The Un-Silicon Valley Way to Make It as a Start-Up

Interesting article I read. I've never been a fan of Silicon Valley's way of doing business personally.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/t...icon-valley-way-to-make-it-as-a-start-up.html

Here's an excerpt:

"Under the radar, slowly and steadily, and without ever taking a dime in outside funding or spending more than it earned, MailChimp has been building a behemoth. According to Ben Chestnut, MailChimp’s co-founder and chief executive, the company recorded $280 million in revenue in 2015 and is on track to top $400 million in 2016. MailChimp has always been profitable, Mr. Chestnut said, though he declined to divulge exact margins. The company — which has repeatedly turned down overtures from venture capitalists and is wholly owned by Mr. Chestnut and his co-founder, Dan Kurzius — now employs about 550 people, and by next year it will be close to 700.

As a private company, MailChimp has long kept its business metrics secret, but Mr. Chestnut wants to publicize its numbers now to show the road less traveled: If you want to run a successful tech company, you don’t have to follow the path of “Silicon Valley.” You can simply start a business, run it to serve your customers, and forget about outside investors and growth at any cost."

Some good inspiration for guys like me opening up a business that only focuses on serving customers the best and nothing else.

Companies have been forming for hundreds of years without outside investors, silicon valley isn't only place in the world where companies are formed.

MailChimp is run out of two sprawling floors in the Ponce City Market, a massive complex in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood that was originally built as a Sears Roebuck warehouse. “A lot of people think it’s cool and vintage, but it’s actually a neat reminder of disruption,” Mr. Chestnut said. “Sears used to be the biggest thing, and then it went away.”

Good shit, OP.

Sherbert Hoover said:

“Sears used to be the biggest thing, and then it went away.”

Click to expand...

I'm convinced that 20 years from now business schools will teach about how Sears had one of the 200 most visited websites in the world and a massive distribution network that Amazon had to build from scratch and they pissed it all away trying to become a real estate company.