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Comment by bontoJR | Hacker News Reader

Very nice story, I have just one question: why did you guys not look for fundings or apply to something like Y Combinator?

Also, I know there are a lot of other similar stories around the US. I would really like to find and ear something similar in an European country, in the hi-tech industry: a small startup doing a good job, with a tiny but prepared team, being lately acquired by a larger competitor. Is there any similar story based in the old-continent?

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If you can bootstrap, why raise unless you have a major barrier to achieve success?

The stock answers to "why raise?" reduce to 1) to achieve the same success faster, or 2) to achieve a larger scale of success, or 3) because raising money drops you into a new world of experience and learning and future networks.

I'm not suggesting any of the above are superior paths to what was chosen in the article, BTW.

One of the reasons they gave for selling was that they weren't sure they would be able to take the product to the next level on their own. It sounds like they would have had to seek funding at some point if things didn't change.

We wanted to focus on building the product and getting it to market as quickly as possible, to see if people were even interested in what we were doing. Also, I was still in graduate school and under contract to teach an undergrad cognitive psychology class, so moving for any period of time wasn't an option. We were able to raise a small amount of grant funding, but the acquisition talks started soon after. We never spent any of the grant and ended up paying it all back once we were acquired.

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