When Viva Reverie posts the second part of FNAF 2 But Really Really Fast and all the memes hit you specifically in your AU and your soul simultaneously:

Silence Day 2022: Hitting the Nail on the Head

Many people over the centuries have tried their own unique ways of Shut The Fuck Up, Castys. Here is one of the many such instances, set in an AU for Personal Reasons ❤

Castys Masterlist

Ingredients: hammering nails into a guy, mouth whump (not teeth, but tooth whump mentioned), some tongue whump, choking (on a liquid), burns

Everything about this was, in Castys’s opinion, incredibly generic. Cold metal table, check. Tight ropes around his wrists and ankles, check. A handful of dudes smirking down at him, one brandishing a hammer, check. The rope over his forehead was new, he supposed. Ooh, another twist, they were taking the fucking gag off.

“Afternoon, everyone. What fun game are we gonna play today, huh?”

The one holding the hammer waved it in the air a little. “We’re gonna finally shut you up for good, Black.”

“Aw, you gonna knock all my teeth out instead of pulling them to use as your stupid gambling chips? You know people don’t need teeth to talk, right?” Castys was sure that wasn’t it, but, what, were they gonna break his jaw or something? They said for good, but that shit would heal so he didn’t-wait was that a fucking-

“You’ll see, so just hold still, you fucking cockroach. Wouldn’t want to mess it up and make us start over, would you? You can’t be that stupid.” Hands descended on his face, pulling his upper lip back, holding his mouth closed, pressing the point of a fucking nail to his gums. Castys couldn’t make remarks at them anymore, just stuck breathing heavily through his nose as the person holding the hammer got it lined up, shifting their grip on the nail, raising the hammer, smirking, saying something he couldn’t hear over the blood pounding in his ears, and then, finally, dreadfully, swinging the hammer down. 

Castys jerked against the restraints as the bright little point of pain in his upper jaw tore open into a scorching sun, blinding and so intense and definitely nowhere near done getting worse. He barely had time to take a breath before the hammer fell again, and now he was definitely screaming, and he couldn’t even feel the hands on his face anymore because all that existed was pain, that and the sound of the slightly rusted metal scraping its way through his jawbone. A third swing and the nail punched through completely, the sharp point digging into his tongue where it had been resting on the roof of his mouth, just his fucking luck. Each successive hit of the hammer drove the nail further in, scraping against the roof of his mouth, more and more blood gushing out, pooling in his throat, choking him, each pointless cough making him jerk uselessly against the hands holding his head still, driving the pain gripping his face further and further beyond the plateau he’d thought it reached.

And then it stopped. The pain didn’t stop, no, not in the slightest, but the hammer stopped coming down, the nail stopped digging further in, the hands stopped holding his jaw shut. He tried to turn to the side and cough out some of the damn blood, but the rope across his forehead made that very super difficult so he gave up and just coughed it up into the air, which went about as well as he expected, which was not well at all. Before he could say anything cool and funny, which would have taken a while because he could not think of anything cool and funny to say at the moment, his jaw got slammed shut again, momentarily pinching the tip of his tongue between his teeth, because he needed more blood in his fucking mouth. On the bright side, he didn’t really feel it because Wow The Nail In His Face Hurt A Whole Lot. And judging by that prick on the gums of his lower jaw, he was about to get another one!

He kind of had a guess as to where this was going. Like, the whole thing in general, since he was very certain where the next nail was going to go, because it was-fuck yup yup there it was making its merry little way through his mandible bit by large bit and he was so smart this time and kept his tongue well away from the bottom of his mouth which was about the only conscious movement he could make at the moment because the rest of him was far to squirm-around-in-pain but it paid off it did the nail didn’t poke his tongue until it did because now it was burrowing into the base of his tongue which he couldn’t really help wasn’t that delightful this was all so delightful and fun and didn’t hurt like he was being injected with acid that was also on fire they were just nails why did they hurt so much maybe it was the fact that they were around his tooth-nerves it sort of felt like tooth pain now that he thought about it but it was hard to think about anything well not hard to think exactly just hard to focus he kept jumping around from one thing to the next in his head trying to think about something that wasn’t the nails or the pain or the screams trapped in his throat or the ropes tying him down or the hands holding his jaw closed or the fact that he was alone here now and might never see-

