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0 pointspg19y ago0 comments

I was 30 when we started Viaweb, and I needed the money.

Viaweb raised a total of $2.5 million during its life. Some of the time I was focused on funding. Investors like you to be, when you're asking for that much.

It's ridiculous to suggest that one has a choice of focusing on funding or building a business. Pretty nearly 100% of successful startups take outside funding, from Google on down.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

abossy19y ago· 4 in thread

I believe Microsoft never took funding. There might be a few others. Anybody know? Apple? That wouldn't make sense. I can't recall the numbers off the top of my head.

pgOP19y ago

Microsoft took funding before their IPO. I've never understood why; it has the smell of a bribe; but they did. Apple took a lot of funding.

nostrademons19y ago

From what I read, Microsoft took a mezzanine round before IPO because VCs have connections to investment bankers, and Microsoft needed investment bankers to make the IPO process run smoothly. So yeah, it basically was a bribe.

danielha19y ago

Um, are you saying that these companies never raised money from investors? You know that they're both public companies, right?

abossy19y ago

Yes, but I meant to imply that they never raised money at the startup stage (and up until IPO...). Microsoft was almost entirely self-funding before going public, except for the money they received that PG mentions, which I never knew about.

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BitGeek19y ago

Quoting yourself:

"When we started our startup in 1995, the first three were our biggest expenses. We had to pay $5000 for the Netscape Commerce Server, the only software that then supported secure http connections. We paid $3000 for a server with a 90 MHz processor and 32 meg of memory. And we paid a PR firm about $30,000 to promote our launch.

Now you could get all three for nothing. You can get the software for free; people throw away computers more powerful than our first server; and if you make something good you can generate ten times as much traffic by word of mouth online than our first PR firm got through the print media."

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