http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio
They had the chance to invest in the following companies early, but didn't: Intel, Google, Apple, FedEx, PayPal, and others.
The stupidest things can turn out to be hits. I read of a guy who decided to market an electric toothbrush in the early '90s, when that market was considered by skeptics to be mature and saturated. He was quite successful, as it turned out.
I guess the nature of entrepreneurship is that it's entirely unpredictable. Therefore, we can safely disregard the naysayers, even though they are accidentally right 9 times out of 10!
JK Rowling wrote a crime novel under a different name. The critics praised it, but it was a commerical failure. It's more likely that luck can play a large failure.
JK Rowling herself has said the number of copies the book sold in its first three months corresponds fairly well to the number of books she sold under her own name when she was initially published.
Luck does play quite a large part in this once the initial vetting for quality is done.
This is misleading unless we know the list size in which these bypassed companies appeared. If the success/failure ratio is 0.01, then it should surprise no one that venture capitalists sometimes miss a winner while carefully investing in startups.
Part of the problem is that with almost all good ideas, you are trying to introduce a new reality where a familiar one already exist.