"Ok, so you’ve got a small technology company and you’ve hit that threshold of about 4 people where it becomes glaringly obvious that you need to institute some process. Or perhaps your engineering team is smaller than that, but you realize that if you don’t spent at least a minimal amount of time on planning your work, you’re going to spend a lot more time doing the wrong work, the less...
As you point out, the bicycle industry has been around for some time. Bicycle design and engineering has been improving for 100+ years.
Mission Bicycles are designed for a specific purpose, commuting in American cities. We optimized for:
- Ride feel: A frame geometry that put riders in an up-right position for comfort and visibility and made the bicycle very stable and responsive even at low speeds.
- Strength: Components and materials that are strong enough to last a life time even with the daily abuse of a city commute.
- Ease of use: Other than fixing an occasional flat, brake pad swap, or chain grease there is nothing on the bicycle to fidget with or break. We literally took everything off the bike that you don't need for a city commute which saves greatly on weight. A typical Mission Bicycle weighs in at 16lbs, which is important for when you need to cary it up a flight of stairs.
The bicycle features you mention (bottle cages, fenders, racks, etc.) were purposefully excluded from the bicycle's design to save on weight, maintenance, and cost.
Google's revenue in 2004 was $3.1B: http://bit.ly/bOQZeZ
Facebook's revenue for 2010 is rumored between $1.2B and $2B: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/03/facebook-revenue-2010/
VC investment rounds and secondary market transactions are probably not the best way to price a company, but they seem to be in the ballpark.
Banker math surely proves Aaron would have to show real hubris to ignore Intuit's offer, but founders rightly run startups, not bankers. Intuit is a $9B twenty five year old company. Mint could have given them a run for their money. They took the payday instead.
That said, Mint seems like the exception out here. Facebook and Twitter seem to be doing a great job keeping the champagne at bay.
See Figure 1 on page 8 -- only 30.4% of the entrepreneurs surveyed were in software or hardware start ups, the rest were in other 'high technology' industries such as energy and bio-tech. I would love to see the same questions asked of only web-software start up entrepreneurs, I bet the results (age, experience, etc.) would skew differently.