Venture Capital Is Not A Road To Riches
But you already knew that, didn't you? Only five people on Forbes' list of 400 Richest Americans this year are venture capitalists. If you don't count the ones that also made money elsewhere -- Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, and Carl Edwin Berg, who built a commercial real estate business with John Sobrato in Silicon Valley -- there are only three. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins slid down this year's list -- his net worth dropped to $1 billion from $1.6 billion so he's number 346. Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures slid off -- last year he was worth $1.4 billion, but his net worth must have dropped to below $900 million, which is this year's bottom. (A lot of people lost money in the global financial crisis, but maybe Khosla's been investing his money in clean tech companies.) On the other hand, two venture capitalists made the list who didn't last year, maybe because the bottom is $400 million lower.
