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Comment by systemBuilder | Hacker News Reader

Most heavily-VC funded companies die Young, even if they make it to IPO, like SGI (now reconstituted as NVidia). VCs don't care about companies, they want to make a quick buck and get out. Most successful startups are self funded for most of their life, e.g Microsoft, Dell, Google, Amazon.

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Microsoft, Google and Amazon took vc. Seems Dell may not have, according to a brief glance at wikipedia

Dell may have been a dorm room startup, but VC influences exists even in it's first early years from Lee Walker who I don't believe was just a simple salaried employee but must have invested some of his own money for equity, and it had meteoric growth in the first few years from dorm room project to full fledged multinational company with a very quick IPO.

The parent made a point about self-funding. Microsoft was entirely self-funded out of operations, post the initial capital put in by Gates & Allen. It was wildly profitable, with extraordinary margins, at the point where it took a tiny bit of VC. They didn't take VC because they needed it to finance the business, they took it for the relationships they were trying to cultivate to lure talent.

The famous Fortune article about the IPO covers all of this:

http://fortune.com/2011/03/13/inside-the-deal-that-made-bill...

They also didn't IPO because they specifically needed the money from the IPO.

The parent comment carefully qualified their statement this way:

"Most successful startups are self funded for most of their life"

Emphasis on most of their life. Amazon was financed by VC for only about the first 2 1/2 years. Uber for example is nearly a decade old and still drinking from the VC tap; Quora is another example of that. Amazon's IPO was just under three years after the founding. Thereafter most of their business expansion was financed by operations in one form or another (including a bunch of debt they took on).

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