notthedr

True, but this company has taken on equity ( almost certainly with preferred shares ) investors. To buy them out, you would need cash. If you don’t have the cash, you need new investors. If the business is cash flowing and/or has assets, it may be possible to issue debt, effectively swapping equity investors for debt investors. The debt investor won’t care as much about growth as it does about you repaying your loan, but you are still stuck with an investor who has pre-negotiated rights ( and now the ability to liquidate the company if you don’t pay them ). Either way, you still have investors.

There are loads of 20-50 person small businesses who raised money in many different ways ( from personal savings to bank loans to customer prepays ). Many of those likely started with a small number of people, growing over many decades one paying customer at a time.

Where would the cash come from?

Get a contract gig job doing something small that you can deliver quality work on. I started in 2001 with a 15/hr job making a static website for a college professor’s group ( had no connections just saw an online Craigslist ad and responded ). That job led to more static websites, which led to some database work, which led to a larger contract developing software to help manage a large event, which led to (many) more php/MySQL applications, which eventually led to interviewing and getting a full time job ( still there after almost two decades but different role ). Over the course of all this, interviewing for each next gig/job got progressively easier.