Somewhat related to this, we founded https://code.berlin, an accredited university in Berlin with strictly project-based, interdisciplinary and self-directed 3-year Bachelor programs in Software Engineering, Interaction Design and Product Management.
We're in our 2nd year now, with 230 students from more than 40 nations. We've partnered with 42 US for student exchange last summer, and it was an awesome experience for our students who went there.
And there's the BAFA INVEST program (http://www.invest-wagniskapital.de, German language only) that refunds/grants 20% to any EU-based angel investor who invests in German startups. It's actually a really great and pretty unbureaucratic program.
Talks with other companies started when I planned to rent out white-labeled versions of the site to job portals etc., so they could have their very own branded CV editor and possibly get a revenue share.
During a lunch with the CEO of a German job portal, where we were talking about a white label, he asked me whether it was possible for them to get access to the CV data of my existing users. I replied "You'd need to buy the site then" without actually thinking about it. He in return asked for a price and I came up with 400k euros just to double it in an email hours later ("after carefully calculating again..." ooops double the price :D). When he still was interested, it struck me that a sale might be worth pursuing.
I then contacted his biggest German competitors to get counter offers, and they seemed pretty interested too. Funny anecdote: The CEO of one company told me that they're not actually interested at that price, but that I should tell the others they'd offer a million euros, just because he liked me and wanted his competitors to overpay. He even told me he would confirm that offer if they ask him. I didn't do it of course.
In contrast to the others, XING offered me a deal with a lower upfront payment but a huge earnout upside. I spent quite a few months tracking, testing and analyzing my users' behavior in regard to the earnout KPIs, calculating whether the deal would be better for me and of course negotiating during that time to make it even better.
That's essentially it, I tried to go into as many details as possible without getting into trouble :)
I've built Germany's biggest online resume editor (https://lebenslauf.com), which started as a side project next to my main startup.
Some years ago a friend asked me to help her out with her resume, how to convert it into a proper PDF file etc. – busy and short of time as I was, I simply looked for some online tool to point her to.
Disappointed by the results of my search back then (2011) and motivated to fully design, code and market a small project on my own (after all those years mostly doing management), I started Lebenslauf.com and quickly got fascinated by the idea and technical challenges of a WYSIWYG CV editor.
For quite some time, it remained a side project where I'd spend about 4 hours per week maximum. Meanwhile the number of users grew slowly but steadily thanks to word-of-mouth from my friends and their friends and their friends...
After I sold my main startup in 2012, I finally found the time and fully realized the huge potential of Lebenslauf.com. So I started making it my main project in 2013 and at some point charged money for the created PDF files, which instantly led to five-figure revenues.
About one year later (2014), I sold it to https://xing.com (public company, essentially the German LinkedIn) for a higher seven-digit figure. I managed to get competing bids for it from multiple companies, so the whole sale process is a story of its own.
It's still astonishing to see what has grown out of it and how many people use it every day, and it was an exciting journey with totally different experiences than a venture-funded company.
The German equivalent is called ELV/Lastschrift and allows you to retrieve money from a bank account, but the owner can revoke that within a few weeks.
I would love to see separate fonts for HTML, CSS, and JS only, as I would want to use it for lightweight HTML highlighting in textareas in a CMS.