Which is why 37 years after its founding, and after 28 years as a public company, he still owns 25% of the company (per Bloomberg). All the more remarkable considering Oracle is worth $173 billion.
On a side note, boy, I'm at a loss to come up with a reason for someone to down vote you. Factual statement, complete with a reference to where you got your information, and some little shit who doesn't like facts comes along and clicks the down button. That, or someone on a mobile device who tried to click one of two buttons that are separated by about four pixels, and hit the wrong one. The good news is that one of those can be fixed.
Brb, working my billion dollar exit now.
Wait till le derpina hears about this one!
It's worth pointing out that VC as an industry may not have been very mature around the time of these companies.
I believe my HN account got slapped with an automatic down rating adjustment quite a long time ago (that applies to anything I post here, automatically lowering my comment positioning).
For example, when I posted my comment initially, it was instantly ranked below a gray-shaded 'negative value' comment from a user with a lower karma rating than myself.
Anything I post on HN automatically starts at the bottom of the pile. I suspect if you could check my account it has a flag set on it.
If you think there's an issue with your account, you could email the HN admins to see if it can be fixed (hn@ycombinator.com).
that's pretty counter-intuitive in today's bubble-blowing tech climate. we praise companies for raising the most money from the hippest VCs rather than customer retention, technology, and market position