The Midas List(31~40)

Parag Saxena
Vedanta Capital
2007 Rank: 38 
Age: 52
Left Invesco Private Capital in 2006 after two decades and a falling-out with the parent company. Started own firm with two other ex-Invesco partners. Big IPOs last year: Masimo, MetroPCS. Investments range from wireless to biotech. Excited by opportunities deregulation provides in India and elsewhere. Raised $1.4 billion fund called New Silk Route to take advantage of that. Advocate for primary school education; notes that one F-16 costs as much as 100 schools.

Scott D. Sandell
New Enterprise Associates
2007 Rank: 41 
Age: 43
Had a two-fer on June 27th, 2007: Data Domain, a storage software firm he incubated at NEA with partner Forest Baskett, and Spreadtrum Communications, a Chinese mobile chip company he backed later, both made their debuts on Nasdaq. In addition to traditional IT, invests in green tech and Asia. Schlepped to China seven times in 2007. Co-sponsored the firm's investments in Lianlian Pay (mobile payments) and RedBaby, a Chinese company that indulges shoppers' instant gratification: delivers goods in 24 hours or less. Both could go public by 2009.

Peter Morris
New Enterprise Associates
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: 51
Returns to the list with June sale of IronPort (e-mail security) to Cisco for $830 million. Other successes: GPS provider Tele Atlas and enterprise networking company Tasman Networks. Excited about opportunities in health care, energy and China and India. Spends free time on the tennis court; was a top-10-ranked junior player and wife is an ex-NCAA champ.

David Tse Young Chou
Goldman Sachs
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: NA
Low-profile Managing Director for Goldman Sachs. Had a hand in orchestrating 2004 bonanza SMIC.

Alexandre Balkanski
Benchmark Capital
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: 47
Harvard PhD founded C-Cube in 1988. The company won an Emmy for its video chip. Joined Benchmark Capital in 2000, led firm's investments in Infinera and Entrisphere. Excited about new venture Ambarella (hi-def video compression semiconductors). Gets a rush skiing out-of-bounds slopes.

Kevin J. McQuillan
Focus Ventures
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: 51
Cofounder of Focus learned the biz at Dominion Ventures and Comdisco Ventures, where he made software and communications investments. Focus took five of its portfolio companies public in 2007, helped sell another three. EqualLogic's pending $1.4 billion sale to Dell had the honor of being the largest all-cash acquisition of a venture-backed company of all time—until, that is, Glaxo closed it $1.7 billion-in-cash buy of Reliant a few weeks later.

Lip-Bu Tan
Walden International
2007 Rank: 28 
Age: 48
Nuclear engineer founded Walden International in 1987, caught the public eye with SMIC. Firm enjoyed 6 exits in 2007, including the public offering of NeurogesX and the acquisition of Centrality. Looking to Korea (Silicon Mitus) and green tech (SolarEdge) for future investments. Recently joined the Regent College Board of Governors.

Kenneth Sawyer
Saints Capital
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: 43
The venture capital "cleaner." Sawyer's firm comes in when the other VCs are frustrated or disillusioned by their startups, buys their stakes and reaps the rewards. Saints made several such secondary investments in voice software shop Tellme, giving it one of the largest institutional stakes in the company. Microsoft bought it for an estimated $800 million last May. The firm has acquired investments in 150 companies. Stanford MBA has swum to Alcatraz a number of times, also likes to dive into caves.

Douglas M. Fambrough
Oxford Bioscience Partners
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: 39
Joins our Midas List with sale of Solexa, which sequences the human genome on the cheap and sold to Illumina last January. Spent 2007 on Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, which aims to let drug developers shut off any disease-causing gene, an approach based on the technology behind Sirna Therapeutics, a company Fambrough backed and sold to Merck for $1.1 billion in 2006. Genomic scientist at MIT before joining Oxford in 1999. Avid amateur automobile racer.

C. Kevin Landry
TA Associates
2007 Rank: NA 
Age: 62
TA chairman's current boards: global securities lending manager eSecLending and MetroPCS. Sits on executive committee of alma mater Harvard's Committee on University Resources.