where she was part of the team that led that firm's lucrative early bet on Facebook (now called Meta). She now runs Acrew Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that she cofounded in 2019. Acrew raised $700 million in October to invest in data and security, health and fintech startups, bringing the firm's assets under management to $1.7 billion—with an emphasis on diversity, especially through its Diversify Capital Fund. Women made up just 17% of VC decision makers (partners, managing directors and principals) in 2024, per a PitchBook report. The private market data firm also reported that firms with at least one female cofounder captured around 22% of VC funding in 2024, down from 25% in 2023. Things likely won't move toward parity anytime soon. On President Trump's first day in office, he issued an executive order mandating the termination of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs—which he called 'radical and wasteful'—that have supported women, people of color, individuals with disabilities and others. In addition, some of the world's biggest companies with powerful corporate venture capital arms, including Google, Meta and Goldman Sachs, have rolled back DEI initiatives. How Gouw will respond to the new environment isn't clear, but for many years she has been a strong advocate for DEI, doubling down on the practice in several ways: starting Acrew, with an founding investment team that's 83% women or people of color; spearheading an initiative to bring Historically Black Colleges and Universities into the VC world; cofounding DEI-focused fund of funds First Close Partners (now with some $35 million in assets); and cofounding All Raise, a nonprofit that helps female founders and investors in Silicon Valley network and find mentors. Gouw didn't respond to a request for comment on this story or on Forbes' estimate of her net worth, but she did speak to Forbes in 2023. 'I'm really excited to be able to bring together my professional passion with my personal passion for better diversity and inclusion in tech,' Gouw said at the time, adding that Acrew's Diversify Capital Fund is the largest VC fund focused on increasing diversity of stock ownership in tech startups, then with more than $300 million in assets. 'You see a little bit of progress, and a little bit of pullback. It feels a little bit like two steps forward, one step back.' Born in Indonesia in 1968, Gouw left three years later with her parents and sister, near the end of the Suharto-led political revolution that targeted people of Chinese descent like her family. They moved to a 2,000-person town near Buffalo, New York, where she learned math by watching Buffalo Bills football games with her father, who'd explain the statistics to her, according to Lowenstein Sandler startup lawyer Ed Zimmerman, who's known and worked with Gouw for nearly 20 years. (In December, Gouw bought a reported 2% stake in the team, worth some $100 million.) In the mid 1980s, only 40% of students at Gouw's upstate New York high school went on to college. 'Someone once told me that you can improve your chances at luck by working hard and getting a good education,' Gouw told Forbes in 2023. So she worked her way into Brown University, where she majored in engineering (and now serves on its board of trustees), graduated, consulted for Bain & Company for a couple years, then earned an M.B.A. from Stanford in 1996. She cofounded a software startup around then, but jumped ship in 1999 to work at Silicon Valley-based venture firm Accel, where she spent the next 15 years. There she rose to become a managing partner of the fund that in 2005 bet on Facebook when it was just a scrappy, year-old startup fresh out of Mark Zuckerberg's Harvard dorm room. Gouw has never appeared in Facebook (now Meta's) regulatory filings, but Forbes estimates she held around 8 million shares at its 2012 public offering—worth more than $5 billion today had she not sold any—and slowly diversified her stake over time. Had she not gotten divorced in 2013 in California, where assets are most often split evenly between ex-spouses, she'd likely be worth even more. Photos, From Left: Daniela Amodei, Selena Gomez, Gwynne Shotwell. Illustration by Ben Kirchner for Forbes In 2014, Gouw decided to strike out on her own, cofounding Aspect Ventures 'with the idea to create venture the way it was in the late 1990s'—meaning launching a fund that was 'just laser-focused on the early stage,' she told Forbes in 2018. She and cofounder Jennifer Fonstad co-led Aspect for five years before splitting up and spinning off into their own firms. Gouw realized she wanted to build a shop that was 'more consistent with her values as a specialist investor,' and 'something with multigenerational staying power,' says Lauren Kolodny, who cofounded Acrew along with Gouw, Vishal Lugani, Asad Khaliq and Mark Kraynak—plus others that made up a founding team ranging in age from Gen X to Gen Z. 