51–60 of 121 posts
(Autodesk did have some conversations with VCs, but they were so profitable and growing so fast that by the time the VCs had made an offer, it was ridiculously low. Here's the history of those deals.[1])
Isn't this the way companies, until fairly recently, have always been started and grown? Basically, come up with an idea/product, reach around to back pocket (or into your purse) and fund it ad-hoc. That, or take out a loan or such. It seems like this was the way things were always done - until fairly recently. It seems like things changed sometime around the early 1990s. I tend to wonder if this had anything to do w…
To put that in perspective, any product or service that can save time for someone where time is an expense (they pay salaries, or have a limited amount of it to meet deadlines) can evaluate your price against their cost of time and ascertain a direct value to your offering. This will save you 1 hour a day, that is 5 hours a week which can be applied to something else or used to generate other revenues.
Preparation is another aspect of time that is sort of the 'first derivative'. These solutions let you save time in the future by taking future point where you won't have time, and using it now when you don't. Example, frozen meals. Preparation is spent time to make a meal now, so when you need dinner but have no time you can just re-heat this frozen meal). Another example of preparation is a customer management tool (CRM) which captures the previous interactions so that you can quickly scan their history before you interact with them (saving time) because you've captured it during previous interactions.
These kinds of businesses you can start earning money right away on.
Autodesk. Started with $60,000 put in by the founders. No further investments until the IPO. Current market cap $24 billion. (Autodesk did have some conversations with VCs, but they were so profitable and growing so fast that by the time the VCs had made an offer, it was ridiculously low. Here's the history of those deals.[1]) [1] https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_32.html
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Valve
Valve was founded by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, both of whom had a 7-figure net worths because of MS shares. I'm not sure if it really counts.
> Wayfair: The home goods e-commerce company was profitable from its first month of operation because they skipped brand advertising and bought up hundreds of domain names that were exact matches for common search terms. I remember buying a TV stand from TVStands.com about a decade ago.
The Wayfair founders also had made millions on selling their internet services firm to a company called iXL years before - so they had the money to fund the venture.
Adafruit: $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.
I'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?
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Craiglist generates tons of cash, wildly profitable, no investment Bose has always funded itself via profits for 50 years with no outside investment. $3b-$4b revenue last year. Beats waited 4-5 years and was huge before taking first equity investment from HTC
Wasn't Beats founded by a celebrity? I feel like this kind of goes against the spirit of the list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Craiglist generates tons of cash, wildly profitable, no investment Bose has always funded itself via profits for 50 years with no outside investment. $3b-$4b revenue last year. Beats waited 4-5 years and was huge before taking first equity investment from HTC
Wasn't Beats founded by a celebrity? I feel like this kind of goes against the spirit of the list.