The enterprise tech market is on fire: These are the 23 venture capitalists that picked the winners before anyone else and are shaping the future of work

Kristina Shen is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners where she focuses on cloud, machine learning, mobile and voice.

Shen, who co-authors the firm's annual State of the Cloud report, graduated from UC Berkeley before starting her career as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse. She joined Bessemer in 2013.

Shen was actively involved in Bessemer's investment the financial modeling company Adaptive Insights, which was acquired by Workday in mid-June for $1.55 billion. She was also involved in the firm's investment in the cloud communication platform Twilio, which went public in 2016.

Shen also led the investment in Glint, a real-time pulse survey and analytics platform which helps HR departments notice which employees are less engaged in their jobs.

Charles Hudson is managing partner at Precursor Ventures, a generalist firm with an affinity for business-to-business software that he founded three years ago.

Hudson, whose career has spanned a series of startups as well as a stint at Google, is currently the sole partner at the firm which invests in around 20 companies a year. With a focus on very early stage — or "pre-seed," startups — the firm's investments are usually around $250,000.

His investments range from software companies like Atipica, which uses artificial intelligence to find bias in recruiting data, to Dor, a piece of hardware that tracks and charts retail foot traffic.

In June, one of Hudson's investments Kit was acquired by Patreon and in 2017, his portfolio company Bizzy was acquired by SendGrid.

Rich Wong joined Accel Partners as a general partner in 2006, and focuses primarily on software, internet services and mobile tech.

One of his best known investment hits is Atlassian, which went public in 2015 and is now worth more than $14 billion.

He also has a knack for funding unicorns. Wong led the the $153 million investment in the robotics automation software company UiPath in March. UiPath is now valued at $1.1 billion. Another of his investments, the background check company Checkr, raised $100 million at a $900 million valuation in April, according to PitchBook.

Dayna Grayson is an early-stage venture capitalist leading NEA's investments in the digital manufacturing and design software space.

Grayson, who works primarily between Washington, D.C., New York City and Boston, started her career as an engineer and product designer. She pivoted to venture capital in 2006 after getting her MBA from Harvard, and joined NEA as partner in 2012.

Though she invests in consumer products occasionally, Grayson is a trailblazer in "additive manufacturing," also known as 3D printing. But her investments have little to do with helping consumers print out quirky plastic objects from home. Her portfolio consists of companies that are using software to rethink the product manufacturing space and increase worker productivity.

Highlights of her portfolio include Onshape and Desktop Metal, two startups with large total addressable markets and high potential to make a big impact on the manufacturing industry. Another one of her portfolio companies, Pocket, was acquired by Mozilla in 2017.

Matt Miller is a partner at Sequoia where he focuses on developer-centric infrastructure and software companies.

Miller, a self-described nerd, founded a startup in college but it didn't take off. After college, he spent nearly five years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs. He joined Sequoia in 2012 and has since worked closely with high-flyers in the enterprise space, such as Barracuda Networks, Carbon Black, Docker and Okta.

Barracuda Networks went public in 2013 but got taken private by a private equity firm in February at a $1.6 billion valuation. Carbon Black went public in early May and is similarly now valued at $1.6 billion on the public markets.

One of his investments, the home security technology company SimpliSafe, was acquired at the end of June by the private equity firm Hellman & Friedman. That deal reportedly valued the company at $1 billion.

Mary Meeker's track record of A-list startups speaks for itself. As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Meeker has built an empire across consumer tech companies, with big names like Facebook, Airbnb, Spotify, and Pinterest.

But don't let that distract from the fact that her enterprise investments are also top of their class. Her portfolio includes the $1.25 billion customer service messaging platform Intercom and the $5 billion office collaboration software company Slack, as well as the $9.2 billion digital payments company Stripe.

She also invested in DocuSign, which went public earlier this year. It's now worth over $8 billion on the public markets.

Meeker joined KPCB in 2010 after nearly 20 years at Morgan Stanley. She has an MBA from Cornell.

Chelsea Stoner is general partner at Battery Ventures where she invests in companies across software and the healthcare-IT space.

Stoner, who has an MBA from the University of Chicago, joined the firm in 2006 after spending time in private equity and at the management consulting firm Accenture.

Avalara, a sales-tax software company that Stoner invested in, went public at the end of June, marking her third mega exit in just over two years.

Last year, her company Intacct was bought by Sage Software for $850 million. The year before, the home-healthcare software company Brightree sold for $800 million to ResMed.

