AS OF 2017, there are 197 one billion-dollar minimum-valuation unicorns in the world, one of which is Indonesia’s Go-Jek. While much attention is on these well-funded game changers, there are many “invisible” unicorns, so-called because they have reached $1 billion plus valuations with little or no VC or other external funding. They are the true definition of bootstrappers. Most of these invisible unicorns prefer to stay under the radar and continue to quietly disrupt business as usual in their chosen sectors. Who are they? How could they bootstrap and grow without any VC help?
Among the invisible unicorns who have done just fine without VC funding: Craigslist ($694 million annual revenue), Scentsy ($545 million), MailChimp ($400 million), Tough Mudder ($100 million), and SparkFun ($32 million). Used car listing site CarGurus went right to IPO, getting a $3 billion market valuation, without VC funding. Dating site Plenty of Fish was acquired by Match.com for $575 million. The most impressive of all was online education giant Lynda. com, which was acquired by LinkedIn for $1.5 billion.
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