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Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

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Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#91

Post by seiferteric »

showerst wrote: post #88
Animats wrote: post #51

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

Not to take away anything from the incredible achievements of autodesk, but $60,000 in 1982 was roughly $155,000 today. That's a non-trivial amount of cash to be able to dump into starting a company.

Really? That's less than the cost for opening most franchises.

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#93

Post by showerst »

seiferteric wrote: post #91
showerst wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away anything from the incredible achievements of autodesk, but $60,000 in 1982 was roughly $155,000 today. That's a non-trivial amount of cash to be able to dump into starting a company.

Really? That's less than the cost for opening most franchises.

I mean, in the context of 'discussion of small entrepreneurs who have started internet companies from scratch'.

You're right that it's a relatively small amount to start any kind of business.

I do think someone mid-career who's something of a subject expert spending $150k teaches us meaningfully different lessons than an inexperienced person whose $150 side project is now a billion company. Not less valuable, just different.

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#94

Post by nostrademons »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #53

Solid advice, solve a problem and sell the solution. Remember that two things you can always sell are time and preparation (which is insurance against future time). 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 valu…

The caveat about "selling time" is that the transaction cost of deploying your solution has to beat the amount of time it saves, and you have to make the case for why this is.

The canonical example of this would be a new programming language. Newer, more advanced programming languages can often dramatically increase productivity over existing standards, in an activity that consumes the majority of time (= money) for software companies. The problem is that to realize those productivity gains requires a 1-2 year retraining for every engineer, along with a rebuilding of all the existing tooling & library infrastructure. If you're 20% more productive, you're looking at 5-10 years before break-even, which is usually outside the investment horizons of the average corporate buyer. (Though interestingly, it seems to be roughly the average cycle time between generations of programming languages.)

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#95

Post by draw_down »

hitekker wrote: post #77
Animats wrote: post #51

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

>We couldn't believe that this was the best deal obtainable for venture funding of the company, and we were inclined to ask around to see if this was reasonable. But, our Distinguished Financial Advisor informed us that this would constitute ``shopping the deal'' when ``a deal was on the table'' which was right out by the genteel standards of the venture community, and that he could not countenance such unrefined beh…

A bunch of capitalists who have norms against competition. Cool.

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#96

Post by jamesfzhang »

replicatorblog wrote: post #14
jamesfzhang wrote: post #12

Wistia. 10 year-old business. Raised only a seed round and has been profitable & growing many years in a row.

Awesome! Thanks for sharing! Do you know if they've announced any revenue figures? Best I could find was an employee count (83) which is impressive given the $1.4M in funding—clearly they have substantial cash flow if they can support that kind of workforce.

I left the company when it was around 40 and only know of revenue numbers at that point. Nothing has been announced publicly as far as I know, but it's substantial & comparable to some of the companies on this list.

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#97

Post by xfer »

nameless912 wrote: post #63
patrickg_zill wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their margins are high. About 8 times what you would pay for quantity 1 of the component from a Chinese supplier. E.g. 1.8" TFT screen they sell for $29.95 is less than $4 shipped via AliExpress.

However, they do provide a value add in the form of dealing with the Chinese supplier and their knowledgebase. Of course you could buy the same board off of aliexpress and then hit up Adafruit for the documentation (or be a badass and go out on your own) but they provide both the ability to buy just one from a US supplier and decent docs in the same place. Sometimes I value convenience over raw costs.

Most of the time, chinese stuff have documentation in english(where necessary). The only problem is long shipping delays, where i live.

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#99

Post by quintin »

Animats wrote: post #51

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

This is gold.

I hope all of HN realizes how valuable it is to have you around....

Re: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

#100

Post by asanwal »

replicatorblog wrote: post #26
pinaceae wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is there a cutoff for length of that stretch? (minimum)

Or minimum revenue before they took outside capital?

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