'To build the next great venture firm, you need to be much more culturally akin to our companies,'says Kolodny. Acrew launched in 2019 with a core value of diversity of perspective and two main funds. It invests anywhere from $1 million to $20 million in startups, with smaller amounts for earlier-stage companies. The vast majority of its Diversify Capital Fund's investors come from 'diverse backgrounds and communities,' meaning women, people of color and immigrants, per Acrew's website. That fund's goal is to bring diversity to companies' investors and boards—thus increasing founders' access to a variety of perspectives and, hopefully, drive better returns, on the thesis that diverse teams make better decisions. The firm hasn't adopted a specific mandate to invest a certain dollar amount or percentage of deals based on a diversity metric. 'Having a board member like Theresia who values DEI reinforces the idea that people will be judged on merits and not on what they look like or where they come from,' says Simon Taylor, founder and CEO of data protection startup HYCU. (Acrew led the firm's $53 million Series B in 2022.) 'There's a misnomer sometimes when you talk about DEI, that you're making exceptions for people. Not in her case at all. She wants to make sure her portfolio companies have access to talent, board members or other contacts that might be diverse.' One notable investor in Acrew's Diversify Capital Fund: Fisk University of Nashville. In 2020, lawyer and Fisk trustee Zimmerman approached Gouw with an idea to get Acrew to donate a fully-funded investor interest in the fund to the historically Black university. ' I'd love to,' Zimmerman recalls Gouw saying immediately, then writing a $1 million check to Fisk to cover the investment in Acrew's fund. Zimmerman, who has represented Acrew in fundraising transactions and is himself an investor in Acrew, added that Gouw has quietly become one of the largest donors to Fisk. Regardless of what happens to the investment, Zimmerman says the inclusion of Fisk as an investor helps because it's shown Fisk that 'this is what happens when you're in a venture fund.' HBCUs like Fisk—which has a $37 million endowment, tiny compared to Stanford's $37 billion—and other smaller colleges have never really been able to access the top VC funds that have helped to drive the exponential growth of the country's biggest university endowments. Gouw's initiative later expanded to other firms and HBCUs as well: The Historic Fund, which involves ten VC firms, including Acrew, General Catalyst and Union Square ventures and nine HBCUs, launched in 2023 with over $10 million in donations to the universities along with matching allocations in their venture capital funds. In the five and a half years since it launched, Acrew has made around 150 investments, according to PitchBook. The firm has had some wins, including an investment in fintech Chime—which is planning to go public at an $11 billion valuation, and for which Acrew partner Kolodny landed on Forbes' 2025 Midas List of top venture capitalists—and real estate tech firm Divvy, which sold in 2021 to (fittingly, Gouw's first investment at Accel) for $2.5 billion. Five portfolio companies have gone out of business so far, per PitchBook. Acrew's initial fund, which made its first investment in 2019, has an 8% internal rate of return so far, per data provider Preqin, putting it in the third quartile of firms that started investing that same year. Taken together, it's too early to tell how the firm's strategy will play out, since venture returns typically materialize over the course of a decade. Plus, succeeding as an upstart venture firm is certainly harder than it was a few years ago. It's more difficult to raise funding now amid rising interest rates and threats of sweeping global tariffs. That's coupled with a more hostile political environment for diversity-forward businesses. 'Diversity, equity and inclusion have become terms that people now shy away from,' Zimmerman says. ' The waters have receded in terms of the popularity of both the sentiment and putting dollars behind the sentiment … but the problem has not changed,' referring to diversity among venture capital leaders, investors and founders. Acrew appears to be hedging a bit, too. In the firm's October announcement of its fresh funds, there is no explicit mention of diversity or diverse voices—but rather a focus the firm's thesis-driven approach of investing in companies in the data & security and fintech sectors. In December, Acrew announced a new thesis focused on companies in the health space. In April, the firm released a report called 'All In on AI.' 'Funds are optimizing for fundraising ability instead of necessarily the substance,' says independent venture capital investor Andrew Chan, who wrote a blog post titled 'The Failure of DEI In Venture Capital' earlier this year. 'They'll play to trends that work.' Still, Acrew touts the diversity of its founding team prominently on its website: 55% identify as female, 48% as Asian/Pacific Islander and 14% as Black, Indigenous or other people of color. And Kolodny says that Gouw's success stands on its own as a way to encourage diversity in venture capital. 'It's important for young women and young Asian American women to see someone like [Gouw] achieve what she's achieving,' she says. Or, as Zimmerman put it in a 2022 social media post: 'Theresia leads by quiet example. It has, however, been brought to my attention that if we are more public about these examples, others will follow.'
