21–30 of 267 posts
Good ideas are important but good execution is more important.
They did take VC funding though? By pulling themselves up by their bootstraps (and a meager $1.3 million in funding) they were able to start a company! That's not an insignificant sum of money, I see that they didn't take further rounds, but still this feels like a nice marketing piece with a bad headline.
The point was that they did YC and seed round but didn’t raise funding after that. Traditionally startups raise every 18mo and have raised A,B,C,D etc in ~10 years and before hitting $5B valuation.
Even with the latest round, it was a secondary sale, so not dilutive raise. Some investors sold shares to other investors but no new shares where created.
Avoiding that “vc hamster wheel” is that you avoid the conversations, meetings, fundraise roadshows and dilution every 18mo or so. So I think Zapier is an interesting example of a startup choosing a different path. Not purely bootstrapped or traditional vc backed company.
$5B is a pretty ridiculous valuation for a $140M revenues company.
I suspect I am not their intended customer as I don't get a lot of value out of the dozens (hundreds?) of API implementations they offer. But I wonder how much of that revenue represents customers with similar plans.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is if you're 100% gasoline then the founders would do well to just get a loan
Having the right investors adds value in a way a bank holding a loan absolutely never will.
Of course that wouldn't work for every product model... some really need that huge capital-driven massive growth to get to some economy of scale. But if you can avoid that, you probably keep a heck of a lot more equity for both founder & early (and maybe not so early?) employees.
As cross-site cookies and browser pixels are increasingly blocked, ad platforms are moving from browser-based tracking to server-side data transfer.
Like those other companies, Zapier provides a single integration point that funnels user and conversion data to dozens of marketing companies' server-side APIs. A few clicks allow you to transfer your customer data to/from hundreds of different platforms.
5 billion dollars for what should've been a free set of libraries and competing UI interfaces to cater to different levels of tech savviness.
It's crazy how complicated the simplest things are in tech that these companies even need to exist. Hopefully it's just growing pains, rather than consolidation and a swamp for decades to come, like we've had with Microsoft.