"Larry was loathe to sell any of the company stock; he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap"
Which is why 37 years after its founding, and after 28 years as a public company, he still owns 25% of the company (per Bloomberg). All the more remarkable considering Oracle is worth $173 billion.
Kind of old-fashioned, don't you think? All that hard work and patience, building a solid product that people actually need. Much easier to win the VC/exit lottery with a Cat-Pictures-as-a-Service product.
On a side note, boy, I'm at a loss to come up with a reason for someone to down vote you. Factual statement, complete with a reference to where you got your information, and some little shit who doesn't like facts comes along and clicks the down button. That, or someone on a mobile device who tried to click one of two buttons that are separated by about four pixels, and hit the wrong one. The good news is that one of those can be fixed.
I've no idea why you've been downvoted. The numbers you point out seem to be accurate and not taking external investment does indeed leave you with more equity (as does sticking with the public company and the associated stock awards). I believe Microsoft was another company that didn't take much (if any) external investment.
It's worth pointing out that VC as an industry may not have been very mature around the time of these companies.
I'm not entirely sure I am being down-voted in this case.
I believe my HN account got slapped with an automatic down rating adjustment quite a long time ago (that applies to anything I post here, automatically lowering my comment positioning).
For example, when I posted my comment initially, it was instantly ranked below a gray-shaded 'negative value' comment from a user with a lower karma rating than myself.
Anything I post on HN automatically starts at the bottom of the pile. I suspect if you could check my account it has a flag set on it.
'he generally took a dim view of VCs and preferred to bootstrap"
that's pretty counter-intuitive in today's bubble-blowing tech climate. we praise companies for raising the most money from the hippest VCs rather than customer retention, technology, and market position
After the first dotcom bubble just the opposite was praised arguably to the extreme. The answer is somewhere in the middle - focusing on profit from day 1 can stop you from doing things, but taking VC money from day 1 with no plan for revenue is also potentially fatal.
Which is why 37 years after its founding, and after 28 years as a public company, he still owns 25% of the company (per Bloomberg). All the more remarkable considering Oracle is worth $173 billion.