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Comment by therealarmen | Hacker News Reader

Lots of non-technology companies.

Out of tech companies -- Craigslist, Atlassian, 37Signals, possibly MailChimp.

Fringe examples -- Indeed sold for $1B and only took a small amount of later-stage funding [1] from USV. WhatsApp took $8M from Sequoia but apparently didn't spend any of it [2].

[1] http://avc.com/2012/09/indeed/

[2] http://forbesindia.com/article/the-worlds-billionaires/the-$...

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WhatsApp actually raised closer to $60M [1]

[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/whatsapp

That story probably isn't true. Why would WhatsApp raise money if they weren't planning to spend any of it?

For help selling the company? I'm sure there are a few VCs that know all the corp dev people and could more than double the final price.

this is definitely not my forte but if VC thinks they could flip the company isn't there a more direct route than buying into a round for the sake of press?

You've got to own some shares to make money in an acquisition. It's not for the press.

wish i could delete my comment, i wasn't thinking

Is 37Signals worth $1B?

Actually, they're valued at $100B.

http://signalvnoise.com/posts/1941-press-release-37signals-v...

i'm not typically a fan of the 37signals blog posts which come off to me as arrogant. this one makes me laugh though; it does a really effective job of poking fun at the broken parts of the VC model.

That article was intended to be a joke. 37signals (now Basecamp) is private and doesn't publicly announce revenue or profits -- though Jason has acknowledged both are in the millions.

it's satirical but is it a joke? valuation is not a pure function of revenue and profit. unless i am missing something this valuation is as real as Twitter's or Facebook's. that's the joke.

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