You know, this is a legitimate question that I don't think has been satisfactorily answered thus far: there have been the numerical analyses about 'successes' which was skewed towards 'success' because there were a lot of YC companies bought out (such as reddit), but are they profitable even for the company that bought them?
Yes, but a lot of them don't find it necessary to openly talk about their balance sheets.
I'm sure Wufoo and the Weeblies are profitable. Grapevine says that MixPanel is profitable already. AirBnb came out early in the press and said they were ramen profitable and then talked about the advantages of being "pizza" profitable shortly thereafter. I'd be very suprised if Dropbox wasn't making decent money, although they may be focused on scaling rather than maximizing profit. I could be wrong, but at the work at a startup event, a couple of companies said that they were profitable already. Listia, maybe? Don't quote me on this.
From talking to YC founders, there's a pretty heavy emphasis to getting ramen profitable as soon as possible to gain leverage in fund raising negotiations. Starving founders tend to give away more equity and get worse terms than founders that can feed themselves and pay the rent.
Things are OK. Thanks for asking. I'm too disorganized, trying to get a half dozen projects going at the same time, so I am planning on hiring a life coach.
and I'd like to think weebly since it really is a pretty darn good value add.
But the freemium approach ( you can omit the powered-by links if you know anything whatsoever about HTML, and it's like $30 bucks for a year of hosting) is the only reason why I would like to think rather than am sure about it.
