From Venture Rankings to Venture Decisions - by Keith Teare

The State of Venture

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From Venture Rankings to Venture Decisions<br>Beyond Ilya Strebulaev's rankings

Keith Teare<br>Jul 10, 2026

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This article was aided by OpenAI Sol 5.6 and the SignalRank Agent (https://agent.signalrank.com)<br>date: "2026-07-10"<br>Ilya Strebulaev has done something useful for a market that often runs on anecdote. His new ranking of angel investors brings structure to a part of venture that is usually discussed through reputation, memory, and selective war stories.<br>That matters. There are still too few academics looking seriously at early-stage venture or indeed venture at all. The asset class needs more people willing to collect data, expose assumptions, and make rankings inspectable.<br>But a ranking is only as good as it is actionable. Can I make investment decisions based on it? That is important for an LP and a co-investor. And for founders, how good is my investor?<br>Strebulaev is clear about the limitation of his own leaderboard:<br>“The ranking uses lifetime US unicorn investments.”

and<br>“Every lifetime leaderboard has the same blind spot. The unicorns behind those totals were often founded a decade or more ago, those companies have since matured, and many of the angels who backed them have moved into formal funds, slowed down, or stopped angel investing entirely. A lifetime ranking rewards being early to the last cycle. It says much less about this one.”

The ranking uses lifetime U.S. unicorn investments. That makes it a historical contribution map. It tells us who appeared on the cap tables of companies that eventually became unicorns. It is useful for understanding the last cycle and historical merit, like a hall of fame. It is less useful for deciding who a founder should target now, who an LP should underwrite now, or who a platform team should prioritize now.<br>The Lifetime List Answers a Real Question

Strebulaev’s leaderboard membership is aligned to most observers intuition. Y Combinator leads with 113 unicorn investments, followed by Plug and Play at 52 and 500 Global at 41. Sand Hill Angels is the best-placed angel group at 31. It does not measure efficiency (how many failures it took to make a success).<br>The list also reveals something important beneath the institutional names. Past the top five, the ranking becomes mostly individuals. In Strebulaev’s count, 271 of the 304 investors in the Top 200 are individuals. That is 89%. In the Top 100, the individual share rises to 91%.<br>The angel market looks institutional at the very top because accelerators invest in hundreds or thousands of companies. But underneath that, early-stage venture still depends heavily on people writing personal checks, building reputations, and getting into rounds before firms are willing or able to move.But still, a lifetime ranking is a weak decision tool and Ilya acknowledges that.<br>The Blind Spot Is Time

Every lifetime leaderboard has the same bias. It rewards being early to companies that were often founded a decade or more ago. Some of those investors are still active. Some are not. Some have moved into formal funds. Some write fewer checks. Some were attached to a platform, geography, or network structure that no longer exists in the same form.<br>That does not make their contribution less real. It does make the ranking less actionable.<br>For a founder raising now, “who backed the most unicorns over a career?” is a different question from “who is currently effective at my stage?”<br>For an LP, “who was present in the last cycle’s eventual unicorns?” is a different question from “who is showing repeatable signal in the present market?”<br>For a venture firm, “who has lifetime prestige?” is a different question from “who should I build a sourcing relationship with this year?”<br>The current market needs a ranking system that is current and measures recency, only that can align to real-time decisions being made.

The SignalRank Cut Starts With Stage

SignalRank’s 10-year leaderboard dashboard takes a different approach. The stage specific scores on the tabs (shown as rankings over time) is not a lifetime honor roll. It is a current stage-specific leaderboard. The dashboard cut used here is the current-year stage specific ranking with a 2016-2025 scored period, and it includes companies, unicorns, efficiency, investor score, and rank. Each year measures only three years of prior investments at the stage.<br>That changes the answer immediately.<br>Y Combinator still ranks first in the SignalRank Pre-Seed cut, but the reasons are visible. In the current dashboard data, YC has 2,357 companies, 5 unicorns, 0.21% efficiency, and a Pre-Seed investor score of 32,128.66. That is a scale story. It is not the same story as “113 lifetime unicorn investments.”<br>Below YC, the list changes character...