Forbes
27-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Midas Originals: Tracking Years Of Outperformance From The List's First Investors
This year marks the 15th anniversary of the modern Forbes Midas List. To celebrate, we're looking back at the investors on our first ever Midas List and the companies propelling them up the list. Fifteen years ago, the companies shaping markets demonstrated that they had officially rebounded from the global financial crisis. We saw a surge in dealmaking and fundraising, as well as renewed investor enthusiasm for high-profile tech IPOs. The concept of unicorns began to solidify as modern-day juggernauts like Facebook (now Meta), Twitter (now X), Instagram, LinkedIn and Airbnb rose to record-breaking valuations. As has been the case since, the top investors on the 2011 Midas List were those with strong picking skills who foresaw the coming rise of consumer internet startups. A lot has changed since then, and while we have seen a number of newcomers make their way onto the list over the years, only a handful of the investors on the 2011 Midas List have maintained their spot on the list today. An even smaller portion of investors have climbed the ranks and remained at the top, demonstrating just how difficult it is to place the right bets time and again. Below, we'll take a closer look at some of the investors on the 2011 Midas List and where they are today. Theresia Gouw, Acrew Capital 2011: #93 In 2011, the Midas List featured just two women: Deborah Farrington of StarVest and Theresia Gouw. At the time, Gouw was a Managing Partner at Accel, where she focused on investments in consumer tech and cybersecurity. She had played a pivotal role in Accel's early investments in Facebook, including its 2005 lead of Facebook's $12.7 million Series A. Gouw was also an early backer of a number of startups that were eventually taken private, including cybersecurity startup Imperva, which was acquired by Thoma Bravo in 2019 for $2.1 billion, as well as Trulia, which was taken private by Zillow for $2.5 billion in 2015. After more than a decade at Accel, Gouw went on to become a founding partner at two additional venture firms, Aspect Ventures and Acrew Capital. Gouw is considered a pioneer for women in the venture capital industry. Since being named to the first Midas List she has added a number of accolades to her resume, including being featured as one of TIME Magazine's 40 Most Influential Minds in Tech in 2013, Forbes' Most Powerful Women in 2018 and America's Self-Made Women in 2024. While the industry has far to go, there are more than five times as many women on this year's Midas List, including Gouw's partner, Acrew Capital cofounder and partner Lauren Kolodny. Reid Hoffman, Greylock Partners 2011: #3 | 2025: #2 A renowned entrepreneur, venture capitalist and philanthropist, Reid Hoffman has been instrumental to the evolution of Silicon Valley's tech landscape. Hoffman began his career at Apple shortly after graduating from Oxford University's Wolfson College before becoming PayPal's COO in early 2000. He then went on to cofound LinkedIn in 2003, which became one of the first major social media IPOs in 2011. The company listed at an $8 billion valuation before ultimately being acquired by Microsoft in 2016 for $26.2 billion. By the time the 2011 Midas List was published, Hoffman had joined Greylock Partners and led a number of early-stage investments in consumer technology companies. He landed the #3 spot on the 2011 list with investments in well-known companies like Facebook and Groupon, in addition to his continued involvement with LinkedIn. Over the years, Hoffman has been a vocal advocate for responsible AI development and has helped start a number of AI ventures. In 2016, he was among the first donors to OpenAI, and in 2022, he co-founded Inflection AI alongside DeepMind cofounder, friend and colleague Mustafa Suleyman. Earlier this year, he launched Manas AI, a drug discovery startup leveraging AI for cancer research. At #2 on this year's Midas List, Hoffman has been one of the very few investors who has proven year after year that he can anticipate trends and make investments that not only generate strong returns but also have word-changing potential. Vinod Khosla, Khosla Ventures 2011: #71 | 2025: #7 With the familiarity of Vinod Khosla's name today, it may be hard to believe that he was ranked #71 on the 2011 Midas List. This is in part because many of the companies that helped skyrocket him to the top – like OpenAI, DoorDash, Instacart and Rubrik – did not yet exist. It is also partly a result of how far ahead of the curve he tends to be. Khosla has made a name for himself as a radical, risk-taking investor focused on the earliest stages of a company's journey. He often concentrates on areas with high potential for positive social impact, like climate tech, nuclear fusion and automation and AI. While many of these technologies are now considered mainstream, Khosla has been investing in them for decades. He was one of the earliest investors in Square (now Block) and OpenAI, well before they grew into the tech giants they are today. He turned a $2.75 million investment in Juniper Networks