Anti-Portfolio

Since 2014, TheVentures has met with a wide range of early-stage startups across Korea. Even after 10 years, we’re still driven by the same ambition: “We’ll be the very first to meet every seed-stage team in Korea!” With that spirit, we continue to review more than 300 startup opportunities every month.

Along the way, we’ve backed successful portfolio companies like GBIKE and HeyDealer — but we’ve also missed out on some incredible founding teams. Among those were opportunities that could have generated returns of more than 1,000x. Like many startups, we’ve made wrong calls based on wrong assumptions. But every one of those experiences has pushed us to reflect deeply on how we can meet more founders and become better investors.

As founders, you’ll hear ‘no’ far more often than ‘yes’. But remember—those ‘no’s never determine the fate of your business. Not even ours. Please remember: one investor’s opinion does not define our team’s capabilities, passion, or the true potential of our business. As proof, here are a few companies we passed on—but that have since grown fearlessly and are now changing the world.

Viva Republica (Toss)

In early 2014, Seung-gun Lee, the founder of Viva Republica, came to TheVentures seeking his first institutional investment. At the time, not only was it legally difficult for VCs to invest in financial services, but we also felt the challenge was simply too great for a startup to take on. Nearly a decade later, in 2023, Viva Republica is now valued at around 7 billion USD.

Karrot

We first met Kim Jae-hyun, the founder of Karrot, around September 2016 through an introduction in our personal network. I remember him as a fun and compelling founder with an exciting business and market. Still, the valuation he hoped for at the time was higher than the range we typically focused on as a first institutional investor, so we decided not to proceed. By 2023, Karrot’s valuation had reached around 2.3 billion USD.

Jobis & Villains

In December 2015, we met Beomseob Kim, the founder of Jarvis & Villains, for their first seed round. At the time, it was an incredibly attractive opportunity—an investment could have been made at a post-money valuation of just 2 billion KRW. However, in our final review, concerns were raised that their core product at the time—receipt photo capture—wasn’t a fundamental solution, and that the market itself was gradually disappearing. So, we decided not to invest. Today, Jarvis & Villains is valued at around 230 million USD.