VC Spotlight - Bessemer Venture Partners
You don’t survive 114 years in investing by chasing trends. You survive by seeing around corners, and betting the house when everyone else is hedging.
That’s the DNA of Bessemer Venture Partners. Born in 1911 from the molten core of Carnegie Steel, Bessemer started as the private investment arm of Henry Phipps Jr., tasked with managing $20M when $20M could buy cities. But unlike its industrial peers that calcified into old money museums, Bessemer became something else, a perpetual motion machine for technological reinvention.
The pivot came in 1975. Silicon Valley was still a punchline to New Yorkers. BVP went west. By 2007, they cracked open the family vault, raised their first external fund, and turned a century-old legacy shop into a global venture war chest. Today: $37.6B AUM. 300+ portfolio companies. 145+ IPOs. And a track record that reads like a cheat code for spotting inflection points.
They call it roadmap-driven conviction. It’s not theory, it’s gospel. BVP runs deep thesis maps across 13 sectors. In cloudcomputing, Byron Deeter didn’t just back winners, he wrote the 10 Laws that reshaped the category. Shopify, Twilio, and Canva weren’t unicorns, they were inevitabilities. In AI, they’re not sprinkling fairy dust. They’ve committed $1B to infrastructure-layer bets like Anthropic and Perplexity while the rest of the herd builds glorified Chrome extensions.
But here’s the real tell, Bessemer doesn’t fall in love with founders. They fall for entrepreneurs. There’s a difference. Founders launch. Entrepreneurs evolve. They morph product-market fit into category-defining outcomes. Fiverr didn’t just offer gigs, they graduated into enterprise SaaS. ServiceTitan didn’t digitize home services, they dismantled the incumbents. And Swiggy didn’t stop at India, they’re now rewriting the delivery playbook across the UAE and Singapore, guided by Vishal Gupta’s no-sleep roadmap from Bangalore.
Operationally, they’re ruthless with clarity. Their “Scaling to $100M” playbooks are required reading in boardrooms from Palo Alto to Pune. And their radical transparency? Legendary. The Anti-Portfolio, a public wall of missed investments from Apple to Airbnb isn’t self-flagellation. It’s a flex. A cultural blueprint for owning your blind spots.
The firm runs flat and fast. No hierarchy. Just operators like Sandy Grippo chairing investment committees and running $37.6B like a sniper, not a scribe. Byron Deeter shaping the Cloud 100 index. And a STRIVE wellness program making sure founders don’t burn out before their Series C.
And if you’re still wondering if they’re relevant now, Anthropic, Toast, Swiggy, Urban Company, NYDIG, Perplexity, are all hiring. Bessemer doesn’t just fund tomorrow. They staff it.
Portfolio hiring link: https://jobs.bvp.com/jobs
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