In early March, Kickstarter quietly sent shareholders a dividend. 

In the wider world of business, such an action would be unremarkable. More than 80 percent of the companies in the S&P 500 pay dividends, and many smaller companies do, too. 

But divvying up quarterly profits with shareholders is unheard of among tech startups. People who follow the venture capital industry were hard-pressed to come up with a single example of a VC-backed startup that has ever paid regular dividends. 

Doing so would be a rejection of the industry’s basic math. VCs bet that they can find the few companies that will generate enormous payouts by going public or getting acquired; the rest fail. There’s not supposed to be anything in between.   Read more…