The Anti-Portfolio

"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."

Wonder why? Click on the link to find out.

(It's a whole lot better if you find out now than later. ^_^)

I don't know about you guys, but Venture Capitalists are not a familiar lot to me, until I joined PESO. But anyway, this is why Bessemer's Anti-Portfolio is all the more amusing. It's a list of famous companies they passed on investing. HP, Apple, eBay, FedEx, Google, Intel, Lotus, Compaq, PayPal, IBM, Cisco Systems... Will the absurdness ever end?

They're so un-bitter about it that I wonder if it's even true.

Beyond the humor of the story is a greater lesson, of course, especially to us Marketing apprentices (aka the VC lapdogs).

Never say die. Getting turned down the first time will just be the start of a string of many other rejections.

The greatest ideas aren't the easiest to recognize. They'll never know what genius hit them.

And we, shall laugh hardest, laugh last.