Bessemer Venture Partners – Our Portfolio
The link above goes to one of the oldest Venture Capital firms in the U.S. If you're not familiar with VC firms, click here.
Everybody loves to brag about their investments that worked. This firm is unique in highlighting their mistakes and failures. This shows humility, for one thing. It also seems to show a willingness to learn from your mistakes.
How many organizations try to hide their failures? Do you often see a failure followed up by an effort to whitewash history, pretending that the mistake was never made? Are most organizations doomed to repeat their failures? I've seen many cases of Toyota being very open about their current and past problems. It seems like a core piece of the lean philosophy to be able to openly define problems, that being the first step in actually solving those problems.
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.
While, over the course of our history, we did invest in:
- a wig company
- a french-fry company
- the Lahaina, Ka'anapali & Pacific Railroad
The firm highlights what they regret passing on, investments including: Google, Apple, eBay, FedEx (they passed on them seven times), Intel, and PayPal.
I would hope that these failures are learning points within their otherwise successful organization. What can we learn from this for our own organizations?? Comments?
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