Jason Pressman is an early-stage investor and managing director at Shasta Ventures. Though a generalist, Pressman frequently invests in cloud computing, Software-as-a-Service and open source software companies.

Pressman joined Shasta in 2005 after running strategy and operations at Walmart.com, a venture backed team that built a digital retail business for the colossal retailer. Before joining Walmart.com, he got an MBA at Stanford.

Among Pressman's investments is Zuora, a SaaS company for building subscription businesses, which went public in April. He also has on-going investments in companies like the employee engagement platform Glint and the server log system Scalyr.

Outside of work, Pressman is an avid scuba diver and advocate of shark conservation efforts through organizations like WildAid.

Tyson Clark is a general partner at GV where he focuses on Software-as-a-Service applications and data center infrastructure investments.

Clark, who studied industrial engineering at Stanford before getting an MBA from Harvard, was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz until he joined GV in 2015. He also spent some time leading corporate development at Oracle, investing at Morgan Stanley, and scuba diving with the Navy.

His investments include the Salesforce competitor ProsperWorks, the cloud security company Evident.io, which got acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2018, and the IT analytics company Rocana, which got acquired by Splunk in 2017.

Martin Casado is just over two years into his tenure as a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

Casado cut his teeth as cofounder and chief technology officer of Nicira, a network virtualization company that got acquired by VMware in 2012 for $1.26 billion. At VMware, he was senior vice president and general manager of the networking and security business.

Like many of his peers in venture capital, Casado went to Stanford. But he didn't get an MBA. Instead, he has both a master's and a PhD in computer science. He's super technical in a way that helps him discern between a good pitch and a good product.

It's this sort of specialized wisdom that makes him an effective board member to heavily technology-driven companies like the self-driving car data company DeepMap and the big data company ActionIQ.

Theresia Gouw is a founding partner at Aspect Ventures, where she focuses on early stage investments in cybersecurity, enterprise tech and the future of work.

Gouw, who studied engineering at Brown before getting her MBA from Stanford, co-founded Aspect in 2014 after 15 years as a partner at Accel.

Among her investment success stories are the cybersecurity companies ForeScout and Imperva, and the offshore outsourcing company PeopleSupport, all three of which went public.

Gouw also invested in Crew, a messaging and collaboration platform for people who aren't sitting at a desk all day, as well as the enterprise security company CATO Networks.

Sarah Smith joined Bain Capital this year as an investing partner after a career spent running high-growth companies from the inside.

Smith, who has an MBA from Stanford, started her career as a music teacher but soon joined Facebook where she held roles in operations and growth before joining Quora as an executive in human resources and in sales roles. While at Quora, Smith moonlighted as a seed investor with Graph Ventures.

Though just two months into her role at Bain, Smith has several unannounced deals in the works. She plans to invest primarily on early-to-mid stage companies, with a focus on workplace productivity software, in addition to some consumer startups in the parenting and care space, such as the parenting app Winnie and the personal robots at OhmniLabs, which she invested in through Graph.

In terms of enterprise tech, Smith is specifically interested in companies that solve issues in HR, operations and sales — areas where she has deep personal experience. She's an investor in the recruiting software company Lever and has her eyes open for interesting things happening in the hiring space.

Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock Partners where his investments focus on Software-as-a-Service, cloud infrastructure, and artificial intelligence.

Chen joined Greylock in 2013 after making a name for himself as an executive at VMware, where he was vice president of cloud and application services. Chen, who studied industrial engineering as an undergrad at Stanford, also got an MBA from Harvard.

Among his most striking investments are Docker, a cloud containerization platform valued at $1.29 billion in a 2017 fundraising round, and Cloudera, which went public last year.

Another of his investments, the decentralized database platform Attic Labs, got acquired by Salesforce in January 2018.

Chetan Puttagunta is an early stage investor focused primarily on developer-led and developer-focused technology startups.

A developer by training, Puttagunta went to Stanford for undergrad and spent four years in financial services before joining NEA. He's been investing with the VC firm since 2011.

So far his specialized focus has paid off in big ways. Two of his portfolio companies, MongoDB and MuleSoft, went public in 2017. Just one year later, Salesforce acquired MuleSoft for $6.8 billion, and NEA was the single biggest shareholder of MuleSoft when it got acquired.

Another one of his companies, the open source search and analytics platform Elastic, already has over 200 million downloads.

Mamoon Hamid is a recent addition to the Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers's team, but he's been an active force in enterprise tech investing since 2005.

That's when Hamid joined US Venture Partners after getting his MBA from Harvard. Then in 2011, he left to co-found Social Capital.

