Three Canadian college students bootstrapped a porn platform called Razr to $100M+ in revenue with 250+ employees, then faced a $9 million bank seizure. They sold to investor Fabian Tillman for $140 million, who doubled profits and expanded into broader media while the adult site remained the cash engine.
The most popular websites are all porn sites. There's 3 college students in Canada. They created Pornhub, the website, and they created Razr, producer of content. Like Netflix making their own shows. Exactly. These guys start this thing and it takes off like a rocket. They go from basically like just 3 friends to like 80 people, 150 people, 250 people. Bootstrap? No investors, no nothing. Fast forward to 2009. They've scaled it to 250 employees. They're making millions and millions of dollars, but they're getting paranoid. They start seeing some bad stuff, right? The government seizes $9 million out of one of their bank accounts. 24/7, they're followed by black tinted SUVs. So they finally just decide, look, let's cash out. Now, there's not a lot of buyers for this thing. Institutional investors can't really buy this type of asset. And now it's worth over $100 million. So they sell it to that guy, Fabian Tillman. $140 million is what they sold it to him for. 3 to 6 months, he doubled the profits of the business. He changes the name. He buys Celebs.com and tries to create a TMZ. He tries to create like a bigger media empire, but nothing, nothing can keep up with the growth of the core asset. The company has 500 employees and he's the biggest fucking tycoon on the planet now.
