Flickr founder tells business story: no VCs, no venture.

For most internet entrepreneurs, an acknowledged and even exciting step in the entrepreneurial process is to explain why an idea deserves a capital injection from a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. But this is not the style of Flickr founder Stewart Bad Fuerde Stewart Butterfield and Katerina Fick (Caterina Fake) couples. Flickr, which offers photo-sharing services, was bought by Yahoo last year and allegedly priced at $30 million. The couple didn't ask for a penny in the venture, and they explained the reason without reservation. "I see many companies that have introduced venture capital into a dilemma in the early 21st century," said Fisher. She was living in San Francisco in the age of the dotcom bubble. "I've seen many companies go bankrupt and fail, and see many start-ups develop too quickly," he said. The idea of introducing money and then having to try to spend it does have some irrationality. "For the two founders of Flickr, the benefits of maintaining a small scale are obvious," he said. When they agreed to sell the company to Yahoo, the company was in a state of balance. Butterfield and Fick decided to keep the vast majority of their holdings for sale, rather than to accept the risk capital they didn't need, at the expense of diluting their stakes. The Flickr story reflects an increasingly strong preference for individual acting in young internet companies. A few years ago, this independent route was almost unthinkable. The high fixed cost of servers, storage devices and software in the late 90 meant that most start-ups had no choice but to turn to venture capital to help their business get started. But while certain areas of technology, such as semiconductors and mobile technology, will still need to rely on external investment, homegrown start-ups are taking full advantage of broader technological and business changes-a change that lowers entry thresholds for aspiring entrepreneurs. First, falling hardware costs mean that many internet companies "no longer need entrepreneurial capital, and they need very little capital". Fick says that recourse to venture capitalists leaves young companies with the risk that they have to find ways to spend their money on things they may not need-a trend that has led many companies into trouble during the bubble. Flickr's case is that only one by one rounds of investment from friends, family and some of Silicon Valley's leading angel investors (angel investor) are enough to help companies cope with rising capital costs. "If we start a few years earlier, we may need millions of dollars," says Butterfield. He said that 5 years ago, a server with hundreds of G storage capacity (one of the many devices used to process users ' uploaded photos) spent about 250,000 dollars on Flickr. Now, "You can get a memory of thousands of G at a price of 5000 dollars." Second, entrepreneurs have learned from the boom and failure of the web. Online Newsletter WeekSasha Lewis Sascha Lewis, co-founder of Flavorpill, said he and his co-founder Mark Mangen, Mark Mangan, were willing to consider starting on a small scale at the start of the venture. "In the heyday of the network, all of our attention was focused on growth and expanding market share in order to achieve exponential growth," he said. The pressure is heavy-I feel like the sky is falling down. "The company, 6 years ago, was a two-person project that was created in New York to catalogue anecdotes, and now has a publishing business in 5 cities on two continents--and it employs only 8 full-time employees." "We want to focus," says Mr Lewis. We know we have a good product and a brand we want to build. "The founder of Flavorpill can develop the site at their own pace because of the low cost of management and because there is no recourse to venture capital and therefore no obligation to outside directors." They spent 1.5 of their time crafting flavorpill pages and appealing to their audiences before contacting advertisers. Their patience was rewarded. Now, around 300,000 people worldwide read Flavorpill's publications every week. Another rival, DailyCandy, with a similar geographical coverage, recently announced a bid to sell, with rumours that it was priced at $100 million trillion. Third, the popularity of open source network construction modules such as MySQL and PHP make it easier for entrepreneurs to build complex websites and services. Andy Bayo (Andy Baio) is also an employee of a Southern California financial company when Yahoo buys the social networking and Events program website upcoming.org. Upcoming is a Web site he developed in his spare time using free open source Web tools. "Free software makes amateur attempts easier," he says. "The only thing you spend every day is your free time." "Bayeux had no intention of turning it into a business when he founded upcoming, so Bayeux was surprised when the company began to get the attention of venture capitalists at a meeting in San Francisco last year. "We're starting to get a lot of attention and some media coverage, but venture capitalists want to take a big chunk," Bayeux says. "I'm doing this out of interest, so that's not going to appeal to me." Paul Graham, a software engineer and founder of Combinator, said that there was a tendency for faster transfers among entrepreneurs, which also helped to keep startups Independent. "For many of these people, they choose either to be bought or to introduce venture capital," he said. Combinator is a company that provides seed money to tech start-ups (seed funding). For many companies, the second option remains attractive. Saivin Rosen Investment Company (Sevin Rosen target) partnership"As I know, venture capital trading remains the same," said Steve Domenik, a Steve Domenic. "Saivin Rosen Investment Company is a venture capital company that specializes in early investment." But Flickr's Butterfield points to the risks of expanding the size of the business with venture capital. "There could be another 9/11 events, or companies like Google, Yahoo or AOL, will realise they need to develop a photo service that is a match for Flickr." Finally, the independent model has been promoted by the Internet Society. Since the dotcom bust, various entrepreneurial ideas have been discussed, assessed and promoted by a close-knit group of influential bloggers. Personal blogs, web collectors like Digg and del.icio.us, and influential blogging communities such as Slashdot and MetaFilter provide a platform for the spread of good ideas- This contrasts sharply with the high advertising and stadium sponsorship deals of the dotcom era. "There is an idea now that if you're doing something cool, if it's really an interesting, innovative, exciting idea, it will find an audience," says Bayeux. "Companies like Flickr are deeply influenced by the blogosphere," he said. Fick says Flickr's stretched budget forces it to develop as many of its pro-blogging features as possible. "At the beginning, we embraced the ' children of the poor '," she says. "The less money you have, the more creative you will be." ”