Bessemer Venture Partners - Building a VC Firm that Lasts Centuries

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:51)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:23)
My guests this week are Jeremy Levine, Kent Bennett and Brian Feinstein. They are partners at one of the oldest and most storied venture firms in the world, Bessemer Venture Partners. Our conversation is split into two parts.
First, we explore Bessemer itself. It's over 100 years old and has a unique operating model with lessons for every investment firm in the market.
We then discuss Jeremy, Kent and Brian's investing styles and outlook. What they look for in businesses, their thoughts on various sectors like vertical market software, and we close with a discussion about AI and defensibility. Please enjoy this great conversation. The first voice you'll hear is Jeremy, then Kent, then Brian.
Kent, Jeremy, Brian, thank you so much for doing this together with me. I don't think I've ever done three people from the same firm at the same time. So this is kind of a fun experiment. When we talked last time, we figured we'll give this a whirl and see how it goes. And I think in this case, it's going to be really fun because Bessemer is such a storied firm. It has such a long history. It also seems to be among the firms, the one that is most willing to evolve with the times, change its investing style, change its stripes, change how it thinks about presenting itself to the world really easily through time. And so I'd love to spend the beginning chunk of our conversation on the firm itself, its history, its unique history, and why that allows you to do interesting things as a partnership. Jeremy, maybe since you've been there so long, you could give the brief overview of Bessemer maybe up to the point that you joined, and then we can all talk about the period since.

**Jeremy Levine** (3:53)
The truth is a bit like an oral history, I suppose, because none of us was around or even born when what became Bessemer Venture Partners started. But as it's been told to me, and therefore probably been massaged and edited over the years like all good oral histories, and therefore maybe 10% of it is still truly true, when Andrew Carnegie, Henry Phipps and Henry Frick started Carnegie Steel together, they were three Scottish immigrants, and they commercialized the Bessemer process, which was invented by another Scottish individual. And if you went to grade school in the United States, you probably studied the Bessemer process in eighth grade US history, which was essentially a way of making steel in high volumes really cost effectively. And these three entrepreneurs figured out how to actually build it, and it worked really well. And then eventually, I think by 1907, as Carnegie Steel was humming really well, JP. Morgan got the bright idea to buy up all the steel companies, aggregate them into a single company called US Steel, and essentially create a monopoly, which of course led to the Sherman Antitrust Act, but that's a story for another show.