Hey, pay attention, they were saying something, holding up a thin metal wire, bringing it towards his mouth, wrapping it around the nails, pulling tight, tight, so tight that his teeth were pressed together uncomfortably hard, and then there was some device he didn’t recognize, sort of like a gun, pressed against the wire, against his teeth, and it was hot, burning, scorching, he couldn’t breathe in and out fast enough, eyes squeezed shut as tears leaked out, fists clenched, stomach twisting, he was stuck, trapped here in this awful, agonizing moment, fire piercing his every nerve, and maybe the hands left his face, or maybe they just weren’t gripping him as tightly, and the fire might be calming down, quieting, growing more dull, more tolerable, his breathing slowing…

Castys pried open his eyes and glared up at the people surrounding him, who all looked way too fucking pleased with themselves. One of them patted his cheek. “Well, Black, how’s it feel? Got anything to say?” Castys tried to open his mouth, but even attempting to move his jaw shot infinitely more awful pain needles into his entire face, so he just ended up wincing as they all laughed at him. 

“Now you’ll be all quiet and well-behaved like your late buddy Red, won’t you?” another one jeered.

“Best of both worlds, even if he’s not as pretty.”

“Hey, he’s a lot prettier with his stupid annoying mouth shut!”

Castys wanted nothing more in the world than to bite all of these fuckers like a rabid bat but instead he got to lie there and be quiet as they made all their dumb comments and pulled on his stupid long hair and poked at his face, which definitely did not hurt like hell. Eventually they got bored, thank fuck, and Castys didn’t resist much as they dragged him back to the cell and shoved him inside, hard enough that he fell to his knees. Sighing, he forced himself to his feet and walked a few steps, plopping down on the edge of the bed. He was glad that shit was over, but now he was…

Reluctantly, Castys reached up to tug at the wire tying the nails together. He knew it wasn’t gonna come off, but he still had to try. Yup, stuck, all melted together by a dot of metal that was still pretty warm to the touch and tangled around the nails stuck in his fucking skull. Maybe he could-ouch no no nope, not gonna be able to pull those out. At least, not without some pliers or something, if he would even be able to do it to himself. Giving up for now, he sighed and pulled his knees up to his chest, curling up against the wall on the corner of their…his bed. 

The sounds of the jungle outside were the same as ever, but the cell was so…quiet. It had been ever since…and now he couldn’t even talk to himself or sing badly or say weird things to the guards outside he just had to be…silent. He supposed he could bang on the walls or something, but he wasn’t really in the mood. All he really felt like doing right now was being quiet, just like his fucking captors wanted, so hooray for them, they fucking won, whatever, but it wasn’t because of the nails, he just…

There was only one person he wanted to fill this silence, and he wasn’t here anymore. Might never come back.

So, for now, and maybe forever, it was quiet.

Castys Cult: @as-a-matter-of-whump @blackrosesandwhump @fanmanga1357-blog @thehopelessopus @just-a-whumping-racoon-with-wifi @hearse-song @muddy-swamp-bitch @whumpasaurus101 @yet-another-heathen @galaxywhump @starnight-whump @his-unspoken-words @misspelledwitch @suspicious-whumping-egg @pumpkin-spice-whump @painsandconfusion @i-can-even-burn-salad @befuddled-calico-whump @whumpinggrounds @whump-queen

