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Comment by pjhyett | Hacker News Reader

GitHub's first employee owns more than 1% of the company, so I'm not sure why it's unrealistic. Maybe in the world of businesses letting VC's tell them how to run their company this is the norm, but it doesn't have to be.

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Name one company in the USA which didn't take outside funding and exited for more than 30mm usd?

I'm somewhat sure that would describe National Instruments (IPO'd at a $380M market cap)

Wow. I was secretly trying to get you to find an answer to one of Keith Rabois questions on quora. I forgot he qualified it as post 1999. Can you do that too?

National Instruments is an amazing company...I was fortunate to get to use their products on some projects as a teenager.

I'm not 100% positive on NI. I just recall that claim being made when I interned there and can't find any info suggesting otherwise.

They IPO'd in 1995, btw.

The first few hires often happen before VC funding is raised, right? And 2-3% for the first few employees isn't unusual amongst companies that later raise VC funding and make it big.

Sas. Still private no funding, founder is worth 8 billion.

Yeah, and how much of those do the employees get? Right.

SAS has a profit sharing programming. That's often a better deal for employees.

In SAS's case they pay up to $70,000 as a bonus, in Canada anyway: http://www.eluta.ca/top-employer-sas-canada. Averages seem to range from $9000 to $32,000 (http://www.glassdoor.com/Bonuses/SAS-Institute-Bonuses-E3807...)

GitHub also brags about not taking outside funding, so it's a potentially better deal for them: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1454597

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