Another example of a company that has grown quite large without using venture funding is Zoho.com - based out of Chennai, India. They are even larger than Mailchimp in terms of revenues - clocking over $1 Billion and with over 3000 employees.
(Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :)
We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.
We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.