The Anti-Portfolio

Bessemer Ventures, one of the oldest VCs in the world, has a really interesting page detailing their “anti-portfolio”: companies that they had the opportunity to invest but didn’t. If you never checked that, be sure to read.

In this page you can see 3 categories of mistakes:

1. Price: they failed to invest because the price seemed too high at the time: e.g. Aibnb at $40M in 2010, Apple at $60M pre-IPO

2. Didn’t get because they thought it was basically a toy or a super niche market: Coinbase, Ebay, Facebook, Google, Tesla

3. Miscellaneous mistakes including failing to realize the founders could pivot the customer or overestimating the competitive landscape or complexity

I think many verticals in crypto (and the market itself) falls into the category (2).

I for example said NFTs were “too niche” in an article I wrote in October 2020 (see below). Even though I recognized that being too niche was not an excuse for failure, I failed to move faster.

See you tomorrow!

Advice for next time: write less, act more