I don't know if I agree. 10x seems to be the common theme a lot of people quote but I've never personally seen a statement that says this is an established standard (which books are claiming this?). I think there are multiple factors to consider when buying and selling, and claiming 10x annual revenue is standard is fool hardy.
Take my advice with a huge grain of salt. Also, the below advice is base entirely on the assumption you live in the US. I do not know how other countries operate so I can't comment.
1. Take some time away from school after high school. I know people want to rush and get it over with but moving forward when you are in this state some times can create the opposite outcome you want.
2. When you feel better, enroll in a local community college and work your way back towards transferring to a university. Apply for financial aid.
You can always try a site like flippa.com. As for the valuation, it's probably a bit optimistic but I guess it never hurts to see what someone might be willing to pay. But my personal guess is it's going to be a lot less than that
It seems a lot of responses here were they didn't know they could scroll. I'm in the opposite camp. Didn't notice there was a play option and just scrolled :/
Execution is everything. An idea evolved and the seed of the idea may be the same but the end result will almost always be different. The peer is a dick for such a move but it's not something to dwell on. If you are to succeed, it will be because of how you execute or lack thereof, not because someone stole your seed idea, generally speaking
I wish I could downvote. Instead of linking to source, it is linked to some useless 3rd party site the OP runs that doesn't even go direct to article and on mobile, the link doesn't even work. I had to google it separately on a different browser tab to get to source to read.
Your latter argument is incorrect. Let's say there are 200 shares issued. Let's say you are a solo founder and own 100 percent of the company. Investor comes in and wants 20%. You would issue him 50 shares and that would dilute your percentage to 80%. Total shares issued now is 250 shares.
Your shares don't change and you don't just get issued new shares. That's why in startups people reference actual shares of stock rather than percentages. Percentages is just a way for people to communicate. That said, in an actual startup we're talking about tens of thousands to millions of shares initially rather than this dumb down version.
As for why your version isn't always the case, it's obvious that if everyone shares get increase accordingly, and retain their percentage ownership, there'd be no new shares/percentage going to new investors of employees
I can't speak for your situation specifically but it was announced in advance that they would be switching to paid plans only. As a result, I personally did have time to backup my data as I imagined you would have had too.
For whatever reason if you didn't see the email and their mail appears to be hitting your spam box, it isn't for lack of them trying it appears. Perhaps the initial email was lost as well.
At this point, my best recommendation is to reach out to support to see if they'd be willing to work with you to get your data back. The free accounts were limited so the amount of files in there can't be much to extract and they may be open to it. Best of luck.
It's interesting but it feels like every year for what feels like more than a decade, some student is building either a craigslist for campus, a campus chat board, a campus event system, a note sharing app, or course scheduler, or some student discount system. These ideas constantly crop up over and over again yet I don't remember any persisting or growing to dominate the space.