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Re:Taking part in Y Combinator from Europe: is it worth it? by devops000 on Friday September 17, 2021 @09:23AM (#28565174)
Sometime this happened. I would prefer to own 100% of a smaller but profitable company instead of 5% of a high-growth/negative profits and starving for the next funding to survive.
Re:Taking part in Y Combinator from Europe: is it worth it? by adventured on Friday September 17, 2021 @01:35PM (#28568368)
There are many scenarios.

There is also: 5% of a high growth, negative profit, thriving company that can rather trivially raise additional capital to keep pushing growth faster.

Hundreds of start-up companies have fit that model over the last 10-20 years.

See: Facebook, Airbnb, Zoom, Twilio, Square, Stripe, DigitalOcean, Cloudflare, Fastly, DocuSign, Teladoc, Datadog, Coinbase, Etsy, Lyft, Uber, DoorDash, Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat, Okta, Zscaler, Hubspot, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, Workday, ServiceNow, The Trade Desk, Snowflake, Roku, Unity Software, MongoDB, Robinhood, Palantir, Roblox, Veeva Systems, Wayfair, Peloton, UiPath (Romania originally), Anaplan, Qualtrics, Asana, RingCentral, Zendesk, Dropbox, Appian, Bumble, Smartsheet, Stitch Fix, C3 AI, Affirm, JFrog, Box, BigCommerce, Sumo Logic, FireEye, Qualys.

Along with dozens of other prominent and smaller companies. And although not US companies, Shopify, Atlassian, Elastic, Wix, MercadoLibre and Spotify are also in that same bucket (and were funded by US venture capital). China also has a ton of thriving companies funded in a similar model (Alibaba, Pinduoduo, ByteDance, Didi, JD, Tencent, etc).

These are significant companies that all followed that model - to one degree or another - and have IPO'd in the past decade (even Tesla's IPO was just 11 years ago, they exist courtesy of the same model).

Salesforce lost money for a very long time. They were founded in 1999, and didn't reliably turn an operating profit until just a few years ago. In a few years they'll be larger than SAP.

Re:Taking part in Y Combinator from Europe: is it worth it? by moneywoes on Friday September 17, 2021 @02:15PM (#28568963)
Salesforce already beats SAP in market cap though no?
Re:Taking part in Y Combinator from Europe: is it worth it? by VBprogrammer on Friday September 17, 2021 @11:28AM (#28566605)
Surely the aim of the game is not to be left holding the bag when the music stops. In that situation you would need to be making sure your own financial position no longer depended upon that of the continued success of the company.

Not saying that is a good way to run a business or the one I would personally prefer.