

A $300m Bootstrap Launched by a Teenager - gatsby
http://mixergy.com/bhavin-turakhia-directi/

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chc
The title of the HN post is a little bit confusing, at least for me. It's a
company that was bootstrapped by an 18-year-old in 1997, which is now (13
years later) worth $300m according to its founder. The title here made me
think it had been recently bootstrapped by somebody who is still a teenager
and that it is now showing $300m in either revenue or profit.

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chunkbot
When someone says $300 million dollar company, it doesn't mean a company with
$300 million dollars of revenue or profit per year. Generally, it means the
_valuation_ (based on any number of measures, ie. acquisition price, last
traded price x number of shares outstanding, founders pulling a figure out of
thin air, etc.) of the company, so revenue can be anywhere from $0 to $300+
million (generally around single-digit multiples), and profit can even be
negative.

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qq66
The traditional meaning of an $x billion company is by revenues. Using it to
mean valuation is quite new, and limited to startup/Silicon Valley people.

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endtime
I'm pretty sure Wall St. people also talk in terms of valuation.

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krohrbaugh
In general, Wall St tends to use this nomenclature (i.e., $X billion dollar
company) when referencing _revenues_. For instance, Procter & Gamble is
referred to as an "$80 billion dollar company" - which speaks to revenue, not
market cap.

This gets murky with private firms, since revenue isn't typically shared, and
even more so with startups where so much of the value is based on future,
projected earnings.

In general, though, I'd say the nomenclature more commonly refers to revenues
and _not_ 'valuation'.

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jamesaguilar
Wait, it's worth $300M according to its owner. How much is it worth according
to other people?

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AndrewWarner
TechCrunch and the British Telegraph both used the same $300M number.

But I was clear in the post that my research lead me to believe that the
number originally came from the founders.

We'll never know for sure until they sell, but the achievement is impressive
from everything I saw.

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jonursenbach
It'll be nice when we get to a point where we can stop supplementing stuff
like this with "by a teenager". Who gives a crap as to how old they are?

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doorty
A million isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. I couldn't
resist.

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doorty
Really? I got -4 points for this. My point is that $300 million isn't that big
of deal when other teenager founders, a la Mark Zuckerburg, have multi-billion
dollar corporations.

