Richard W. Levandov

His firm Avalon Ventures is not well-known outside of biotech circles or its San Diego headquarters (Levandov is based in Waltham, Mass), but his November 2007 Series A investment in social game developer Zynga makes his coordinates irrelevant. Levandov, who co-led the investment with the ever-ubiquitous Fred Wilson and Brad Feld from Union Square Ventures and Foundry Group, stands out by being inconspicuous. He knew Wilson and Feld from their days at SoftBank (Levandov and Feld worked there, and Softbank was an investor in Wilson’s Flatiron Partners) and befriended Mark Pincus while working at AOL with Sunil Paul, Pincus’ cofounder in their first company, FreeLoader. It took Levandov less than an hour to decide to invest in Zynga. He says: “Due diligence is information you studiously gather if you want to kill a deal.” Levandov also made an early investment in Tacoda before it sold to Time Warner for $275 million. He joined Avalon in 2007 from Masthead Venture Partners, and before that, Softbank, in part to help the firm branch out into digital media. Besides Zynga, current investments include Internet startups Cloudkick (acquired by Rackspace), Pictela (acquired by AOL), Cloudant and Simulmedia.