John Connors, a venture capitalist at Bellevue-based Ignition Partners who previously served as CFO of Microsoft, was named to Forbes’ 2013 Midas List that honors tech’s top investors.
Connors has made a number of good investments in companies like Splunk, which went public last April, Heroku, XenSource and Parse, which was just acquired by Facebook.
Connors, who ranked No. 98 on the list, worked at Microsoft for 16 years, holding several different titles including CFO and CIO. He joined Ignition in 2005 and also sits on the board of INRIX, the Kirkland provider of traffic data.
Other than Connors, not many from the Pacific Northwest made Forbes’ list. GeekWire’s John Cook has been writing (and talking publicly) in recent weeks about growing concerns over the lack of capital available in Seattle. To some degree, the only major venture capital firms left in the region are Madrona Venture Group, which successfully raised a $300 million fund last year, and Maveron, which recently announced a new seed fund program.
Some VCs claim that money will flow to good ideas, and that the Seattle startup ecosystem just isn’t producing enough raw entrepreneurial talent that is VC-worthy.
Others, however, claim that there’s a lack of capital available — accelerated by the fact that leading venture capital firms such as OVP Venture Partners and Frazier Technology Ventures have disappeared. In addition, Ignition’s scaled-back $150 million fund will make a large percentage of its deals in California startups.
Previously on GeekWire: VC investing tanks in Washington, overtaken by Oregon for first time since 1993
