Anyone who has followed my posts knows I love to post about business and hope to start a wildly successful one someday. I see that a lot of others do, too, so maybe this can be an interesting thread.
I've been thinking a lot lately about a guy named Scott Delong. He started a website called Viral Nova a few years ago. It was a content hoarding site that used the facebook algorithm to make its content go viral. The site was really only him and two part time employees working from his home, but it became one of the most visited sites and, after just a year in existence, sold in a deal that could reach $100mil after certain benchmarks are reached.
Another guy whose business strategy impacted me and surprised me was Jon Oringer. He is the founder of photo licensing agency Shutterstock. He actually started the business because he needed affordable photos to use for an email marketing business he was running at the time. He actually took the agency's first 100,000 pictures himself. In 2012, Shutterstock went public and he reportedly became Silicon Alley's (the east coast version of Silicon Valley) first billionaire.
One of the big differences between these two guys and the majority of people who make fortunes in tech/online sector is that these companies weren't buoyed by venture capitalists. Most of the time, when you hear these absurd valuations for companies, founders see very little of that. After they raise so many rounds of funding, their shares in the company become diluted.
