3 ms·

According to the definitions often used here, isn't Bose a lifestyle company?

• _pius 16y ago
  No.
  • robg 16y ago
    Who were his large investors?
    • SwellJoe 16y ago
      It was initially funded, at least partially, through research grants, I believe. But, shouldn't you have instead said, "Wasn't Bose a bootstrapped company?" if you were talking about how the company was funded?
      • robg 16y ago
        Sure, but I was playing off the contrast as it's typically being made today. Sounds like he never had an interest in VC. Seems like Bose is at least one counterpoint to this view: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2338140 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2338140
        • SwellJoe 16y ago
          That's a good point, and I wasn't aware of this discussion, which gives your comment more useful context. I think there are a lot more examples than pg hints at, they just happen to be less common in tech...which someone else theorized could be because money is so easy to come by in technology and less so in other fields. People don't have to bootstrap as often in tech, so fewer big success stories started out by bootstrapping. I think maybe it's a hard thing to figure out because there are so few Googles, Amazons, and Apples in the world. If you only have a few extreme outliers to look at as your data, your conclusions might be completely wrong, even though they fit the data perfectly.
• SwellJoe 16y ago
  It seems to me that "lifestyle company" is often a denigrating term used by VCs to insult companies that didn't need VCs to succeed, and that didn't choose an exit that would fit a VC-invested business model. Bose is a very large, very successful, international company. Most VCs would have been very pleased to have been involved in funding Bose. Bose could also go public at any time, and have a very large exit. Regardless of the lack of an exit, the Bose founders are extremely rich today, and they don't have to remain involved in Bose for it to continue to operate and grow. I believe the original use of the term "lifestyle" implied an ongoing requirement for the founders to be involved to keep the company going, but it's come to mean "a company that did not raise huge sums of money and did not choose to exit via acquisition or IPO within a few years of founding". In short, I don't like the term, as it provides little useful information about a company, and is colored by the most common users of the term (VCs).