into $7 billion and generated billions more through wins like Cerent, Siara and Excite. His willingness to make bold bets has consistently placed him ahead of major technological shifts and helped him deliver strong returns. Doug Leone, Sequoia 2011: #11 | 2025: #7 With a knack for understanding people and what motives them, Doug Leone landed a sales job at Sun Microsystems right out of college. At Sun, he learned the core tenets that turned him into one of the most accomplished investors of all time: grit when stumbling upon obstacles, humility when faced with failure, and the ability to take calculated risks. These attributes helped Leone land a gig with Sequoia in 1988, where he ultimately became a managing partner and led the firm's expansion into China and India. At Sequoia's helm for over 25 years, Leone led several notable investments for the firm, including familiar names like Palantir, ServiceNow, Nubank, Medallia, Snowflake, Wiz and RingCentral. Over the years, many of the companies Leone has backed have yielded strong returns, such as WhatsApp's $19 billion sale to Facebook in 2024. His willingness to support founders from diverse and often unconventional backgrounds, coupled with a hands-on approach to mentorship, helped him cement his reputation as a trusted and principled leader in the industry. Danny Rimer, Index Ventures 2011: #59 | 2025: #95 Danny Rimer's move to the Bay Area during the birth of Web 1.0 in the 1990s ignited a passion for technology that drove him to work alongside many of the world's most creative founders. An eternally curious fan of design and art, his first tech venture involved digitizing and selling images of famous artwork, establishing exclusive deals with galleries like the Louvre and Uffizi Gallery. Today, Rimer's investments focus on generational companies that leverage technology to influence how we interact and shape our culture. Rimer joined Index Ventures in 2002 to open its London office, and he later led the firm's expansion into San Francisco. He is one of fewer than 20 investors to have made the Midas List a total of 11 times, first appearing in 2011 for his investments in and MySQL, which sold for $280 million and $1 billion, respectively. In 2013, he led Figma's $3.9 million seed round, becoming the first institutional investor in the company. More recently, he invested in innovative consumer and design-focused companies such as Etsy, Farfetch, Glossier, Patreon and Discord. Peter Thiel, Founders Fund 2011: #7 | 2025: #3 By the early 2000s, Peter Thiel had already become an iconic tech mogul. He co-founded PayPal in 1998 and Palantir Technologies in 2003, two highly respected and valuable companies with a combined market cap of nearly $350 billion today. But believe it or not, that's not what he is best known for. In 2004, Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he made a $500,000 investment in the company for a 10.2% stake. This move proved highly lucrative over the years, as Facebook's valuation soared to $104 billion by the time the company went public in 2012. When the 2011 Midas List was published, Thiel was a Silicon Valley staple and placed seventh on the list. Over the years, Thiel has built on his early success with significant early investments in a wide variety of household names, including Airbnb, Stripe, Spotify, Twilio and SpaceX. Building off of his legacy as Facebook's first investor, today, he continues to provide support to young companies and entrepreneurs seeking to take their ventures to the next level. The Thiel Fellowship was established in 2010 to award $100,000 to individuals under 23 years of age to pursue entrepreneurial ventures instead of attending college. He also launched Breakout Labs, which provides grants to early-stage science startups in an attempt to bridge the funding gap for innovative companies conducting pioneering research that may not generate strong short-term returns. He is one of the only investors who has made the Midas List every year, and this year, he came in as #3. Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures 2011: #12 | 2025: #9 Fred Wilson is known for his contrarian approach to investing, often entering disruptive sectors when others are hesitant. He emphasizes the importance of investing in companies that foster community and engagement, particularly through companies leveraging decentralized networks like social media platforms and crypto companies. Wilson founded Union Square Ventures in 2003 and quickly got to work leading Series A rounds for Indeed, Twitter, Etsy and Zynga, making the firm one of the earliest investors in several groundbreaking platforms that would go on to deliver substantial returns for investors. Among Wilson's other investments are Stripe, Zynga, Tumblr, Stack and Carta. A strong proponent of blockchain technology, Wilson also led Union Square Ventures' $5 million investment in Coinbase in 2013, which was later valued at nearly $6 billion upon the company's direct listing in 2021. Since his debut on the Midas List in 2011 at #11, Wilson has been one of the most consistent investors, appearing on the list every year and only ranking outside of the top 50 investors twice.
