Amen. I call this business model “tiny unicorn”. Been riding mine 25 years now.
VCs want to get you to grow rapidly because the only way to move the needle on their returns is to blow the roof off. However as a founder, this is proof you can have a great business and a great quality of life by keeping costs relatively low, the team relatively small, just cranking out code and having fun.
More power to em, if you prefer software be a certain way write it yourself.
[1] https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...
So, yes, they’ve done pretty well but they took a risk and still probably didn’t come close to maximizing comp even they had a rather good outcome.
And I just threw out the $150k number because it’s a very good outcome. Could just as easily be something a lot lower including negative.
In aggregates: Household income > individual income > wage/salary; you've confused the first with the last.
$150K is beyond 90th percentile individual income. [0] I can’t find wage/salary percentiles separately, but its probably even further beyond 90th percentile there.
https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-individual-income-perce...
But, we started with two people. At some point we needed funding. That put us on a track of angel investors, VC's, and a cycle acquisition, buyback, funding, acquisition, buyback, etc.
As the techie guy, I found that tiring and distracting. When we changed from software as a product to SAAS, it got a lot less fun. When we grew to 2000 employees (mostly non-tech), the company was a pain.
So after 20 years (to the day), we sold it and moved on.
If you were back to two people with a promising idea, how would you do it this time?
C'mon now. With that attitude, how are you ever going to get imploded on top of the Titanic, or buy a social media company so you can smash it against the wall like a toddler with a toy truck? You want to live a comfortable, happy life, with happy employees and customers? No way! This is capitalism, baby! Fuck your customers and your employees, it's your right to throw them into a vat of acid so you can blow millions of their dollars to spend 30 minutes in the stratosphere wearing a cowboy hat! If you don't do it, someone else will!
It's not fair because the larger company continues to get VC funding which allows it to subsidize features or even give them away for free. Remember, all these companies are effectively racing to become monopolies and part of that process is "price dumping" to kill of smaller competitors. Again, this sucks, but those are the incentives VCs provides and companies have to oblige or get swallowed up by bigger fish.
If you have a product that works and makes a good profit, and you can maintain it with 10 people and extend it with 5 more, sometimes that just is the company.
In this context I think it is important to note that Ycombinator was founded in 2005. For the majority of its existence, and the general hype of tech startups, money was incredibly cheap. Now that the gears are switching, a lot of the advice given to startup founders does not work as well anymore.