Bootstrapped Tech Founders
Cluster focuses on anecdotes and stories of successful tech entrepreneurs who started companies with minimal resources, dropped out of school, or bootstrapped without VC funding, leading to major exits or billions in value.
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Curious anecdote: Elon Musk started out in this field, which gave him the capital to do X.com/Paypal (among his more recent endeavors). From [1]:He stayed two days [at Stanford] before dropping out to start Zip2, which provided online content publishing software for news organizations, with his brother Kimbal Musk. In 1999, Compaq's AltaVista division acquired Zip2 for US$307 million in cash and US$34 million in stock options.[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk" rel
Single guy developed OkCupid without VC money. Sold it for millions
From poster's profile: "Son of a school teacher got his start designing websites. Dropped out of community college freshman year to pursue clothing venture.Failed, started programming with a "Get it done!" mantra.Made first million when he founded xyz game in 2007 at age 20 with partner from Ycombinator. Sold to xyz media two years later for a whopping $1.9 Billion. Devotes time to improving infrastructure in developing nations, Africa."Seems a bit over the top for y combinator. Hackers are
Peter Thiel in Zero to One: "Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school"
Actual full interview, "Risky Business": https://www.startups.com/library/founder-stories/marc-andree...
fwiw, hes the founder of hashicorp - now worth at least 10bn. so the latter path you drew was the one that happened!
Prominent founder who previously sold a company to Amazon for half a billion, and a whole lot of funding.
Fun trivia: Brian Armstrong was looking for a co-founder on HN back in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664
It's not too farfetched given that Evan Williams founded the company.
Yeah, his journey is incredibly, incredibly lucky. One of the first employees at Pinterest, then raised money for Gumroad when he was still a teenager, then when Gumroad didn't grow fast enough (Not even failed!) he was basically gifted it by his investors.A reality 99.9% of us can only dream of, and I've always found his writing/tweeting a bit distasteful because of it. Lottery winner telling you how to pick a ticket kind of vibe.