Sol Orwell, a fellow Canadian, has refused venture capital for his very profitable business, Examine.com, because he doesn’t see an upside in relinquishing control to venture capitalists. He doesn’t need cash—his company makes seven figures per year. He isn’t looking for a quick out or trying to sell—he enjoys his work a great deal. As a majority owner, he doesn’t have to answer to anyone except his paying customers.

When they launched another product, Unsplash (royalty-free stock photographs), they did so in a similar manner: they bought a $19 Tumblr theme and uploaded ten high-resolution images taken by a local photographer. Within three hours, the first low-fi version was launched. They did the work manually until a scalable system was absolutely required, then invested in it with their profits. Now, a few years later, more than 1 billion photos are viewed per month through Unsplash (and it’s now a profitable business, although it is VC-backed at this point).

A good example is Community Laundry, a business that installs and maintains over forty thousand internet-connected washing machines across a thousand Chinese college campuses. Having developed a popular smartphone app that allows students to schedule and pay for the use of dormitory laundry facilities, the ME team gave outside vendors access to the app’s more than 10 million users. Today, the Community Laundry platform hosts dozens of other businesses, such as food delivery and dorm room furniture, and takes a share of the revenues they generate.

That’s why we are smitten with Patrick Collison’s Fast List. Patrick is CEO and cofounder of Stripe, a San Francisco–based financial services company.

The nearest approximation I have found is Li Ka-shing, a refugee from China who is now Hong Kong’s richest man. Li left school at the age of fifteen and set up a small business manufacturing plastic flowers. From these modest beginnings he developed the massive Hutchison Whampoa group, of which Eversholt, another rail rolling stock leasing company, is a subsidiary. None of the, admittedly small, sample of railway employees I interviewed had ever heard of Li, far less experienced resentment at his oppression or exploitation. If they did express resentment, it was – appropriately – directed at the management of First-Group and most of all at the Department for Transport. Li is svelte, noted for his relatively modest habits and second only to Bill Gates for the scale of his global philanthropy.