The Anti-Portfolio
bvp.com
bvp.com
But I'm glad I looked. This is hilarious!
(And it has nothing to do with YC or YC applicants. The actual title is much better: "Honoring Those We Missed: The Anti-Portfolio")
It also makes me feel not quite so bad about some of my own personal mistakes...
For the curious, the original submitted title was:
For All Rejected w2018 YC applicants, a sprig of hope
If you want to learn the fine art of self-deprecating humor, read the Bessemer article and then watch this video:
They're VC's... so a much higher standard of proof is required to establish integrity. (cough cough Eduardo Saverin)
Gotta remember, all angels and VCs are desperate to increase their "deal flow", that means they need startups to know their name when they go looking for money. So the VC puts on a sort of phoney humility... a kind of "hey we're worth billions but same as you its been hard!" type thing. "Look at how we made mistakes where instead of making tens of billions we only made billions". That way when you are looking for money you might think "Hey those Bessemer guys seemed pretty down to earth, like me!"
It's more like a good PR agency wrote it than 'refreshing'. No one there actually writes... they're al playing golf. It was Sally at the PR agency who wrote the thing that evoked a sense of integrity from you. She needs a pay rise.
okay, so, I don't have hard evidence of their strong moral principles, that said, to be in the VC business that long must be a fairly good indicator that their services are trusted, and their behaviour is befitting of their duty.
"With $4 billion under management, Bessemer invests from $100,000 to $75 million in innovative companies like LinkedIn, Yelp, Skype, CornerstoneOnDemand, Pinterest, Box and Twilio. Over 100 Bessemer companies have gone public. Last year alone, Bessemer had 5 IPOs, 7 M&A exits, and 20 new investments. "
https://techcrunch.com/2017/10/17/watch-the-first-four-episo...
Failure is not an option. It's a feature
- This is the point I made in a comment yesterday. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15537940
hprotagonist was fretting about the "freight train is barreling down on them in the form of Apple and Google"
I said there, and I'll say again here: Waiting for large companies to innovate is like saying "I won't build the Apple II because I'd rather wait for the IBM PC to be invented".
I think that big companies are under too much market pressure to really innovate freely. Startups are a good thing, and Y Combinator is helping. If you have an idea, please don't just give up and wait for the market leaders - make a startup and make it real.
There's no such thing as an antiportfolio or "missed opportunities". You may as well say "why didn't I pick the correct lotto numbers". The answer is "because you didn't".
Why didn't I make every decision in my life the right decision? Answer: "because you didn't".
I could have made a billion dollars if I had know all the right stocks to pick. The VC antiportfolio is the same thing.
Proximity to an opportunity seems to make people feel a greater sense of that they "lost" the opportunity, but in fact that lost opportunity is precisely the same as the whole world full of other opportunities that the person could have taken at that moment.
Lotto numbers all look the same up front. Startups all look different, so a good VC can be better than a bad VC if they just know which differences to look for.
I don't think this is an obvious claim. There's no strong evidence that VCs are capable of differentiating good startups from bad.
Anyone that got rejected that believes in their business should keep at it. We got rejected several times from YC in the early days, and it really meant nothing for the business in the grand scheme of things (so glad we didn't give up!)
We got really close but it wasn't in the cards. Ended up bootstrapping after that, and went to TechStars instead based on a recommendation from a friend (I really felt a need to do one of these programs, insecurity in hindsight). Came back from that and kind of fell into what became Ionic (http://ionicframework.com/) which was a side project for us, found some good traction with it and it consumed us and we ended up doing some VC rounds over the last few years (and continuing to grow nicely, millions of devs, etc.).
There's a long ways to go still but if you believe in the team you have, then you should do whatever you can to make it work. That combination of the right people at the right time is one of the most precious things and something that only you can assess. Not everyone will see the potential, but you realize quickly that they aren't the gate keepers: customers are.
It only means they chose someone else, for any number of reasons. Like all investment funds, they're choosing from a pool of applicants. Pitches are graded on a curve, they're all relative. YC is high profile and gets a lot of applications, I'm certain they're turning down some companies that they think are good investments, sometimes in favor of better investments, and sometimes for other reasons.
Could still believe you're a great investment.
You mean Susan? The CEO of YouTube? :)
Any other rejects interested in a mastermind group?
We could network with Slack/Hangout, encourage each other, and arrange our own "Rejects demo day" at end of March.
If interested reach out to me.
Why some continue to believe VCs actually know anything or add value is beyond me. Even YC admits as much, saying their best guess is the caliber of the founder, and that there should be at least 2 co-founders. Everything else is a guess.
This anti-portfolio is a sample of Bessemer's Type II errors [1]. It does not follow that they are useless. (Their returns are far from useless.)
But it doesn't mean you're a smart VC it just means that you're a rich VC. They have enough high profile misses to show they have no idea what is going to be successful. They passed on Google, Apple and Facebook with a combined market value of almost $1.5 trillion dollars.
You won’t find a source for this because it isn’t true. Lots of VCs have busted because despite diversification, the odds of a single company in a portfolio of 20 to 100 making it big are very small.
Bessemer Venture Partners is perhaps the nation's oldest venture capital firm, tracing our roots back to the Carnegie Steel empire. This long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.
It is extremely funny.
Also, while you wait, make sure to check up on your mom. Get into shape. Enjoy the scenery.
I have since stopped going fishing with that fucker.
Unfortunately some people think along the same line about running a company, not necessarily a startup one.
Oh, and if you know the fish and tricks of the trade, it is not just a matter of luck. Statistics in sports fishing say there really is a 10x angler. Competition fishing has been a thing for a long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Freshwater_Angling_Champ...