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Forbes Column 08: Bootstrap Yourself
Posted on Friday, Apr 18th 2008
My new Forbes column Bootstrap Yourself highlights Silicon Valley’s hottest new trend, Bootstrapping. Great bootstrapping case studies I have covered are Sridhar Vembu, Frank Levinson and Jerry Rawls, Cree Lawson, and Beatrice Tarka. Sridhar, Frank and Jerry did it almost without any outside money, while Cree and Beatrice have done it with very small rounds of Angel funding. Aspiring entrepreneurs, you have much to learn from them.
This segment is a part in the series : Forbes Column 08
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. The Gap in Google's Defenses
. A Recession-Proof Corner of the Tech Sector
. eBay's Bounce-Back Opportunity
. How To Dig Out Yahoo's Treasures
. The Microsoft-Yahoo! Battle Plan
. What Microsoft Should Do While Yahoo! Dithers
. The Next VMWare
. The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur
. The Coming Death of Indian Outsourcing More »»
. India - Cash Rich, Product Poor
. How to Save the World's Back Office
. Latin America's eCommerce Leader
. The Next Indo-China War
. The Real VCs of Silicon Valley
. Fund Envy
. Bootstrap Yourself
. The Coming Convergence
. Lighting The Way In India
. Hydro-Alchemy
. How Amazon Could Change Publishing
. A Technological Fix For Education
. How Technology Can Save Retailers
. Mobile Microfinance
. How To Heat Up Solar
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. Kill The Business Trip
. Water Firm Enlivens IPO Market
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. Peeking Inside the iPhone
. Bootstrapping, Montana Style
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. Silicon Lazarus
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. Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction
. Barack Obama' s Finance Lesson
. Stimulus Package For Entrepreneurs
. Building A Smarter Corporation
. Deconstructing The Cloud
. 'SaaS-ing' Back At The Economy
. Web 3.0
. My Adventure With Amazon
. An S.O.S. To Silicon Valley
. OLPC’s Last Billion
. Capitalism Revisited
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I’m just curious in terms of bootstrapping, does it make sense more for technical people rather than business people. If you need to build a prototype, at least the technical guy can build it at almost no cost. But if a business guys has an idea and wants to build something, it’s kind of hard to get anyone to build something for free.
No, you build a team, share the equity ownership, and all team-members work either for free, or you do some sort of “project” based work to make payroll.
Hi Sramana,
Philippe Kahn, currently founder/CEO of FullPower.com has not taken a dime of VC money and has been greatly successful in IPO/sale of his previous 3 companies (Borland, Starfish, LightSurf). His current startup too is self-funded.
[…] My very strong recommendation to entrepreneurs is to learn the tricks of bootstrapped entrepreneurship so that they can retain maximum control over their destiny. This recommendation assumes that entrepreneurs would be putting their savings into their ventures. Thus, we need a tax policy that makes it as attractive as possible for entrepreneurs to “invest” in their own ventures, especially at the early stages. [See: “Bootstrap Yourself.”] […]