Invisible unicorns: 35 big companies that started with little or no money

Joseph FlahertyContributor   Joe Flaherty is director of Content & Community at Founder Collective. More posts by this contributor: Theres no shame in a $100M startup Overdosing on VC: Lessons from 71 IPOs Venture capital is a hell of a drug, and its possible tooverdose on VC, but for most founders that is a champagne problem. More often the question investors hear is how do I get a VC to back my startup? These founders arent worried about how overcapitalization will make their IPO prospects trickier theyre scrambling to get someone, anyone, to sign their first term sheet. Theres a widespread belief among founders that venture capital is a precursor to success. VC is a common denominator of the most successful tech startups, but it isnt a prerequisite, especially at the early stages. Entrepreneurs can prove out quite a bit with little to no capital. Capital wont make your company insightful. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? To help illustrate how startups can move forward, here are 35 examples of companies that started with a few thousand dollars, or even just sweat equity, and went on to become exemplars of what I call efficient entrepreneurship. Many of these companies have subsequently earned billion-dollar valuations, some even have billions of dollars in revenue, but none started with anything other than what would be considered a seed round. Most of these startups raised money from VCs, but only after they established the fact that their success would come with or without a wire transfer from an investor. Even now, many of them arent widely known they are the invisible unicorns of the tech industry. So before scrambling to schedule meetings with investors, read these stories. They provide a counterbalance to the VC-centric outlook held by many founders, and provide alternative ways to think about funding. What follows are brief and simplified descriptions of these companies (categorized by approaches they share) and links to stories where you can read more about them. Remember, taking venture capital should be a choice, not a compulsion. These companies show how its done. Figure something out, then ask for money You dont need venture capital to get started in most industries if you can solve a real problem for customers and charge money for it. Here are three ways to think about this: Automate your workflow The easiest way to build a useful product is to automate some part of your daily workflow. This will ensure youve got proven demand for what youre building and a pre-existing funding source for your project. MailChimp: Co-founder/CEO Ben Chestnut was running a design consulting business in the year 2000 and had a stream of clients who wanted email newsletters created. The only problem was that he hated designing them. So, to spare his team the tedium, he decided to build a tool that would streamline the process.MailChimp, a $400 million run rate business, was born. Lynda: Lynda Weinman started as a teacher in need of tools to instruct web designers in the late 1990s. The offerings at bookstores were bland, so she began producing training films that better educated her students. Tutorial by tutorial her company helped software developers and designers improve their skills. She spent two decades building a content library and tech assets that had enough scale to entice LinkedIn to pay $1.5 billion to acquire the company. Start with a capital-efficient product Many entrepreneurs make frontal attacks on industry leaders, usually resulting in failure. This is especially true in the case of hardware. Instead of trying to compete with a company like Apple, these scrappy startups filled the gap left by RadioShack and built businesses worthy of respect and emulation. AdaFruit Industries: Limor Fried started her DIY electronics e-commerce empire as a student at MIT by assembling DIY kits comprised of off-the-shelf parts. Fried merchandised the same building blocks found at electronics stores, but also crafted quirky content that made the prospect of soldering a replica Space Invaders cabinet seem reasonable. Now she has 85 employees and earns $33 million per year. SparkFun: Similar to AdaFruit, Nathan Seidle started SparkFun out of his dorm room by selling electronics kits and oddball components to a coterie of engineers who wanted to explore exotic new sensors and systems. Now his e-commerce empire employs 154 and has revenues of $32 million per year. Solve an existing problem and leverage an existing business model Startups dont have to be particularly innovative in terms of business model. Building a better mousetrap on top of a more modern technical platform, or with a UX layer, can be enough. None of the companies that follow reinvented the wheel, but all wound up creating real value. Braintree Payments: Exchanging money online, without being fleeced by fraudsters, is one of the oldest problems on the web. All parties to a transaction happily agree to pay a fair tax for a superior experience. Braintree built a better tech solution and survived on the proceeds of those transactions for four years before raising $69 million in two rounds of venture capital, which preceded an $800 million acquisition. Shopify: Shopifys founders were looking for a shopping cart solution when they were starting an e-commerce site for snowboarders. Unable to find one, they decided to scratch their own itch and built a bespoke solution on the then red-hot Ruby on Rails framework. It turned out to be a perfect solution for plenty more people, and the founders ran the business independently for six years on the revenue they generated. They ultimately raised money from VCs and later IPOed, which rewarded them with a billion-dollar valuation. Self-reliance rules Many entrepreneurs waste their time playing CEO, crafting a strategy and drawing up a dream org chart for what their business might become. Dont do that. Instead, figure out what you can do, today, to advance this idea using only the resources you have. Ipsy: Sending boxes of makeup to amateur beauticians has become a growth industry thanks to pioneers like Birchbox. YouTube star Michelle Phan didnt have first-mover advantage, but she leveraged her online celebrity (8 million+ YouTube subscribers), relationships with cosmetics brands and <$500,000in seed funding to build a subscription box startup that generated $150 million in revenue before raising $100 million in VC. Capital