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Comment by LaurentVB | Hacker News Reader

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.

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