Venture investing is said to be like baseball but with unlimited strikes. You can sit and let hittable balls sail past, but when you swing…you need to connect.

So it’s with this in mind that Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the oldest firms in the industry, celebrate their anti-portfolio: all the great deals they said no to.

It makes for humorous but painful reading. Like when one of the Bessemer partners said to his friend who was renting her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin: “How can I get out of this house without going anywhere near your garage.”

For the most storied firms, such as Sequoia, their access to deal flow means that their anti-portfolio is basically every company that does well that they didn’t invest in. Ouch.