wont make your company insightful. ShutterStock: Jon Oringer was a professional software developer and an amateur photographer. He combined this set of skills and used 30,000 photos from his personal photo library to start a stock photo service that is currently worth $2 billion. His capital efficiency paid off and ultimately turned him into a truly self-made billionaire. SimpliSafe: People scoff at the idea of trying to bootstrap a hardware business, but SimpliSafes Chad Laurans did it. He raised a small amount of money from friends and family and then spent eight years building a self-install security business, literally soldering the first prototypes himself to save money. Eight years later, the business has hundreds of thousands of customers, hundreds of millions in revenue and $57 million in VC from Sequoia. Everyones money is green Funding doesnt always come millions of dollars at a time. Founders can scrape together money from grants, incubators and angels, or even pre-sales. The savviest entrepreneurs design their business model so they collect payment before they deliver their product, turning customers into a source of growth capital.   Tough Mudder: Track & field entrepreneur Will Dean turned $7,000 in savings into a company with more than $100 million in annual revenue. The secret was pre-selling registrations to races and then using those funds as working capital to construct the electrified obstacle courses that have made Tough Mudder a global phenomena. CoolMiniOrNot: CoolMiniOrNot started out as a website where geeks could show off their ability to paint Dungeons & Dragons figurines. Eventually, the sites founders decided to design and distribute games of their own, leveraging Kickstarter as a channel. They have run27 Kickstarter campaignswhich have raised$35,943,270million dollars of non-dilutive funding. Game on. Sell! Sell! Sell! Usually the best source of capital is a customer, and selling has two benefits. First, you make the cash register ring immediately. Second, you quickly learn what resonates with customers and can use those insights to refine your offering. Scentsy: DNVBs are hip, but they are over-reliant on twee launch videos and Facebook ads to drive revenue. Scentsy sold candles at swap meets when they couldnt afford to buy ads. It wasnt glamorous, but it did give the founders a solid grounding on the messages that resonated with buyers now they have more than $545 million a year in revenue. CarGurus: This app leverages data analytics to help customers find the best deal on used cars, but the companys CEO credits its $50 million a year in revenue, and profitability, to hiring a sales team early in the companys life cycle. Nearly half the companys 350 employees are busy making sales calls, not writing software. LootCrate: LootCrate had more than 600,000 customers and $100 million in revenue before they raised institutional capital. Part of the reason they were so efficient was that the company started charging customers from its first weekend in existence. The founders were at a hackathon, set up a landing page, collected orders and used that capital to buy the geeky goods that would fill the packages. Be miserly with marketing Startup marketers might not want to waste time with unmeasurable brand marketing. Efficient entrepreneurs need campaigns to be additive, immediately. Wayfair: The home goods e-commerce company was profitable from its first month of operation because they skipped brand advertising and bought up hundreds of domain names that were exact matches for common search terms. This model kicked off a decade of profitable growth until they ultimately raised a Series A worth $165 million shortly before going public and earning a market cap that is currently over $4 billion. If you cant creatively turn $1 into $10, why do you expect to be able to turn $1 million into $10 million? Cards Against Humanity: With just $15,700 in funding from Kickstarter, the Cards Against Humanity team built a business that grossed more than $12 million in its first year. Theyve also sustained their brand with a series of canny marketing stunts, selling cow poop, cutting up a Picasso, digging a big hole representing the ennui of a post-Trump America, then selling Trump bug out bags and simply asking for money. These promotions arent cheap to run, but they make enough money to defray costs while earning a disproportionate amount of free media. GoFundMe: Viral marketing is dismissed, rightfully, when it is tacked on to a business model, but it can be a powerful driver when properly integrated into a business model. Paired with hyper-efficient conversion rate optimization (CRO), it can be unbeatable. The founders of GoFundMe were able to use these twin forces to bootstrap a business to the point where it was valued at ~$600 million. Efficiency > Capital Startups are often measured by how much money theyve raised. Its more important to ask how efficiently those companies use the capital. Efficiency doesnt mean penny-pinching, but instead, finding entrepreneurs who orient their business around a technology or business model that is intrinsically more effective at multiplying capital. PaintNite: The idea of combining Monet and Merlot has been around for a while, but the founders of PaintNite wanted to make the model more cost-effective. While their competitors relied on a slow, expensive franchise sales model, PaintNite paired art teachers with existing bars that wanted to sell wine on weekdays and created a business that did $30 million in revenue the year before it raised venture capital. Plenty of Fish: The dating site was founded in 2003 and didnt change dramatically regarding functionality or aesthetics over the next decade. Other sites had more features, flashier graphics and copious amounts of venture funding, but PoF was free and spent most of its resources fighting spam accounts. As with Craigslist, Plenty of Fishs biggest asset was its reputation as a well-stocked pond. The company iterated on the product over time, but never needed massive infusions of capital. Ultimately, the company sold for $575 million. Mojang: The masons behind Minecraft never raised any venture capital, employed just 50 people and earned nearly a billion dollars in profit before selling to Microsoft. The Swedish studio never got sucked into fads like Zynga-inspired social spamming and predatory microtransactions. Minecraft grew by charging users a flat fee, resulting in a $2.5 billion acquisition. Fortune