The Midas List, Or Why Facebook May Be The New Google

With hundreds of prominent venture capitalist gathered at the NVCA conference in Boston today, it was an interesting time for Forbes to release its sometimes-annual Midas list of 2011’s top 100 tech investors. We imagine some VCs gave their touch-screens a good workout as they scrolled through the list to see where they ranked – or if they ranked at all.

Such lists are always heavily subjective, since picking the methodology determines how the list will turn out (full disclosure: our friends at Dow Jones VentureSource provided the raw data for the Forbes report, though neither VC Dispatch nor VentureWire was involved in the project). And indeed, some VCs get irritated by the list, believing it doesn’t accurately reflect true returns.

But it certainly gets attention. The project examines returns gained from IPOs and M&As over $200 million in the last five years, and used a series of additional metrics as well as an expert panel to come up with the final list.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Must-Reads from other Websites

Panos Mourdoukoutas

Why Apple Should Buy China’s Xiaomi

Paul Graham

What I Didn’t Say

Benjamin Bratton

We Need to Talk About TED

Mat Honan

I, Glasshole: My Year With Google Glass

Chris Ware

All Together Now

Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro

The Sculpture on the Moon

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Websites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other websites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Read more »