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Insider is taking you behind the scenes of our best stories with our series The Inside Story.
This week we re spotlighting Insider startup and venture-capital reporter Candy Cheng.
Cheng is a TV veteran who produced shows for Bloomberg and CNBC before joining Insider.
You can read Cheng s reporting for Insider here.
You ve followed the tech and startup world for a long time and have produced interviews with the likes of Tim Cook, Bill Gates, and Jack Ma. What trends are you following now?
I get this question a lot, and the truth is, as a startup and VC reporter, you kind of have to keep an eye on everything all at once. As one smart investor told me, tech has gone from being a vertical to a horizontal. One could argue that every company is now a tech company, so that is how I approach my beat. We cover everything from fintech to consumer-tech startups in every stage, from seed to unicorn, ranging from funding to IPO s
Navin Chaddha
Mayfield has created over $9 billion in value from its investments in 2021 alone.
Its investment in Poshmark is expected to more than triple its returns to limited partners.
Managing partner Navin Chaddha offers the secret to his success as an entrepreneur and investor.
Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha has had a banner year. In the first quarter of 2021, his firm s portfolio created over $9 billion in market capitalization versus just $1.4 billion one year ago.
In early January, the Seattle-based application security and delivery company F5 Networks acquired Mayfield s portfolio company Volterra for $500 million. Seven days later, one of its star portfolio companies, Poshmark, went public in a spectacular $277 million IPO. As one of Poshmark s earliest investors with over 17.3 million shares, Mayfield walked away with nearly $1.7 billion after the IPO.
From Margaux MacColl, Melia Russell, Candy Cheng, and Michael Haley:
The venture capitalists who write the earliest checks known as seed investors take the biggest risks. But when they choose well, they also reap the biggest rewards. With huge profits at stake, thousands of institutions and individuals are active seed investors.
But seed investing is more an art than a science and only a few succeed regularly. Tribe Capital, a seed venture-capital firm and an investor in other funds, set out to find the top investors by analyzing data on about 1,000 of them. The result is this list of the top 100 as well as the Seed 25, a list of the top female seed investors.