Hamid's portfolio includes some of today's most successful software companies, including Slack, last valued at $5 billion; Yammer, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2012 for $1.2 billion; and Box, which went public in 2015.

Now at KPCB, Hamid works with the design software startup Figma and the photo-editing app Prisma, as well as Intercom and Slack.

Eric Liaw is general partner at IVP. He joined the firm in 2011 after time at Technology Crossover Ventures and Morgan Stanley.

As with everyone at IVP, Liaw is a generalist, but he tends to focuses on late-stage investments across high-growth enterprise software, internet and mobile startups.

One of his investments, GitHub, got acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion in early June. He's also invested in MindBody, a Software-as-a-Service platform that's aimed at boutique fitness club and yoga studio owners and which went public in 2015, as well as ZipRecruiter, a career website last valued at $950 million in a 2018 series B.

Liaw went to Stanford for his undergrad and stuck around for his M.S. in Management Science and Engineering.

Karim Faris is general partner at GV where he focuses on enterprise software, data analytics, and security.

Faris, has an MBA from Harvard in addition to an MS in electrical and engineering from University of Michigan and a BS in computer engineering from Brown.

He joined Google's corporate development team in 2008 after spending time in venture capital firms, and started investing full time for GV, then known as Google Ventures, in 2010.

One of his portfolio companies DocuSign went public in April 2018. Another, Cloudera, went public in April 2017.

He's also seen several companies get acquired, including MindMeld, which got acquired by Cisco in 2017, and Upthere, a cloud company that got acquired by Western Digital in 2017.

Ajay Agarwal is managing director at Bain Capital where he makes early-stage investments in Software-as-a-Service, supply chain management and autonomous systems

Some of his investments include SendGrid, an email automation company that went public at the end of 2017, and Kiva Systems, a robotics company that got acquired by Amazon in 2012 for $775 million.

Two others, Clari and FourKites, are gaining steam with growing traction and the funding rounds to match.

Before joining Bain, Agarwal was head of sales and marketing at Trilogy Software. He has a BS in electrical engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard.

Byron Deeter is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners where he invests primarily in cloud and mobile startups.

Since joining Bessemer in 2005 to lead its global cloud practice, eight of Deeter's portfolio companies have gone public and 10 have reached unicorn status with a $1 billion+ valuation.

One of those companies was DocuSign, which went public in April. Deeter also invested in the financial modeling company Adaptive Insights, which was acquired by Workday in mid-June for $1.55 billion.

Other notable investments from Deeter include the public companies Box, SendGrid and Twilio.

Deeter, who graduated from UC Berkeley, also has experience on the other side of the table. He first met Bessemer in 2000 while raising a Series A as a cofounder with Trigo Technologies, a software company that got acquired by IBM in 2004.

Peter Levine is a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz.

He's the man behind the firm's $100 million series A investment in GitHub — the single biggest check ever written by the VC firm. It proved to be a smart move in June when GitHub got acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion.

Before joining the firm, Levine spent many years as an executive in the enterprise tech industry. Most recently, he was an executive at Citrix, which acquired XenSource, where he was CEO, in 2007.

Besides GitHub, Levine has investments in heavy-weights like the cloud infrastructure company DigitalOcean, which was valued just under $700 million in 2015, and the 3D design company Onshape, which was valued at $800 million in 2016.

Dharmesh Thakker is a general partner at Battery Ventures, where he focuses on early and growth-stage investments in cloud, data, security and enterprise applications.

Thakker, who has an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, joined Battery Ventures in 2015 after time as managing director at Intel Capital. Last year he had two big exits from investments in MongoDB and Cloudera, which both went public.

Currently, Thakker is involved in many of Battery's data-focused and enterprise investments, including Databricks, last valued at $940 million in 2017, and the cloud data center company Fungible, last valued at $260 million n 2017.

Bryan Schreier is a partner at Sequoia Capital where he invests across the enterprise and consumer tech sector.

Though he's a generalist, Schreier has had some major success with enterprise tech businesses — particularly with Dropbox, which went public at a $9 billion valuation in March. Dropbox is now work $12.5 billion on the public markets.

He's also invested in Qualtrics, a marketing data and analytics company last valued at $2.5 billion in 2017. And another investment of his, a software company called Inkling that helps onboard and train field workers, got acquired by the private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners in February.

Schreier worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley for three years before joining a pre-IPO Google in online sales and operations. He stayed at Google for five years before joining Sequoia in 2008.