Investing is one of the most strategic yet satisfying endeavors that anyone can ever pursue. Although it poses the possibility of increasing your wealth, it also comes with the risk of losing it all just as fast. Today’s top investors have solidified themselves amongst some of the best financial analysts, who have a proven track record of successfully investing their money into prominent projects, companies, and assets. Irrespective of how seriously you pursue cryptocurrency or investing in general, it’s always valuable to have a basic understanding of who the top dogs are when it comes to investing. Let’s take a look at ten of the most influential investors who everyone should be aware of moving forward.

This is not financial investment advice.

This article discusses today’s prominent investors and how they became successful.

Tim Draper

The first investor that we’ll discuss is Tim Draper, who is known as being one of the most successful and influential investors in Silicon Valley today. Draper is the founding partner of Draper Associates and DFJ, but his original suggestion to use viral marketing as a method for spreading a software application from customer to customer was instrumental to the early successes of Hotmail, Skype, and others.

Draper has been recognized as a leading supporter of entrepreneurship with numerous awards and honors. He was listed as #46 of the most outstanding Harvard alumni, #7 on the Forbes Midas List, #1 of the Most Networked Venture Capitalists by Always On, and #98 in Worth Magazine’s 100 Most Powerful People in Finance. It’s safe to say that Draper is definitely a well-coveted figure among the investing community, as he also received the World Entrepreneurship Forum’s “Entrepreneur for the World” in 2015.

While maintaining his status as one of the most prominent figures in modern business, he also served on the California State Board of Education from 1998 to 1999, and currently leads an initiative to create six new states in California (Six Californias) to encourage competition and choice in government. In 1994, he created a non-profit for young children to learn about business and entrepreneurship called BizWorld. In 2011, he created Draper University of Heroes, a residential and online school to help extraordinary young people meet their entrepreneurial goals.

Garry Tan

Next, we have successful investor and former Y Combinator partner Garry Tan. Before Tan turned 30, the entrepreneur had already co-founded and helped develop a blogging platform to compete with Tumblr and became a partner at Y Combinator.

In 2008, Tan co-founded Posterous, a blogging platform, which has raised $5 million and was acquired by Twitter in 2012. Tan was a founding member of the engineer team Palantir Finance while working with Palantir Technologies.

He is currently the managing partner at Initialized Capital, an early stage seed fund with over $250M under management and over $20B in market value. He’s also famous for being one of the earliest investors in unicorns CoinBase and InstaCart.

Alexis Ohanian

Alexis Ohanian is an entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder and executive chair of reddit, a platform for online communities to share links and have discussions. Alexis’ original plan was to build an infrastructure that would allow people to order food from their cell phones. Though the idea was rejected, Alexis was invited to join the first class of Y Combinator, on the condition that he’d come up with a new concept. The next idea he pitched would become reddit.com.

Today, Ohanian focuses most of his time and effort on Initialized Capital, the early stage venture capital firm that he co-founded with Garry Tan. Ohanian has evaluated more than 6,000 startups as an early partner at Y Combinator, giving him the ample knowledge and experience necessary to be successful in this space.

Fred Wilson

Fred Wilson is an American businessman, venture capitalist and blogger. Wilson is the co-founder of Union Square Ventures, a New York City-based venture capital firm with investments in Web 2.0 companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, and MongoDB.

Wilson began his career as an associate and then became a General Partner at Euclid Partners. He worked at Euclid Partners from 1987 to 1996. In 1996 Wilson and Jerry Colonna began Flatiron Partners, which was named after the Flatiron District Based in New York City, it grew into an investment fund that focused primarily on follow-on investing, with investments in notable dot-com bubble successes and failures.

The firm’s 1996 fund capitalized at $150 million with two investors: SOFTBANK Technology Ventures and Chase Capital Partners, the private-equity arm of Chase Manhattan Corp. The firm later raised another fund capitalized at $500 million with Chase Capital Partners as the sole active LP. In 2001, Wilson and Colonna shut down Flatiron.

