Robert Nelsen may not be a household name in venture capital circles — certainly not the way that Reid Hoffman, John Doerr and Fred Wilson are known.
But the Seattle venture capitalist is doing OK, outranking some of the higher profile VCs on the planet in the new Midas List released today by Forbes.
Nelsen, an early investor in Juno Therapeutics, a Seattle biotech company that went public in Dec. 2014 and now is valued at more than $4 billion, ranks #16 on the list, just behind Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
“My philosophy is to bet on great science, take risks with risk takers, tackle big problems, and to ignore convention,” said Nelsen in an email interview with GeekWire.
The 52-year-old father of two is the only Seattle-based investor on the list of 100 venture capitalists, though James Topper of Seattle-based Frazier Healthcare Partners also makes the cut at #91. Topper, an investor in Acerta Pharma and Calistoga Pharmaceuticals who joined Frazier in 2003, is based in Silicon Valley and leads Frazier’s Menlo Park office.
The recognition comes just a week after a separate VC list — produced by CB Insights and The New York Times — showed no Seattle area investors in the top 100. That sparked me to write a column on GeekWire — Company builders wanted: Can you find any Seattle investors on this list of the top 100 venture capitalists? — in which I noted that it is time for Seattle’s venture capital ranks to take root and for superstars to emerge.
Nelsen has certainly been around the block on the venture capital scene, helping to start Arch Venture Partners. While Arch is based in Chicago, Nelsen has always operated from Seattle, seeding investments in companies such as Ikaria and Trubion Pharmaceuticals. While biotech is a speciality, he also bankrolled Classmates.com and NetBot, both of which sold for positive outcomes.
In the past, he’s helped finance more than 30 companies, fifteen of which have reached valuations of $1 billion or more. Here’s what Forbes had to say about Nelsen:
The biggest dreamer in biotech investing is also the best-performing healthcare investor on our list, during a time when healthcare investors did great. Over a thirty-year career, Nelsen has had two dozen companies go public, and was the initial investor on both Illumina, the $23 billion (market cap) giant that popularized DNA sequencing, and Aviron, which created the nose spray flu vaccine.
One of Nelsen’s biggest successes in Seattle is Juno, a heavily-funded, cancer-fighting company that he helped get off the ground. According to the 2015 proxy statement, Arch is the second biggest investor in Juno, holding a 12.78 percent stake. Nelsen has served on the company’s board since it was founded in 2013.
“Juno was an easy investment because of the data,” said Nelsen. “Dead people walking out of the hospital two weeks later with no tumor gets your attention.”
And Nelsen sees even more promising prospects ahead when it comes to biotech investing.
“Biotech innovation is at an unprecedented, world-changing time, where cures and disease modifying therapies that save people massive societal money are becoming the norm. That has innate value, regardless of the markets,” he said. “I expect more cure, more innovation. We are in the glory years.”
The number one VC this year on the Midas List was Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital, an early investor in WhatsApp. The messaging app sold to Facebook for $16 billion in 2014.
