I'm in Cambridge, UK. The alumni from the university's Computer Lab have started hundreds of businesses in recent years, many off the back of their academic research, and that is only the ones who have notified the alumni organisation about what they're doing. There are multiple business parks around the city focussed heavily on small business and in at least one case focussing almost entirely on start-ups. This is just in one city and talking about one department of one university.

Of course you haven't heard of most of these start-ups. They probably operate in specialist fields that are of no personal or professional interest to you. So do most businesses in the world, start-up or otherwise. But many of these organisations grow into successful businesses, often without taking much if any external funding.

I don't know what it is about HN recently, but it seems like some people believe your business is only a success if it becomes the next MicroGoogleApple with a multi-billion exit for the founders, and the only path to doing that is getting lots of rounds of increasingly silly money from angels/VCs and then selling out to a major corporation for what we seem to be calling "FU money" these days. The ideal way to do this is apparently believed to be starting a Internet-based, mass-market company providing a trivial service and running it on a web site with a silly name formed by taking a normal word and adding the ending "ly".

In other news, hardly any companies will ever pull off this combination (I can count exactly none so far), while there are countless tech companies working on all kinds of applications that make plenty of profit by actually doing something useful in a certain market, which would probably provide an eight or nine figure exit for their founders if they chose to leave. These don't necessarily hit the headlines, because not everyone cares about specialist software or services, and not every founder wants to run up a company to a paper value of billions in two years and then exit making a good deal for their VCs.