Technology companies follow an extreme power law curve.

Of all tech companies started in the US in any one year, around 15 ever generate $100M in annual revenue.

Those 15 companies are ultimately be responsible for 97% of the market cap for all companies started that year. 15 companies! That’s way harder than making the NBA in any given year – most of you would never attempt such a difficult thing. And yet here you are.

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Wow.

Edit: I mean you hear a lot about it's near impossible to have a super profitable startup and that most fail, but when you say 15 only ever generate 100mm in revenue, that puts a new perspective on it. For me anyway.

The counter-complimenting (but not contradictory) point is that it's also true that you could create a business, especially a purely software-based business in terms of how it scales, and it could hit only say $1M or even $200k in revenue or profit each year, and that would be a huge success -- as long as you kept the team small, the ownership in your hands, etc., ideally as close to 1-2 people as possible even. Getting say $200k/year of mostly passive income would be a huge life-changing state of affairs. We don't all need to become GitHub or Pinterest or Facebook, etc. In business, a homerun is relative. FU money for a single founder with 100% ownership is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

100mm annual.

100mm lifetime is still one hell of an achievement, but I'd imagine significantly more reach it than 3%. Lots of B2B companies survive for a few years with 8 figure annual rev.

jasonshen, you misspelled at least 4 of the names of the people you covered. I wouldn't have said anything if it was just one or two (everyone makes mistakes), but 4 (at least) is kind of excessive.

Edit: in fear of downvotes for calling jason out on such a detail: I think getting people's names right is important; it shows attention to detail and respect for the people you're naming. (It's also a pet peeve of mine, but that's irrelevant). So my comment is meant to be constructive criticism. BTW, the names that are misspelled (that I know of) are:

Kalanik -> Kalanick; Collision -> Collison; Andressen -> Andreessen; Preston Warner -> Preston-Werner

(I didn't write them before because I was on my phone and it was time-consuming to do)

Woops, thanks! Meant to go back and fix those at the end but forgot. Fixed Travis Kalanick and Tom Preston Werner but didn't see any other typos - which were they?

edit: got the rest, thanks! You might have to hard refresh to see the changes.

Funny, I just did the same: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685011.

Nice! These two are also good:

Startup School and Surviorship Bias -http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4685042 My Key Takeaways from Startup School 2012 - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4681791

Thanks Jason and everyone else updating us on Startup School 2012. Really good to still hear this stuff without actually being there.

I can just imagine how funny it must have been for Travis Kalanick to whip out the Uber revenue graph like that haha.

You missed the most important one by jl :p

http://www.teespring.com/fundraising

True. Everyone laughed at that one. How are sales? =)

haha, looks like 5 people reserved it so far. No one gets anything if 100 people haven't reserved one in 21 days though :)

I love Jason's Hen. Great site.

"I love Jason's Hen. Great site."

I didn't realize I had a chicken. Thanks =)

"The greatest thing about being rich is that you don’t have to do business with people you like.’”"

That was 'people you don't like' :)

Thanks, fixed.