Quantity > Quality is Now What Matters Most, Again.
By now, you’ve probably seen Stanford ProfessorIlya Strebulaev’s post revealing thetop 50 VC investors in U.S. unicorns(trying to get the actual underlying data to do a much deeper dive hopefully soon).
🧠 11,000+ investors analyzed
🦄 1,500+ unicorns tracked
📊 Only early-stage investmentsbeforeunicorn status counted
Linkhere
Justsix firmshave backed100+ unicorns each. But how many have made up the majority of returns and which will next?
These firms dominate the early-stage venture landscape:
Together, they account forover 700 unicorns—nearly half of the Top 50.
🚫 This list doesn’t tell youwho made money.
💸 It only countshow many unicornsthey invested in—not how well those investments returned capital to LPs.
So I asked:
👉Does the quantity of unicorns actually correlate to venture success?
So I broke down some of these firms’ previously most well-known deals to see whoreallyturned paper unicorns into real DPI in the past to show you what it takes.
–Airbnb (2009)→ $585K → IPO 2020 →7000x
–WhatsApp (2011)→ $60M → Acquired by Facebook →50x
–Stripe (2010)→ ~$20M valuation → Still Private ($95B) →~1000x
–Coinbase (2013)→ $25M → Direct Listing 2021 →200x
–Slack (2010)→ Early round → Acquired by Salesforce ($27.7B) →200–300x
–Airbnb (2009)→ Tiny seed check →20,000x
–Stripe & Coinbase→ Early rounds →~1000x each
–Toast→ Late-stage check → IPO 2021 →20x
–OpenSea→ $100M at $1.5B → Marked down ~94% →Unrealized loss
–DoorDash & Coupang→ Big bets →10x
–WeWork→ $10B in → Bankruptcy →~0x
Lightspeed with “only” 78 had some of their data shared and you can see it really only takes a few investments to be successful.
https://www.newcomer.co/p/revealed-lightspeed-venture-partners
You investedbeforethe price ran up
You held enoughownershipto matter
🧩 The best returns came from early-stage firms who wrote small checks into cheap rounds, held significant ownership, and supported those founders for a decade.
In contrast, many late-stage unicorns turned intooptical wins—big logos, weak multiples.
So if you're raising, investing, or evaluating performance, here’s what to ask:
👉 What % ownership did you have?
👉 When did you invest?
👉 Did you exit, and how?
✅Early-stage firms like Sequoia, a16z, and Accelcombine quantityandquality: great access, strong ownership, patient capital.
✅Late-stage players like Tiger & SoftBankdominate unicorn counts butstruggle on returns.
✅Seed-stage giants like SV Angel and YCthrive on wide funnels and power-law wins.
Still the smaller emerging funds have the highest Alpha potential
So yes—having 100+ unicorns is impressive.
Butreturning capitalis what separateshype from high-performance.
Next time someone brags about their unicorn count... ask:
“Cool. How many did you exit?”💰
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