Judging by his website, because of his extraordinary ability to vet tech opportunities. Check out the list on his Posse page - it's staggering.
What is staggering about that list? It looks pretty much like any list of a VC that has survived. One or two big but not tremendous plays like Dropbox and a lot of companies I haven't heard of before.
Sorry to snark, but the ability to vet opportunities isn't necessarily a skill that allows individuals to gain such a staggering list of investments. It's worth noting he improperly "vetted" Snapchat[0]. On the other hand, getting proprietary deal flow is. It would be easy to rank him at the top on that.
Are there places that track this info among VCs?
Generally speaking, the institutional limited partners (LPs; pension funds, endowments, family offices, etc.) that invest in venture and private equity incur pretty significant costs to get third-party information about actual performance by managers (i.e. VCs). From largest to smallest, LPs might generally: subscribe to Cambridge's data and use it in-house with full time staff, or hire a consultant (like Cambridge) to assess and help select their managers, or pay a fund-of-funds a fee (on the order of 1%) to do likewise.
The point of all that is: figuring out who is actually making money in VC, and guessing who is likely to continue doing so, is very non-trivial. It can't be done with publicly available, Crunchbase / Angel.co type data, much less a VC's own statements or portfolio listing page.
Don't get me wrong; Pitchbook is good and I pay $$$$ for it. But it serves a company-centric intel need, not an investment performance measurement need.
Can you please expand on this? Genuinely curious as to what the metrics are in this case.