Earlier in this thread, Moejoe wrote:
Quote:
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Well both Twitter and Google were started with very little investment at all, by people just as interested then in the coding/intellectual aspects of their respective technologies as they ever were in the monetary gain.
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Hmm... Wikipedia on the founding of Google says:
The first funding for Google as a company was secured in August 1998 in the form of a $100,000USD contribution from Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, given to a corporation which did not yet exist.[22]
On June 7th, 1999, a round of equity funding totalling $25 million was announced[23]; the major investors being rival venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.[22]
I guess that $25Million counts as very little money. As for Twitter:
Twitter has raised US$57 million from venture capitalists. CEO Evan Williams raised about $22 million in venture capital.[8] Twitter is backed by Union Square Ventures, Digital Garage, Spark Capital, and Bezos Expeditions (led by Jeff Bezos of Amazon).[9] Institutional Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital backed Twitter in 2009, investing an additional $35 million.The Industry Standard has pointed to its lack of revenue as limiting its long-term viability.[10] On February 13, 2009, Twitter announced on its official blog[11] that it had closed a third round of funding in which it secured more than $35 million.[12]
Actually, I think that the math in the article is suspect; I get $95 million there.
Again, very little money.
I note that most tech ventures
begin with very little money... right up until the close that first round of venture capital. After all, if they had more than a little bit, they might not have needed the VCs.
Xenophon
(Who's been there and done that, on both sides of the transaction. But not as spectacularly as either Twitter or Google, darn it.)