With Bessemer's
Jeremy Levine cracking the Top Ten in this year's Forbes'
Midas List of tech investors I thought I should reprise one of my favorite posts. From Bessemer Venture Partners:
Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture
capital firm, carrying on an unbroken practice of venture capital
investing that stretches back to 1911. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.
Over
the course of our history, we did invest in a wig company, a french-fry
company, and the Lahaina, Ka'anapali & Pacific Railroad. However,
we chose to decline these investments, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company.
Our reasons for passing
on these investments varied. In some cases, we were making a conscious
act of generosity to another, younger venture firm, down on their luck,
who we felt could really use a billion dollars
in gains. In other cases, our partners had already run out of spaces on
the year's Schedule D and feared that another entry would require them
to attach a separate sheet.
Whatever the reason, we would like to
honor these companies -- our "anti-portfolio" -- whose phenomenal
success inspires us in our ongoing endeavors to build growing
businesses. Or, to put it another way: if we had invested in any of
these companies, we might not still be working.
Apollo Computer
|
 | (acquired by Hewlett Packard)
BVP's Felda Hardymon was offered a small position in the company's last
private round, and waved it away: too small a position, he thought, at
too high a price. In less than a year it was worth 17x. |
 | BVP
had the opportunity to invest in pre-IPO secondary stock in Apple at a
$60M valuation. BVP's Neill Brownstein called it "outrageously
expensive." |
 | In
1994, Gil Schwed pitched his idea to BVP's David Cowan, who said that
Gil would never get distribution in the US. The next year, Check Point
got a huge Sun OEM deal and sold $25M of firewall software. |
 | "Stamps? Coins? Comic books? You've GOT to be kidding," thought Cowan. "No-brainer pass." |
 | Incredibly, BVP passed on Federal Express seven times. |
 | 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?”...MUCH MORE | | | | |
