Bessemer Venture Partners

“10 months after the Series A, Jeremy and Trevor from Bessemer came to me and said, you are still massively constrained by money. How about, instead of you spending a bunch of months on fundraising, we'll just Quadruple the valuation of the company and put much…”

“A hundred percent. I mean, with our, the cool thing about the space that we're occupying is because the VCs themselves, like if you think about Iconic, General Catalyst, Bessemer, they have huge legal networks themselves. They're big spenders on legal services…”

“I think that the founder product insight is irreplaceable. And so much of these businesses today are product led that we want to back founders who are unique and differentiated there. And we want them bought in for the journey. And tapping out and hiring a rep…”

“Don't try to be the operator. And that manifests itself in a few ways, but one of them from the investing side is don't find things that are doing okay and going to fix them so that you go from, you know, good to great. Go find the teams in the business that's…”

“We are Totally transparent with our diligence issues and concerns, and we don't dance, like, we'll literally share it after the investment, like, here's the readout, here's what we heard, here's, you know, here are the really red flags.”

“We just ran the math. Our average hold period is like 14 years, longer even than I thought.”

“And so, you know, for me, it, it's companies like Tesla early on and Atlassian on the software side and, you know, on and on like this, where massive respect for the entrepreneur belief in the vision and just couldn't quite get there.”

“The better in Anthropic was that they would be one of those companies and that they had the chance to compete at the one slot, which we very much still think they do.”

“It was one of our largest checks, and now is, is our largest check ever.”

“A year and a half ago, I had three CEOs in the same year tap out, including one that had to go away and needed real time.”

“I have a saying at Bessemer that I started saying a year ago, which is that COGS are the new CAC, which is that you can spend a lot on, on COGS, but it means that you also can't then be spending a lot on CAC in customer acquisition.”

“You know, you look at an Anthropic or a Perplexity or a Canva and we, you know, we have, you know, nine figures into each of these companies and yet we are still, you know, well below historical venture standards where you aspire to own 20% or something in the…”

“You know, 3.8 X will keep you in business for a long time, but the reason to do it is because you believe it could be a 30 X. And that's the basis of our anthropic investment is we believe that it is a generational company.”

“I look at a company like a Canva, or I look at a company like Intercom that's at a scale where in some ways they're already becoming an incumbent in those markets, and yet they're disrupting themselves at awesome rates and have AI products that are already, yo…”

“I was at one of our portfolio company board meetings the other day, and they mentioned that they had switched from, you know, human-based interventions to the FIN product from Intercom, And they showed the stats of deflections went up, I forget to, you know, 9…”

“We're going down accounting and legal and medical. We're going through these sectors where there's a lot of, you know, front edge humans doing busy work and paperwork, and we're supercharging them.”

“We're looking at, you know, fusion investments now that I think will be supported and accelerated by AI.”

“We're seeing businesses go from zero to a hundred million in 1.5 years. That's the supernova profile.”

“The rule of X mathematically shows it's about a two to two and a half X multiplier value of growth over efficiency at mid-stage scale. Call it fifty million ARR or so.”

“One of the most famous and most painful for me was Tesla early on. It's on my anti-portfolio. If you go to the Bessemer website, we have a page dedicated to our screw ups, and that's one of mine. And it was because I couldn't fundamentally see how the unit eco…”

“This is a change in my view. I'll confess that I was pretty hard lined against this, not for founders and teams. I always feel that taking some pressure off of them is good, but I didn't love it when our co-investors were looking for liquidity. Early in busine…”

“We're over a trillion dollars In private market cap now among just the top 100 cloud AI companies right now which is just a astronomical number to consider.”

“So it used to be Twilio. Then you know, probably StubHub, Canva, Anthropic Yeah, probably, probably that bucket.”

“And we've actually added people and processes to make sure that we don't get subject to this kind of mental inertia where we invite in, you know, another partner to look at it and our best deals were constantly saying, You know, okay, we have the century team,…”

“We own 28% of Shopify and Twilio at IPO and we owned, you know, well less than that of Procore and Service Titan just because we, you know, included a lot of other investors downstream.”

“So importantly, we distributed early. We didn't necessarily sell. So what we did is we gave people the choice.”

“We're seeing, you know, other firms adding asset management businesses and debt products and roll-ups and doing all sorts of things. You know, there's some kernels in there that we agree with. There's a lot in there we probably aren't going to pursue.”

“This is very much why we don't hire sector-specific investors, and we don't give you air cover if your sector goes out of favor, meaning our job's to make RLPs money, and if you're in a sector that's cooling off, you better get the hell out and go somewhere el…”

“My first roadmap at Bessemer was RFID, radio frequency identification, which was and is a zero trillion dollar market.”

“I mean, we put our money where our mouth is. We've been a buyer. So over, and that's again, like we a year ago when we were buyers, we still wouldn't have didn't conceive of that.”

