I took the investor table from Cursor's $60B exit, and turned it into this graphic with Claude.
Some quick notes: each box represents an investor, and the scales are in 4th root (for better visibility). x-axis is money in, y-axis is money out. Each box spans the approximate range of both. The further up and left a box, the larger the ratio of outcome.
The boxes try to capture some of the ambiguity on investment size / terms, and range of outcome possible.
The most notable one here probably is Ali Partovi's Neo writing a pre-seed check which ~3000x’d in about 4 years. The OpenAI startup fund did quite well here themselves with a nice 500-800x.
Thrive, while a bit later, made the most in absolute value, netting somewhere in the range of $7B to $11B