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Comment by wwalser | Hacker News Reader

A few things make the data slightly misleading. In cases of multiple founders (so most of the data points), only one founder seems to be represented by the "Founder Ownership" percentage. Additionally, in some cases the percentages are representative of voting rights not actual monetary value of said "ownership".

This causes some founder/ceo/early teams to appear over represented: Sergey Brin, Larry Page & Zuck, while others appear under represented.

I can't help but feel that these flaws make the final assessments tilted toward the point of the article which appears to be something along the line of `owning 11% at IPO is totally normal, don't sweat it`. This is VC content marketing through and through. Additional note: "That means smaller investors and employees owned 27% of these businesses at IPO." The idea that employee pools make up a sizable chunk of most of these companies is completely laughable.

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Also: the title. It is not "at exit", but really "at IPO", which might be the most infrequent exit there is.

Yeah, it also doesn't appear to contain any that were bootstrapped. I wonder if any bootstrapped startups have ever IPO'd.

My favorite startup exit is PlentyOfFish.com. 100% owned by one dude who made over half a billion cash selling it to Match.com.

Microsoft only sold 5%, and Gates says they never used the money.

Atlassian, which just IPOd this year, was famously bootstrapped. There are two founders, each with 37.7% [1], so the table is misleading and the should really be 75.4%. Atlassian eventually took funding from Accel, 8 years after its founding.

It is also curious the table rounded Accel's ownership up (12.7 -> 13), but truncated the founders' (37.7 -> 37).

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...

Atlassian's funding wasn't typical VC growth money either. The first round was taken off the table by the founders and was primarily a mechanism to get board members in preparation for a US based IPO. They also took a second round, 100% of which which went to early employees in the form of a secondary market sale for stock options.

There have been at least four in the last five years (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QT-vg7OHHhO9VvSHpgo7...).

There are many more notable bootstrapped exits, e.g. Mojang/Minecraft.

Lots of bootstrapped companies that could IPO, e.g. Mailchimp

And many other examples of companies that took very little money making their founders richer than comparable funded founders. E.g. Each of the founders of Wayfair made more than EVERYONE involved in the sale of Zappos.

But a good proxy for VCs, where most non-IPO exists are basically considered a failure. 1.5-3x returns from a "successful" sale to a larger company is a failed investment for most VC firms.

> This is VC content marketing through and through

There are some unexplained things like Apple founders "Steve Jobs, Markula[sic], Scott" having 35%. First, why is Mike Markkula (which is the correct spelling) included as a "founder or CEO". He was an investor in every history of Apple I've read. Second, is Steve Wozniak included or not included in that 35% of founder ownership? I recall reading that Wozniak had approx. 7% share at the time of Apple's IPO, so not huge but not tiny.

I'm similarly confused. Wasn't Netflix founded by Reed Hastings?

The person they list as "founder or CEO", Jay Hoag, is an early investor and Netflix board member according to Forbes[1]. Wikipedia says Netflix was founded by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph[2] and makes no mention of Jay Hoag.

So, yes, I'm confused too. It doesn't seem that they should list Hoag as the "founder or CEO", and why exclude the actual founders which is what the article is supposed to be about?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysomaney/2016/08/12/why-is-jay...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix

Yeah, Jay Hoag was a long time board member of Netflix since 1999, he just purchased 900k Netflix shares since August this year.[1]

According to this source [2] based on the latest SEC filing, Reed Hastings owns 931,660 shares of Netflix.

Since Jay might own some original Netflix shares, with the new 900k shares addition, perhaps he has eclipsed Reed Hastings in shares ownership.

[1]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysomaney/2016/08/12/why-is-jay...

[2] http://www.davemanuel.com/net-worth/reed-hastings/

Yep and many of them are just plain wrong. Godfrey Sullivan was not a Splunk founder.

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