Prashant Fonseka

Next, we have investor and venture capitalist Prashant Fonseka. Fonseka is an investor at CrunchFund, the early stage venture capital firm founded in 2011 by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington and VantagePoint Partner Patrick Gallagher. Fonseka launched his first business, an in-home tech support network, while in high school and has experience in education, real estate investing and development, and operations management.

Currently, Prashant Fonseka works as Principal at Tuesday Capital (formerly known as CrunchFund), a seed stage focused venture firm. Want to learn more about Prashant Fonseka?

Check out our Coinbundle Conversations where CEO Saad Rizvi chats with Fonseka himself!

Naval Ravikant

The Silicon Valley legend Naval Ravikant is an Indian-born, self-made multi-millionaire, entrepreneur, investor, adviser, influencer, and passionate cryptocurrency enthusiast. He’s widely known as the CEO and co-founder of AngelList, a U.S based platform where startups meet angel investors and job-seekers find work at startups. After moving to Silicon Valley to start a new life he founded Epinions.com, a general consumer review site that was later bought by Dealtime, who rebranded the site to Shopping.com.

Naval joined forces with Babak Navi, and in 2007 they created Venture Hacks, a blog focused on helping entrepreneurs raise capital. In 2010, with a list of 50 angel investors willing to invest $80 million, AngelList was launched by Ravikant. Acknowledging the new trends arising, Naval is currently entering the crypto scene as a partner of MetaStable Capital, board member of the Z-Cash foundation, and with his latest crowdfunding product CoinList.

Paul Arnold

Paul Arnold is one of Silicon Valley’s most popular investors, having founded Arnold Capital and Switch VC. Paul brings startup experience, investment know-how, and business strategy to the table.

He invests in talented founders disrupting how things work, partnering with them to expand their businesses and scale to the next level.

As an executive and early employee at AppDirect, he grew the company through multiple rounds of scaling and funding. Before that, he drove strategies for some of the biggest names in tech at McKinsey & Company.

Chris Dixon

Chris Dixon is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm and also a contributing writer for TechCrunch.

He was a co-founder and the CEO of SiteAdvisor and also co-founded Founder’s Collective, Hunch, and more.

Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.

Michael Ma

Here, we have experienced investor and founder Michael Ma, who previously sold his Y Combinator backed startup TalkBin to Google in 2011, where he held various roles including lead mobile product manager for Google My Business.

Michael Ma is currently a General Partner at Liquid 2 Ventures, a seed stage venture capital firm built for the post-cloud, post-mobile, post-accelerator world of technology startups.

Chris Sacca

One of the more well-known Silicon Valley personalities around the world thanks to his appearances on the popular investing show Shark Tank, Chris Sacca is an accomplished venture investor, company advisor, and entrepreneur. Sacca manages a portfolio of over eighty consumer web, mobile, and wireless technology start-ups as well as an array of mature enterprises through his holding company, Lowercase Capital.

While primarily known for its investments in seed and early stage technology companies like Twitter, Uber, and Instagram, Lowercase has quietly grown to be one of the larger venture funds in the United States. Previously, Chris served as Head of Special Initiatives at Google Inc. In 2008, Chris worked on President Barack Obama’s campaign as a Telecommunications, Media, and Technology advisor, a speaking surrogate, a field office volunteer, and as Co-Chair of Finance and a Trustee of the Presidential Inaugural Committee.

In 2012, Chris continued his work as a National Finance Committee member, a host of the President’s own technology roundtable series, and as a Co-Chair of Tech for Obama.

Conclusion

If you are even remotely interested in finance or investing in general, then it’s extremely valuable to know who some of the top investors in the space are. Having technical knowledge is one thing, but having an understanding of who is who in the investing space will give you a good idea of how to achieve the success that you so badly desire. Moving forward, keep an eye out for any of the names on our list to stay updated with any of their future endeavors, especially given the cryptocurrency industry’s unique stage in its overall growth. As always, happy investing!