How sad that they only listed companies that got funding. It is not a good culture to look at funding as success, how about growth, revenue or even profit.
It's an interesting phenomenon that all the biggest successes take outside funding. Perhaps the reason is that the better you are, the better terms you can get money on, and for any given startup, there are terms so good you'd be stupid not to take money at them.
Even if funding is the first step to success it is still wrong to pronounce startups most sucessfull based only on that. How about waiting till they start to to make money?
Bottom line is some companies may be well suited to take outside funding early on, some might be better off bootstrapping to profitability, but it seems most successful companies in our industry do end up taking funding at some point in their lifetime for one reason or another.
Much of the 37signals/anti-VC/whatever crowd fails to recognize that not all companies are created equal. Just because 37signals has done phenomenally well without outside funding (with the exception of Jeff Bezos' investment) doesn't mean that's the right path for all companies. Ditto for Google/Microsoft/etc which did take funding.
It's slightly ironic because I don't think the 37signals themselves believe no company should ever take funding, rather they're fighting the perception that you must take funding to start your company.
I think looking at how much money the founders made would be the most objective measure. Of course you're going to be able to create a bigger company if you go out and raise a few million bucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you'll personally be better off in five years.
If majority got funding before traction, that would indicate that VCs/angels are really good at evaluating teams.
CSN Stores - $300MM+ annual revenue/ bootstrapped
MailChimp - Approaching $100MM/ bootstrapped
Club Penguin - $350MM acquisition, heard they had a little angel money, but no VC
Ganz/Webkinz - Kind of a startup within a small manufacturing biz, but they have mid 9 figures in revenue.
SparkFun/iFixit - Both $20+MM in revenue with no outside investment.
Provocraft has $100MM+ in virtual good sales
Granted, most of these aren't household names in the tech world, but all thrive based on web tech. I'm sure there are others beyond the ones I know, but there seems to be a playbook that can get a company to $100MM+ without VC.
In closing, I agree with your thesis, and Sequoia's old homepage would back you up 100%, but do you think companies like the ones above are just outliers or are not successful enough?
SAS - Would be in the Fortune 500, I think, if it wasn't privately owned.
37signals - Bezos investment aside, they certainly behave like a privately owned tech company.
Bose is at least one counterexample, it seems. However, don't the most successful private companies have little incentive to release the information you say is necessary for the comparison?
When I lived in NYC there were tech community events filled with people trying to launch an idea with no traction (ie. users, customers) and in many cases these events required an invite! I have more than one profitable bootstrapped web app and I can't get an invite!
At this stage in my life, I'm not so interested in most, but in average, meaning: sure all of the really huge companies took funding, but are people who took funding, on average, more successful? In other words, I'm more interested to a surer path to a million dollars than an outside shot at 100 million.
I don't know the answer, but it's an interesting question.
I think the problem with lists like this is it creates a culture of celebrating the funding part only, not the hard work that comes later and the true success that the investor wants.
How about revenue, or users, or even active users?
It's just damn disappointing to see that the mantra being spread is "raise a ton of cash or bust," and that people not raising money are often ignored.