Is it really true that you could take a $250k seed round, build something profitable-but-not-huge, then just quietly run the resulting business? I thought that carried a pretty strong expectatation that you'd be hiring employees and looking for series A pretty soon.
Definitely interesting if there are other good routes for "slightly-too-big-to-bootstrap" ideas (beyond the obvious "savings" and "transition from consulting")
Wufoo did YC then didn't raise a Series A, before eventually selling to SurveyMonkey. Olark raised from YC, then a Seed and that's it. Statuspage did YC and then Seed and then sold to Atlassian. These are just some examples off the top of my head, I'm sure I could come up with a ton more.
Thanks for these examples. Going for a relatively early sale/acquisition/acquihire returns capital to the seed investors, so not really quite the scenario that I was thinking of, but the Olark example is very interesting.
Absolutely, it of course depends on the terms. But in my experience investments for that amount never involve a board seat and normally involve a smallish amount of equity so investors have no means to pressure companies into taking an A later if they don't want to. There is some expectation that you'll do something with this money and normally for early stage companies that means hiring people, but I've never heard of an investor strong arming an entrepreneur into hiring people when they didn't want to.
Definitely interesting if there are other good routes for "slightly-too-big-to-bootstrap" ideas (beyond the obvious "savings" and "transition from consulting")