Re:The Median Level of Founder Ownership at Exit
by jhchen on Friday November 04, 2016 @01:07PM
(#12874112)
Atlassian, which just IPOd this year, was famously bootstrapped. There are two founders, each with 37.7% [1], so the table is misleading and the should really be 75.4%. Atlassian eventually took funding from Accel, 8 years after its founding.
It is also curious the table rounded Accel's ownership up (12.7 -> 13), but truncated the founders' (37.7 -> 37).
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1650372/000155837015...
Re:The Median Level of Founder Ownership at Exit
by wwalser on Friday November 04, 2016 @03:30PM
(#12875289)
Atlassian's funding wasn't typical VC growth money either. The first round was taken off the table by the founders and was primarily a mechanism to get board members in preparation for a US based IPO. They also took a second round, 100% of which which went to early employees in the form of a secondary market sale for stock options.
Re:The Median Level of Founder Ownership at Exit
by mgummelt on Friday November 04, 2016 @12:36PM
(#12873852)
Microsoft only sold 5%, and Gates says they never used the money.
Re:The Median Level of Founder Ownership at Exit
by replicatorblog on Monday November 07, 2016 @09:43AM
(#12891327)
There have been at least four in the last five years (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QT-vg7OHHhO9VvSHpgo7...).
There are many more notable bootstrapped exits, e.g. Mojang/Minecraft.
Lots of bootstrapped companies that could IPO, e.g. Mailchimp
And many other examples of companies that took very little money making their founders richer than comparable funded founders. E.g. Each of the founders of Wayfair made more than EVERYONE involved in the sale of Zappos.
My favorite startup exit is PlentyOfFish.com. 100% owned by one dude who made over half a billion cash selling it to Match.com.