Yep. I wrote a piece for TechCrunch about this recently. There are a bunch of "Invisible Unicorns" in the startup world that have built businesses brick by brick, often without capital to start. They often have a compound interest like effect, the $1M business grows year after year and all of a sudden you have MailChimp, with a $400M ARR, which is completely controlled by its founders. Or Shutterstock, which went from bootstraps to a $2B market cap (and $1B for the founder alone).

These stories are often kind of boring. Who wants to build (or read about) a CRM for life sciences companies? Fortunately for Veeva shareholders, there was a founder who wanted to go after this $6B opportunity.

Or Guidewire Software, which powers insurer's ability to underwrite and turned a modest $29M in VC into a near $3B business.

In my post, I found 15 companies that I categorized under the heading "Blessed are the Boring." These are companies that build software to automation injection molding quotations, construction management, corporate event messaging, and have done quite well as a result.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/01/invisible-unicorns-35-big-...

It would be good if more startups studied their examples, rather than reading yet another profile on Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey.