Best of Bootstrapping: Why is Bootstrapping So Important?

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

You may have read my recent Bootstrapping to an Exit piece, where I highlighted the importance of facilitating capital-efficient startups and smaller exits, including with small chunks of investment.

In working through the current landscape of our industry, a few trends become evident:

1. A large percentage of VCs are chasing Unicorns
2. Too much money chasing too few deals capable of delivering hyper growth bids up valuations
3. Many Death by Overfunding tragedies have emerged
4. Entrepreneurs are reacting, as Erin Griffith points out in her NY Times article: More Start-Ups Have an Unfamiliar Message for Venture Capitalists: Get Lost

My observation, having covered Bootstrapping for a dozen plus years, is that the industry doesn’t fully understand Bootstrapping.

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Featured Videos

Cloud Stocks: CrowdStrike Expands Partnerships to Address Cyber Attack Fears

According to a recent report, the global endpoint security market is projected to grow from $13.99 billion in 2021 to $24.58 billion in 2028 at 8% CAGR. The recent Russia-Ukraine war has also heightened the scare of cyber attacks globally. Endpoint security players like CrowdStrike (NASDAQ: CRWD) are expanding their offerings and partnerships to help organizations manage this growing risk.

569th Roundtable Recording on March 31, 2022

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Video FAQs

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 1)

Manish discusses his various experiences with customer validation in great depth, as well as his journey from being a hard-core developer geek to a successful entrepreneur CEO who has raised multiple rounds of venture capital from top firms including Sequoia Capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

570th Roundtable Recording with Anupam Rastogi, Emergent Ventures

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When did you reach some level of cruising altitude? What year would that be?

Dheeraj Pandey: We were still the fastest to half-billion in 2015. Along the way, there were jitters. There’s always turbulence. In 2015, there was turbulence when the Intel issue came up. They had a massive number of bugs on the server. They started to put more stuff in their folder. The Intel processor had an immense issue on the server-side.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping to Exit

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Over the last decade and more, I’ve had the privilege of working with a large number of bootstrapped entrepreneurs. These include self-financed companies and also modestly capitalized startups that operate in a capital-efficient manner applying the principles of bootstrapping. [You can take our free Bootstrapping Course to review these.]

For our Seed Capital series of podcasts and blog interviews, I’ve interviewed hundreds of investors, especially micro-VCs and angels who are playing in the early stage game.

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Coursera Uses Corporate Partnerships to Bring In New Content

According to a recent report, the global e-learning market is expected to grow at 13% CAGR from $222.2 billion in 2020 through 2026. The industry has benefited in the recent past by the continuing global pandemic and lockdown conditions. Recently, Coursera (NYSE:COUR) announced its fourth-quarter results recording strong growth.