We all know when people were right about something - especially in Silicon Valley because they remind you about it incisively. "Oh Turntable.fm? I consulted on their pivot." "Dave Morin brainstormed the Path idea with me." "I helped Twitter reach the masses when I joined in 2010."
Rarely will people admit when they completely got it wrong. I'll share one of my personal most embarrassing misses: When Facebook opened their platform up (2007) I thought it would fill the whole site with junk MySpace style clutter and it was the beginning of the end. I also thought Facebook had done it because they ran out of ways to innovate on the platform. It's embarrassing how wrong I was.
In what is the single coolest thing I have seen from a VC firm in a long time, Bessemer Ventures has taken owning failure to a completely new level. They have listed their most epic investment misses in their Anti-Portfolio. Not only do they list the companies, but they even call out the partners that screwed it up.
There does seem to be an unusual amount of these attributed to David Cowan who Startup Grind attendees found out when he spoke last year, is an unusually humble guy. I'd add say he's no slouch when it comes to investing having led on companies like Zoosk, VeriSign, Playdom, Hotjobs, and Smule. Read some of my favorites below, or check out the whole list here. Thanks to Daniel for the find.
