So good. Some of my favorites:<p>> David Cowan’s college friend rented her garage to Sergey and Larry for their first year. In 1999 and 2000 she tried to introduce Cowan to “these two really smart Stanford students writing a search engine.” Students? A new search engine? In the most important moment ever for Bessemer’s anti-portfolio, Cowan asked her, “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage?”<p>> Jeremy Levine spent a weekend at a corporate retreat in the summer of 2004 dodging persistent Harvard undergrad Eduardo Saverin’s rabid pitch. Finally, cornered in a lunch line, Jeremy delivered some sage advice, “Kid, haven’t you heard of Friendster? Move on. It’s over!”
This is typical VC masterbation.<p>1. This list is tiny. They have pass on 10000 more companies than the ones on this list. Most of that passing was done correctly<p>2. VCs rightly over-index on the big winners. The Facebooks and Airbnbs of the world are completely outsized in terms of one key thing: how much money they make for the GPs and LPs. However, as builders, we should not focus on these because they are few and far in between and you don't need to be a founder of one of these to have a life changing event. You just need a good 7 or 8 figure exit. VCs don't make money on an 8 figure exit so they train us to go big or go home. This webpage is another piece of that propaganda.
Here is a list of companies from the page:<p>Airbnb, Apple, Atlassian, Coinbase, eBay, Facebook, FedEx, Google, Intel, Intuit, Kayak, Okta, PayPal, Snapchat, Tesla, Zoom, Instacart<p>Interesting notes from the page:<p>1. Apple: Bessemer had the opportunity to invest in pre-IPO secondary stock in Apple at a $60M valuation. Neill Brownstein called it “outrageously expensive.”<p>2. Coinbase: Ethan’s pithy response would go on to earn Brian and Coinbase a spot in the Anti-Portfolio for life: “There’s really no questions you could answer that would cause me to invest!” Almost nine years later, Coinbase would go public in a direct listing valuing the leading crypto exchange at $85.8 billion – or just a mere 8,580x the price Brian had eagerly offered up!
Are all these companies still as successful in alternative universes where BVP did invest in them?<p>I guess in part it depends on whether BVP just gets on the cap table and stays the f out of the company direction :D
Wonderful idea. It strikes me that anyone in the selection / allocation / decision business becomes more credible by illustrating the anti-selection like this. Kudos to BVP.
Interesting that all but two of the listed startups were software companies (FedEx, Tesla). I imagine the costs of fixed investments required to scale a company not based on software can reduce the potential max returns quite substantially. Can a non-software company achieve the kind of returns a software company can?
> 2011 Jeremy Levine arrived at LAX three hours late, thanks to flight delays, with enough time for only one of the two meetings on his calendar. He literally tossed a quarter and phoned Evan Spiegel with his regrets. SNAP was the largest IPO in 2017.<p>I guess you should blame the airline for that one
I assume besides being good marketing, this list is also meant to serve as a salve for rejected founders.<p>It's a "It might not be you. I could very well be us." message.<p>If you are getting rejected by 99 VC firms, it can beat you down and something like this could be soothing when things seems grim.