The Verdict™ on ___ · Investor series · Register · By Siong Yoong
Bessemer passed on Apple, Google, and Airbnb
Bessemer passed on Apple, Google, Facebook, and Airbnb — and publishes the list. The miss was never the companies. It was trusting access over signal.
~4 min read
AI thumbnail — to generate
passed on Apple, Google, Airbnb / Leaderboard™: signal, not access
Illustrative read — these are teaching numbers, not a live score.
TL;DR — One of the best venture firms alive passed on Apple, Google, and Airbnb — and it wasn’t a taste problem. Each deal came in through the wrong door, or no door at all, and a firm that judges by who sends a deal will always miss the ones nobody sends. Rank founders on merit instead of network and the company your instinct would wave away sits in plain sight. Here’s how to catch it on your own deals.
Bessemer Venture Partners has been backing winners for over a century. It also passed on Apple, Google, Facebook, Airbnb, eBay, and PayPal — and, to its credit, publishes the whole painful list as its “Anti-Portfolio.” The eBay miss is the one I keep coming back to: a partner heard “Stamps? Coins? Comic books?” and called it a no-brainer pass.
Verdict Insight™
For years I read misses like these as taste failures — a smart room that just didn’t see it. That’s the wrong read. Every company on that list was, at the moment of the pass, a real founder with a real wedge in a market about to move. What was missing wasn’t judgement. It was a way to see the founder that didn’t depend on who made the introduction. When you judge deals by who sends them and how they feel, you don’t miss the bad ones — you miss the good ones your network never sends you at all.
The uncomfortable part is that every pass was rational in the moment. Nobody was careless. The best-connected deals got seen and the rest never reached the table — and “the rest” is where Apple and Google were sitting. Access quietly decided what got a vote, and merit never got one.
How to read it on your own deals
Next time a deal feels off because of where it came from — a cold inbound, a founder with no mutual connections, a name nobody in your circle can vouch for — split it into two questions. One is “do I trust the messenger?” The other is “is this founder fundable?” They are not the same question, but the messenger keeps answering the first while you think you’re answering the second. Judge the founders in front of you on merit alone, and the deal your gut would wave away lands on the same list as the ones your friends brought you — ranked the same way, seen at last.
Run it by hand — or let a skill run it for you
You can do this yourself now — you just learned how: rank the founders, not the introductions. When you want it done at scale, I’ve packaged the same ranking into a free Claude skill that reads any deck on merit and drops it onto a Leaderboard™ — the ranked view that surfaces the fundable founder sitting just outside your network. Register and it’s yours, no subscription, no catch. Get the free skill →
Sources
The coin split and any Verdict™ score shown above are illustrative teaching reads, not actual Verdict™ assessments. The facts, figures and dates are drawn from the sources listed here.
- Bessemer Venture Partners — The Anti-Portfolio. bvp.com
- Fortune — The tech deals VCs wish they hadn't passed on. 2016