Cowboy Ventures, founded by Aileen Lee, took the top slot in the 2014 Portfolio Momentum Rankings.
By Jessica Stillman (Editor, Women 2.0)
Who’s on a hot streak in venture capital? Female-founded Mattermark should know. The company, co-founded by Women 2.0 Conference speaker Danielle Morrill, uses big data to give investors better information about the growth and momentum of startups. But recently, it’s also gotten into the business of collecting data on the performance of the investors themselves.
Three months ago the company released its first ever rankings of active venture capital firms, basing the list on the growth signals of companies in their portfolios. To be eligible, firms needed to have at least 15 active portfolio companies and to have announced an investment in the previous six months.
Who topped the list? None other than the firm of Women 2.0 PITCH judge and panel moderator Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures.
Portfolio companies were scored “based on momentum, or a moving average of relative week-to-week changes in signals like website traffic, mobile downloads, inbound links, and social media following. The more dramatically positive the score, the faster the growth,” Morril explains on the Mattermark blog.
Cowboy Ventures took the number one slot, but it wasn’t the only firm with a strong female influence on the list. Forerunner Ventures has an all-women leadership team, Maveron has a female principle, Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding partner at FLOODGATE, Joyce Kim is on the team at Freestyle Capital, and at Rothenberg Ventures around 30% of the companies in the portfolio have a female founder. All of which amounts to good news for diversity in technology.
“My hope is that these rankings will celebrate firms that are making great calls, whether they are well recognized name brand or up-and-coming partnerships, and encourage investors to focus on taking a portfolio-wide approach to assisting their companies with growth,” Morrill added. Check out the complete rankings here.
Jessica Stillman (@entrylevelrebel) is an editor at Women 2.0 and a freelance writer with interests in unconventional career paths, generational differences, and the future of work. She writes a daily column for Inc.com, contributes regularly to Forbes and has blogged for CBS MoneyWatch, GigaOM and Brazen Careerist, among others.