Forbes
03-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The 10 Most Popular Industries For Billionaires 2025
Want to join the three-comma-club? There are countless ways to get there, be it bubble tea, comedy, or bringing back the woolly mammoth. But working in finance was still the most common route onto Forbes' World's Billionaires list in 2025. The most common route, for the 11th-straight year? Finance and investments. The industry has the most billionaires of all, with 464, or 15% of the list. And they posted another strong annual return, adding 41 new members, and some $400 billion in wealth, since last year. In all, these money masters are worth $2.6 trillion in all. Newcomers include venture capitalist Theresia Gouw (estimated net worth: $1.1 billion), private equity mogul Adebayo Ogunlesi ($2.2 billion) and George Raymond Zage III ($1.2 billion), who took LGBTQ social networking app Grindr public through a blank-check company in 2022. Warren Buffett, the 94-year-old Oracle Of Omaha, is still the sector's richest person by far, with an estimated $154 billion fortune (up $21 billion since last year amid yet another rise in Berkshire Hathaway stock). Then there's the tech industry, which ranks second, with 401 billionaires, accounting for 13% of this year's list. That includes Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, who is worth an estimated $216 billion (up $39 billion since last year) and ranks as the list's runner-up for the first time ever, trailing only Tesla's Elon Musk ($342 billion), who Forbes classifies as primarily an automotive billionaire. Awash in VC money and investor delirium for all things AI, no group has gotten richer (adding $600 billion) or gained more billionaires (46) than the planet's tech moguls. As a group, they're the wealthiest of all, worth a collective $3.2 trillion. Newcomers include Severin Hacker ($1.1 billion), cofounder and CTO of language learning app Duolingo; Marissa Mayer ($1 billion), the first female engineer at Google and former Yahoo CEO; and the world's youngest self-made billionaire, 28-year-old Scale AI cofounder and CEO Alexandr Wang ($2 billion). Manufacturing comes in third, with 342 billionaires, accounting for 11% of this year's ranking. The group is worth $1.1 trillion (up $100 million since last year), and the sector's richest person is still Germany's Reinhold Wuerth, with an estimated $35.1 billion fortune from fasteners and screws. No one from the industry gained more than Nigerian cement and sugar mogul Aliko Dangote, who is worth $23.9 billion (up $10.5 billion since last year). Among the sector's 33 newcomers: Chinese vaping mogul Zhang Shengwei ($2.2 billion) and Swiss hearing aid tycoon Hans-Ueli Rihs ($1.8 billion). Rounding out the top four is fashion and retail, where 297 individuals made their billions, accounting for 10% of this year's list. Altogether, they're worth $2 trillion, up $100 million from last year. That's despite the industry's richest person, LVMH's Bernard Arnault of France ($178 billion), losing $55 billion in wealth amid what his luxury goods giant has called 'a challenging economic and geopolitical environment' for the sector. Even with these headwinds, 16 newcomers from the industry still found their way onto this year's list, including Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge ($4.7 billion each), the cofounders of clothing brand Alo Yoga; Chinese gold and jewelry mogul Xu Gaoming ($8.2 billion); and Saudi grocery store and mall tycoon Abdullah Al Othaim ($2.5 billion). Richest: Vagit Alekperov ($28.7 billion), founder of Russian oil giant Lukoil. Richest: Rupert Murdoch & family ($23 billion), founder and chairman emeritus of News Corp., one of the world's largest media conglomerates. Richest: Harry Triguboff ($19.1 billion), founder, owner and managing director of Meriton, Australia's largest apartment developer. Richest: Mukesh Ambani ($92.5 billion), chairman of Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, which holds interests in petrochemicals, oil and gas, retail, telecommunications, media and financial services. Richest: Zhong Shanshan ($57.7 billion), founder and chairman of Chinese bottled water company Nongfu Spring. Richest: Thomas Frist Jr. & family ($27 billion), cofounder and chairman emeritus HCA Healthcare, which operates the largest hospital network by capacity in the U.S. Richest: Bernard Arnault & family ($178 billion), chairman and CEO of luxury goods conglomerate LVMH. Richest: Reinhold Wuerth & family ($35.1 billion), honorary chairman of screw and fastener maker Wuerth Group. Richest: Mark Zuckerberg ($216 billion), cofounder and CEO of Meta (formerly Facebook). Richest: Warren Buffett ($154 billion), chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway.
