Ask HN: How can you be rich without selling your company?

4 points by jmilinion 13 years ago | 5 comments

From what I've read, the standard way for a startup to cash out is to sell it to a bigger company.

Here's the problem, I've watched many my favorite startups slowly die after they were sold. Except for a few rare ones, the service they provided was never the same again - if it still exists.

You want to cash out because you would like to do other things but you still care a lot about the quality of your previous product.

What other options are there?

soneca 13 years ago |

Create a big, profitable company; bootstraping, without investors to press you to have an exit. And be rich with your profit (remember the good old 20th century capitalism?).

I was just reading the case of weheartit.com - a brazilian "clone" of Pinterest. The quotation marks are there because Weheartit became big before Pinterest even exist.

They became big, but refused any external investment, while Pinterest were genius of raising funding.

There are two sides here: one is that Weheartit lost a billion dollar oportunity to Pinterest for both trying to bootstrap on 37signals style and/or just having worst execution.

Other is that Weheartit is still very big, with regular traffic, and surely large revenue from ads. They didn't die because of Pinterest, they are still a huge company, only by anchoring them to a billion dollar clone one may not call them a successfull company. And their founders are perhaps cashing out dozens (hundreds?) of thousands of dollars each month.

http://www.businessinsider.com/weheartit-fabio-giolito-brazi...

jonathanjaeger 13 years ago |

Build a profitable business and pay yourself a lot through salary or dividends. Or go public.

jmilinion 13 years ago | |

Can something like TechCrunch be big enough to go public?

jonathanjaeger 13 years ago | | |

Content sites and blog networks would have a very tough time going public, they're even tough to make into profitable businesses. But if you can build a profitable business that makes you rich and you're not beholden to investors, you don't need to worry about getting acquired or getting pressured by anyone.

jamedjo 13 years ago |

Find a company interested in your tech, make them a customer/client and sell them a minority stake?

If its a talent acquisition it might be hard to find someone passionate enough to run your startup, and near impossible to do in your spare time.

(My experience: none)