Identifying Successful Investors in the Startup Ecosystem

Srishti Gupta, Robert Pienta, Acar Tamersoy, Duen Horng Chau, Rahul C. Basole

Abstract: Who can spot the next Google, Facebook, or Twitter? Who can discover the next billion-dollar startups? Measuring investor success is a challenging task, as investment strategies can vary widely. We propose InvestorRank, a novel method for identifying successful investors by analyzing how an investor's collaboration network change over time. InvestorRank captures the intuition that a successful investor achieves increasingly success in spotting great startups, or is able to keep doing so persistently. Our results show potential in discovering relatively unknown investors that may be the success stories of tomorrow.