“I remember way back in the day when we were at Bessemer, it's myself, Byron Dieter, and Tyler Goldberg. We wrote now this very famous memo about service sign. I think we put, what do we say, a two percent chance at a billion dollar outcome.”

“If you need to own a large fund and write a fifty hundred million dollar plus check, like I think Bessemer is as good as any of the other big funds.”

“And we had a rule at Bessemer. If the company called you back, it really sucked. It was the CEO you call every two days for a month. That's the CEO you want to get on the phone.”

“And I didn't frankly think there was much difference between Bessemer and Sequoia and Kleiner at the time, and General Atlantic and TCV, other than some people wrote bigger checks and smaller checks.”

“That Series A was about twenty million, and we did about 15. Again, I, I'm always dilution sensitive, and so, we did about 15 in primary, and then gave some early, our early friends and family had the option to sell, you know, at a nice return.”

“The recent examples I think are most interesting would be like Ethan from Bessemer, Christina Shen from Andreessen Horwitz, and Mark Goldberg from Index Ventures joining, leaving those large platforms to form like a real partnership, right?”

“We've dedicated a billion dollars of our four billion in dry powder to go invest in AI companies”

“For public companies, growth is still worth twice as much as profitability for startups. It's probably four to 10 times.”

“Growth is twice as important as profitability. So track both, but profitability is not the goal.”

“And for example, when I caught up with Byron Dieter, most recently from Bessemer, they're managing 10 or twenty million. Byron's done a ton of the best SaaS companies. If you don't know, he'll only do AI. There's exceptions of course, but if you're not AI firs…”

“The absolute peak that Bessemer thought of at the time of the investment was that Shopify might, in the best of cases, become a four hundred million dollar company. And they assigned a three percent probability to that outcome.”

“Bessemer or folks like them would prefer to be able to have their stock just moved over to another entity that would likely do something with it and hopefully have an outcome down the road so they don't have to write it all down”

“I don't think that the way you build a big company or the way you get a big exit is by investing in the most ambitious companies, growing the fastest. Those are also the companies that crash into it.”

“One of the things that I eventually, ah, did myself when I started at Bessemer, ah, this is in 2000 and seven, was to, Take a very different approach to take this kind of partnership type of approach with the entrepreneur, because I realize what they really ne…”

“My worst decisions have been the ones that I made in the least amount of time, due to pressure.”

“Insiders are just blinded by convention, by knowing a little bit too much of what hasn't worked in the past of where others failed. Naivete is a strength in these cases, and if you have the right entrepreneur who, again, is self-aware and perhaps also has a ce…”

“That that it's a better arbitrage opportunity to be the lone player or the first mover in a even in a smaller market, even in a niche market, than to be the number two or three in a large market. Because a number two, it's like a gladiator competition. Number …”

“As much as I am willing to be contrarian, I'm not willing to invest in something that others are not going to fund. So I need to find, it's a fine line, but I need to find something That perhaps is not mainstream, perhaps is not and yet a headline in TechCrunc…”

“I invest in people who I think can raise money even when they're not, even when they don't meet their plan.”

“I mean, any early stage company that's raising fifty million dollars, I don't know what stage that was that you were thinking about, it's inappropriate. Those are not the type of invest, of entrepreneurs that I back.”

“In both cases, I received what would be politely say very lukewarm feedback from the partnership. In fact, in the case of Wix, it was outright negative feedback.”

“I accept that sometimes I have a lot of biases towards certain types of entrepreneurs, and I can't always invest in the same Adam Fisher typecast entrepreneur that even though that works for me, it doesn't scale and I'll probably miss out on some very good one…”

“So I'm much more interested in not making a mistake with a hire than making sure that this is the Best possible candidate we could hire.”

“The latter because hopefully I've done my work and I've figured out the personal chemistry and the founders pretty good at that themselves, which I, again, I look for when I fund people. But sometimes it's a mismatch in the stage.”

“Experience in hiring is, is definitely underrated. You're absolutely right. It's one of the greatest skills of second time entrepreneurs is that they actually don't even need me to interview any of the candidates.”

“I make it very clear to the entrepreneur that I'm choosing them more than I'm choosing the market or the particular product, and that I'm choosing them because I'm also not just choosing somebody that I hope will succeed or want to succeed, but somebody that I…”

“And when you express that kind of balance, when you react to entrepreneurs, whether it's good news or bad news, with some kind of composure, they become more transparent with you, more forthcoming. They'll share the good information and the bad information as …”

“Rarely have I turned down deals in the very early stages due to price alone.”

“I try and make sure my companies I back never raise at valuations that they want to sell the company at, and I warn them of that.”

“No, at seed I don't think so. I think it distorts everything. Everything from the go-to-market model to how you hire, to the offices and the culture you're creating, it's all wrong. I, so I completely disagree.”