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Comment by jonpaul | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking the same. Technically, they didn't take VC, they took angel investment. They are different, but I completely agree on your point as I wrote in my comment on SVN blog.

I don't get how they can claim to be a bootstrapped company when they did indeed take angel investment. I would love for someone to shed some insight.

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Here's some insight: It's hard to find successful startups that are truly 100% bootstrapped. 37 signals entire purpose for doing these posts will be undermined if they can't find a good number of companies that fit their theoretical profile.

It seems likely that 37 Signal's primary purpose for doing these posts is to raise brand awareness.

It's not hard to find. We've got over a dozen stories lined up so far and we're hearing from more businesses every day.

This one shouldn't have been posted as part of this series. We definitely want to keep this series clean and clear with no ambiguity.

So you guys wouldn't fit this criteria either, right, having taken money from Bezos?

No investment money was spent funding operations. That's the criteria we're using for this series.

It's not really an angel investment either. Just like a VC, an angel typically hopes to cash out at some point in the future via an acquisition or IPO.

In this case, the investor received common stock. Which means he hopes to generate a return on his investment from his share of the profits.

This is in keeping with 37signals' focus on profitable companies, as opposed to startups which are built to flip.

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