If you ready two sites this weekend (one being GCV of course), then do check out venture capital firm Bessemer’s memo page on some of their deals and how they came to invest.
As one of the world’s oldest VC investors, Bessemer Securities has been investing in private companies for more than a century and is the capital base behind Bessemer Investors (and separate to the Bessemer Trust also set up to manage Phipps family money among others). Its partners would be worth listening to anyway, and especially as Bessemer’s exits in recent years include Shopify, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitch and Twilio.
It is at this atomised level of individual partner (or two, such as David Cowan and Ethan Kurzweil’s successes together) talking with one or more startup founders that the essence of venture investing as it has been becomes clear.
As Bessemer says on its site: “One pattern that consistently emerges is that Bessemer’s best investment decisions centred on people. In retrospect, the early products themselves are barely recognisable today. Rather, passionate, analytical and relentless founders zigged and zagged their way to that elusive ‘product-market fit’, and these memos provide a glimpse of those winning entrepreneurs before they were famous.”
Now, of course, individual connection and understanding is complemented increasingly by algorithmic overlays and data.
But the 290 or so partners at the top 50 VC firms sitting on portfolio boards are placing their trust, capital and support at the entrepreneurs’ service (in the best cases), and seems part art, which is why the legends – such as Dick Kramlich, founder of NEA and now Green Bay Capital, or Nagraj Kashyap, founder of Microsoft’s M12 Ventures and Barbara Dalton at Pfizer Ventures (both members of this year’s GCV Powerlist) – remain so highly regarded.
