My Portfolio That Wasnt

Valuable early-stage companies are rare, and even experienced investors like Osborne miss out on potentially big wins. This post highlights companies Osborne evaluated but didn't invest in, serving as a reminder that venture capital often involves missed opportunities and the importance of spreading your net wide. It's a valuable read for founders seeking funding as it provides insight into an investor's decision-making process, and demonstrates the challenging nature of early-stage investing.

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Valuable companies are rare, and venture capital relies on casting a wide net to find them, acknowledging the difficulty of predicting success early on.

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Evaluating a high volume of opportunities is crucial, as even experienced investors miss out on potentially successful companies.

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Early investors are often celebrated for their foresight, but identifying truly valuable companies remains challenging, even with extensive market intelligence.

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This investor plans to maintain a public list of missed opportunities, suggesting a commitment to learning and transparency in the investment process.

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In Venture Capital, valuable companies are hard to come by. You’ve probably heard this far too often.If not, here’s a neat post explaining the math on why 95% of Venture Capital firms fail. No one can predict valuable companies at early stages. Venture capital has become about spreading your (investment) net far and wide to catch these few valuable ones along the way. It’s true, hindsight vision is 20/20 - early investors of successful companies are highly regarded. Albeit, in retrospect.

There are far too many average companies and too few valuable ones. On an average I personally evaluate over 700 investment opportunities a year. Of those, I’ve had the privilege of evaluating, in my opinion, a few such valuable companies. Time will tell whether they truly are business that are highly valued for scale, consumer loyalty or any other metric. I believe, these companies will be truly successful and I have missed the opportunity of partnering with them in that journey.

Here’s My Portfolio That Wasn’t:

[to be updated]

This post is in no way complete. Will be updated regularly for valuable companies I’ve been unable to back.

Onward.