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Comment by replicatorblog | Hacker News Reader

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

All good examples! Thanks so much!

Wasn't Beats founded by a celebrity? I feel like this kind of goes against the spirit of the list.

Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre.

a fluff doc on them coming out: http://www.npr.org/2017/07/07/535920449/the-story-of-dr-dre-...

a celebrity with very deep pockets.

Recent docu-series "The Defiant Ones" on HBO [1] features the story of Iovine and Dre regarding their partnership on Beats (and beyond).

[1] https://defiantones.com/

AFAIR eBay had an investment in Craigslist. Might be wrong.

They owned at least 25% of the company at one point, but it was well after it started and gained critical mass, or liquidity in this case. My filter for this piece allowed for companies that raised money, but only if they managed to run independently, for a few years at least.

eBay bought a former employee's stock from him; it wasn't an investment. Craigslist later bought back the stock (https://web.archive.org/web/20040813165340/http://www.cnewma...).

Zoho Corporation, founded in 1996 with over 4500 employees - completely bootstrapped and profitable :)

(disclaimer: I work for Zoho)

Datto, Inc. - First CT unicorn, started in a basement and made it very far before taking VC money: http://www.courant.com/business/hc-datto-startuprecovered-mo...

Teamwork.com, entirely self funded by two guys who had a web agency and scratched their own itch in PM software, now doing over 100m in annual revenue. They dropped nearly $1m to change domain which they say paid for itself in three months. Now offering free deskspace and mentoring for other startup SAAS

Wolfram Research (Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha) - 700 employees, no outside capital.

JetBrains

i'm sure you've seen the interviews on indiehackers.com, but there are many more bootstrapped companies on their way up! many to watch out for.

For sure! IndieHackers is great and I hope to include many of those companies in the future. What we were trying to do was show that you could build big and substantial businesses. Too many people dismiss bootstrapping as a way to build lifestyle businesses when in fact it's a way to build public companies.

In some cases we featured some companies that had $10M+ revenues and extraordinary success in PR (Cards Against Humanity) or found some cool funding method (e.g. Kickstarter and CMON). LMK if there are any IndieHacker interviews you think deserve inclusion.

Thanks!

CV Library / Resume Library?

Skyscanner

MathWorks

JetBrains?

Valve

Great call!

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.

That's helpful context, thanks! I think they definitely deserve to be in an update, but that's a pretty important qualifier to call out.

GitHub

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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