favors the boring Boring isnt a value judgment. Many of the most impressive, successful companies that managed to grow without capital thrived by solving acute, if somewhat dry, problems. If you solve a hard problem, customers will happily fund it. SurveyMonkey was founded in the dot-com bubble of the 90s and though it wasnt as disruptive as peers like Kosmo, it was more durable. It survived the dot-com crash and steadily grew into a nine-figure run rate, only raising $100 million 11 years after getting started. Protolabs does for plastic injection molding what Vistaprint does for business cards, and is currently worth $1.2 billion. Cvent, worth $1.3 billion, builds event management tools and Textura, acquired for $663 million, handles construction management neither typically considered a hot or hip market. Grasshopper is a phone networking company that had 150,000 customers and more than $30 million in annual revenue, but no VC on the books, and was eventually acquired by Citrix. Epic was founded by Judith Faulkner in 1979; the Wisconsin-based electronic medical records provider may be the largest bootstrapped software company operating today. eClinicalWorks was founded in 1999 when the mantra was get big fast, and many of its contemporaries crashed and burned. By focusing on excelling at the dull, yet profitable work of managing clinical data, the company survived and now employs more than 4,000 workers and generates $320 million in annual revenue. Unity became a backbone of the mobile gaming industry by focusing on all of the unsexy aspects of game development, like cross-platform compatibility and bump mapping. They went years without raising capital, but now have a valuation over $1.5 billion, and are more successful than the majority of branded game startups. GitHub took the pain out of version control and became a critical part of the tech ecosystem before raising capital. Qualtrics started as a tool to administer surveys for schools and businesses in a basement in Utah and now employs 1,000 and rakes in $100 million a year, profitably. Blessed are the unfundable Sometimes raising capital is almost impossible. Weve seen companies with tens of millions in revenue, triple-digit growth rates and other advantages struggle to raise even small amounts of money. Fortunately, these startups tend to prevail in the end, despite this apparent disadvantage. Atlassian: One of the benefits of building a startup outside Silicon Valley, NYC, LA or Boston is that there isnt much VC available. This may sound like a curse; after all, how could it be helpful to have no access to capital? It can be a blessing in disguise. This kind of isolation prevents you from daydreaming about what youd do with millions of dollars and forces you to make happy the paying customers you do have. Atlassian, based in Australia, bootstrapped its way to a $4 billion market cap. If it had easier access to funding, they might have found themselves chasing low-quality growth and gone under before they figured out how to scale efficiently. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. Campaign Monitor: One of the odd features of capital-efficient companies is that their first rounds of funding tend to be eye-popping sums that look more like proceeds from IPOs. This is the case for Campaign Monitor, whose first round of funding amounted to $250 million. Sydney-based Campaign Monitor didnt have easy access to venture capital, so they bootstrapped the business and built a unique technology that offered superior email analytics to companies like Disney, Coca-Cola and Buzzfeed. Time will tell if raising a quarter billion dollars helps or hurts the company, but it is certainly a validation of the progress theyve made so far. The Trade Desk: While he had a unique view of how to power the programmatic advertising industry, founder Jeff Green started The Trade Desk late in the funding cycle for modern adtech. This overcapitalization of the market, combined with investors getting burned by bad performers, made every round of funding a struggle throughout the life of the company. Green was a consummate startup CEO, who raised only $26.4 million in venture capital during the companys first six years and turned it into a billion-dollar business traded on the NASDAQ. How? By embracing the constraints of having less capital, focusing on the highest return activities and building a culture of innovation powered by ideas rather than infusions of capital. (Disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor in The Trade Desk.) VCs arent perfect, and even the best miss out on ideas that seem like sure things. It is shocking how common it is to hear founders talk about how they couldnt sell investors on an idea that went on to become a billion-dollar business. AppLovin founder Adam Foroughi sold his business for $1.4 billion, but found it hard to raise venture capital, even with serious revenue. I couldnt find anyone to give us an investment at what I thought was a reasonable starting point valuation (maybe $4 million or $5 million) and, by the end of our first year of operations, we were profitable and doing over $1 million a month in revenue. The rest, as they say, is history. Takeaway: Avoid designing your business around VC Too many founders orient their businesses around venture capital from day one. Startups used to figure stuff out and then ask for money. Today, they ask for money to figure things out. Outside of drug discovery or aeronautical hardware, this is usually the wrong decision. In fact, making progress without resources is the best way to get VCs to take an interest in your company. The companies mentioned above chose not to raise money for protracted periods of time, but when they did, they had their pick of investors and could set the terms. Our advice isnt to try to bootstrap a business in perpetuity. Venture capital has powered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Zappos. Just remember that you dont need a penny to get started. You dont need permission from funders to found and scale a startup. So the next time a VC tells you they pass, remember these three principles: Its possible to get a tech-enabled business off the ground with no capital. Its feasible to scale a tech business rapidly with very little capital. Its often in the founders best interest to limit the amount of capital they take. If you know of some other companies that self-funded their way to an extraordinary outcome, please let me know.