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January 14, 2002

The anti-portfolio
Posted by Teresa at 03:00 PM *

Bessemer Venture Partners’ own site says it best:

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

We chose to decline the investments below, each of which we had the opportunity to invest in, and each of which later blossomed into a tremendously successful company.

Then they proceed to list ten tremendously successful companies, and explain why they turned down the opportunity to invest in each one. In FedEx’s case, they turned it down seven times.
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