A VC anti-portfolio
Paul Kedrosky points out a fun bit of candor from the folks at Bessemer Venture Partners:
Most venture firms have mental lists of deals that they shoulda/coulda done, but didn’t, and yet only a vanishingly small number of such firms will ever list the deals that got away. After all, it makes you look intermittently dumb and human and risk-averse, and gunslinging venture sorts could never concede any of those things to be true.
Trust the iconoclasts at Bessemer, however, to maintain at least a partial public list — they call it their “anti-portfolio” — of the deals that got away:
Among the gems on the reject list: Google, eBay, FedEx, Intel, Intuit, Lotus, and Compaq.
To keep things in perspective, Bessemer has a track record of nearly 100 years of successful investments, starting out in 1911, with funds raised from the sale of Carnegie Steel. I’d be pretty pleased to be around long enough to have such a spectacular reject list…
Tags: vc, fun, investment, finance
