>I'd like to know how they set out to earn an extra few thousand each month and accidentally stepped into an "empire" that will gross $100M in the span of a few years, without venture capital.
That happens a lot more than 1 billion exits happen, and even outside the startup space.
There are tons of 10-100M companies in all kinds of sectors, even in local fast-food chains...
Net margins are only 1.5%, though, according to the industry trade group [1]. With median sales of about $25M/year, that's under $400K profit for running a supermarket. It's a decent living, but before giving up programming to buy a supermarket, consider that you can get to $400K/year income a lot quicker with less risk than you can grow a business with 1.5% margins to $25M/year.
Business is about profit, not revenues. $100M revenue is considered a huge number in software because it's assumed that your marginal costs are close to zero, and so that's basically pure profit. $100M in many other industries gives you a decent living in exchange for a lot of work. Hell, I could easily build a billion-dollar business selling $100 bills for $99.99, but I'd lose $100K on it.
Considering you criticize supermarkets for this, consider how the tech "unicorns" usually celebrated on HN are all about revenues (at best), and eyeballs (at worse) and hardly about profit.
Even Amazon took 10+ years to turn actual profits...
It ain't working out so well for most of those unicorns...
There's a complication in that if you're spinning off massive profits per customer but re-investing them in expansion, you won't show any GAAP profits, but your revenue will increase exponentially and as soon as you stop expanding you'll be massively profitable.
Amazon & Uber are in a very different league from say Fab or Homejoy. If your core business segments are profitable but you're investing that money into moving into other segments, then you're in good shape. If you're losing money on every new customer and making it up in volume, you have a problem.
I think we're just used to the idea of CEOs earning multiple millions of dollars per year. So if you hear about a CEO who runs a grocery store with $100M in revenue, you would expect that he earns a lot more than $400K.
Who says that your supermarket needs to be in the Valley? In Michigan you can live like a member of the elite on $400K a year. In Detroit you could live like a king.
I think the 1.5% margins would be a problem though. Plus I image the big supermarket chains have the benefit of large economies of scale taht the small individual stores don't have.
It's actually higher than that. Those numbers are after the inflated pay of the higher ups. One company makes almost exactly that margin. The CEO makes over ten million a year. The board is doing good. The shareholders are doing great. They have perks like luxury jets, wine-and-dines, etc. All this while other people run it for them.
Gotta factor these things in to claims by companies talking razor-thin margins. There's more money to be made than they'd make you think. Although, it's still work to get there as you said.
That happens a lot more than 1 billion exits happen, and even outside the startup space.
There are tons of 10-100M companies in all kinds of sectors, even in local fast-food chains...