Taken as a whole, the methodology rewards what can be observed from the outside. Capital raised, deals done, and marquee portfolio names are all visible; the money actually returned to limited partners, for the most part, is not. Firms that are big, busy, and prominent will therefore do well, and on the whole they deserve to. But the ranking is best read as a measure of franchise strength rather than of skill per dollar invested.

Every ranking methodology reflects the objectives of its creators. I also co-created a methodology for assessing VC firms, with an emphasis on the economically relevant portions of the net profits generated by individual VCs’ investments. What the two lists agree on is as informative as where they part. Both put the same handful of firms, which have been prominent for a decade or more, at the very top; firms such as Sequoia, a16z, and Lightspeed. That agreement is real: the elite of the American VC industry is very select, relatively stable, and well capitalized. Below that, of the roughly 110 firms in TIME's top 200 that do not appear in ours, only fifteen are ones we rule out by definition: accelerators such as Plug and Play, angel networks, corporate vehicles, asset managers. We include some VC firms that are ineligible for TIME’s ranking (Meritech, Dragoneer, Addition, and Inflection Ventures all place in our top 100). We agree on the other firms: we simply score them lower. In other words, the industry has reached consensus on its top performers but not on the tier beneath it. For a founder or an allocator, that is the practical lesson: past the first twenty names, "top firm" is a claim about which yardstick you picked.