(For more on valuation and the background, http://www.businessinsider.com/atlassian-helps-employees-poc... )
If you never take any money you don't even have a valuation, so what makes you a billion-dollar company anyway? You're just a $0 company that happens to be pulling $10M in profit per year (for example.)
I don't mean the question that started this thread is ridiculous (though it's unusual) - I just mean that the example given is a perfect answer, and your follow-up question is kind of ridic (IMHO.) Or at any rate not "the important question."
I mean just consider our specific example: at $10M profit, the price per earnings if you purport to be a billion dollar company, is 100. So, no alternative accounting metric would ever give you a billion-dollar valuation (assuming you bootstrapped, which implies high margins and low infrastructure and other costs, so really nothing would give you the billion-dollar valuation.)
I'm not an accountant, but from how I've experienced things, only if the company sells shares and establishes a valuation thereby can value the company at $1 billion in our example.
In the context of the real world, your way is quite an odd way to interpret the "requirement" -- no money taken, ever, until the very first money that is sold for a percentage is raised at a valuation of $1 billion. Why? Why not let the first valuation be lower?
Under a more reasonable interpretation, i.e. totally bootstrapped, and eventually reaches $1 billion, the stated company meets the criteria. It's worth triple that now, and $60 million as a first raise eight years in is proof positive that it's a "totally bootstrapped business".
I can see where you're coming form, if the question is interepreted as "can I become a billionaire without selling any equity, by completely owning a billion-dollar totally bootstrapped business", but then it isn't nearly as interesting.
We were actually forced by my company to move our "How to use this repo, get it up and running, etc" documentation out of README.md at the root of our github repos, to the Atlassian Wiki because, "this is how we do things now."
Fuck your terrible editor that adds random double spacing, and in general, fights me at every turn.
And the fact that at almost every standup, or planning meeting, we end up fighting some Jira issue that makes it obscenely hard to plan the way we want.
Your software makes it harder for me to get my job done. It is not good. I don't care if HN down votes me to oblivion. Your company has failed to make a good product. If you've read this, I feel better.
Oh and "Enterprise" is the problem. Let's use complicated shit that doesn't really solve anyones use cases particularly well, but manages to fudge along for everyone so seems like a big win for idiotic top down managers.
If the tool isn't helpful, don't fucking use it. I can draw you a diagram if that would help. If someone is forcing you to use an unsuitable tool, where do you think you should direct your opinion?
Yes, it sucks that I'm forced to use a crappy tool. That happens all the time in the software world. Sure, you can take the HN fantasy path and quit every job you have every time you disagree with something, but you'll never make any real progress that way. I'm still working hard to ship a good product in spite of the fact that some aspects of how I build it will be sub-optimal.
However, if the people that work on shitty products would fight back a little bit more, perhaps those of us forced to use them wouldn't find it so distasteful.