Fat Brain Toys was bootstrapped:
Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
21–30 of 121 posts
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#22Adafruit: $33M revenue is not "earns" $33M. Could be running at a loss for all we know.
Fair enough, but I don't see how they could run a loss on a hardware business for a decade without raising capital. More likely it's got standard ecommerce margins, blended with higher margin from their own product line.
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#23Indie.vc has a list of large bootstrapped companies at the bottom of their FAQ. Some like ESRI are unicorns and have a near monopoly but have been around for 40 years http://www.indie.vc/faq
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#24Indie.vc has a list of large bootstrapped companies at the bottom of their FAQ. Some like ESRI are unicorns and have a near monopoly but have been around for 40 years http://www.indie.vc/faq
Thanks for the pointer!
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#25I'm one of the authors of this post and plan on releasing an updated version with some companies that we missed on the first pass. If you know of other substantial startups that went far before raising capital, please let me know: JoeFlaherty@FounderCollective. The current list of misses includes: + Grammarly + 37 Signals/Basecamp + Zip Recruiter + Outcome Health + Wistia Who else?
Veeva, funded in 2007 - raised a total of 7m (3m angel, 4m from Emergence Cap).
Now public at close to 9bn market cap.
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#26I'm one of the authors of this post and plan on releasing an updated version with some companies that we missed on the first pass. If you know of other substantial startups that went far before raising capital, please let me know: JoeFlaherty@FounderCollective. The current list of misses includes: + Grammarly + 37 Signals/Basecamp + Zip Recruiter + Outcome Health + Wistia Who else?
Veeva, funded in 2007 - raised a total of 7m (3m angel, 4m from Emergence Cap). Now public at close to 9bn market cap.
Huge fans of Veeva! We feature them in another post:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/15/overdosing-on-vc-lessons-f...
I tried to keep the focus on companies that went for long stretches before they raised capital, but Veeva raised so little they probably merit inclusion.
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#27I'm one of the authors of this post and plan on releasing an updated version with some companies that we missed on the first pass. If you know of other substantial startups that went far before raising capital, please let me know: JoeFlaherty@FounderCollective. The current list of misses includes: + Grammarly + 37 Signals/Basecamp + Zip Recruiter + Outcome Health + Wistia Who else?
Zoho Corporation, founded in 1996 with over 4500 employees - completely bootstrapped and profitable :)
(disclaimer: I work for Zoho)
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#28Invisible, indeed. My interest timed out before any such corporation was named. It was kind of interesting watching the layout dynamically rearrange itself over and over. If this isn't readable on a recent Android phone with a decent net connection then who are these articles for anyway?
It used to be common knowledge that code written on fast computers would only work well on fast computers, but the current generation of cloud developers has forgotten that. I'm sorry and I share your pain. This site jumped around like crazy rendering on my 1.7Ghz dual core phone with 1GB ram running android lollipop.
One odd thing I have noticed is that desktop builds work fine even when crosscompiled for arm machines with the same specs. There must be some memory management inefficiency in android that causes this. Since people just chuck their devices in the bin every two years, no one seems inclined to fix it. There has been some talk of a universal way to run desktop linux (arm builds, of course) on a android kernel, so I have hope for that.
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#29Invisible, indeed. My interest timed out before any such corporation was named. It was kind of interesting watching the layout dynamically rearrange itself over and over. If this isn't readable on a recent Android phone with a decent net connection then who are these articles for anyway?
Looks fine to me on a galaxy s8+
I could be wrong, but I doubt that "recent" phone would be a referring to anything near a flagship phone's specs. You're what, 8 cores and 4GB ram? They still sell single core phones with less than a gig of ram.
Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money
#30I'm one of the authors of this post and plan on releasing an updated version with some companies that we missed on the first pass. If you know of other substantial startups that went far before raising capital, please let me know: JoeFlaherty@FounderCollective. The current list of misses includes: + Grammarly + 37 Signals/Basecamp + Zip Recruiter + Outcome Health + Wistia Who else?
JetBrains