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Congrats! Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your o

Congrats! Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping. Sure, the line is fuzzy no matter how you look at it, but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings), I don't like it being called "bootstrapping": the core difference is in the type of safety net you've got (and thus the risks you are really taking).

plehoux 6y ago
> but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings) Profits from another business, in and itself, are technically also from personal savings. But yeah, maybe our story doesn't subscribe to the purest form of bootstrapping.
- achillesheels 6y ago
  I would define bootstrapping more on par with autonomous scaling. The criterion pertains to the risk in capitalization. The more the risk is self-owned, the more the "quality" of the bootstrap :)
- necovek 6y ago
  The only distinction is that personal savings usually do not grow at the same rate, thus the different qualification of risk. Anyway, your story is enlightening and interesting regardless if it was "impurely" bootstrapped, so apologies if I made it seem as if that was the most important thing.
gumby 6y ago
> Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping. That seems like a crazy distinction. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps means not getting outside assistance. Growth through reinvesting your profits is entirely the deal. Otherwise what else on earth could it mean? We started Cygnus with 15K (about 30K in today's dollars; it was 5K from each founder) and didn't take outside money for seven years at which point we have about 150 employees and had never had an unprofitable month after month 3 (though the three of us had to skip paychecks some months during the first year, and I gave the company free rent for a few months -- but staff always got a paycheck). edit: It wasn't just the cash; we also had an old Sun-3 that Sun had somehow appeared -- still had a Sun property sticker -- plus we had the first production prototype of the "pizza box" sparcstation which had in fact been legitimately given away.
- necovek 6y ago
  Uhm, of course profits from the "bootstrapped" business does not count as external business profit: you had exactly the "fixed pot" I talked about, so your example is a great case in point. But the OP had profits from another business. Eg. imagine if Google decided to create a self-driving company with profits from their search/ad business. We wouldn't ever think of calling that self-driving company bootstrapped.
  - gumby 6y ago
    I guess since it was the same team and the money was coming from the team's first bootstrapped business it all seemed like just adding another product to me. But yeah, it was written up more like it was simply subsidized by a group of investors who happened to be the founders.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  For anyone else reading, I actually found Cygnus Solutions' business model interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions Lived the dream there: making a lot of money maintaining open source. Good stuff :D
  - gumby 6y ago
    In 1989 the term was "free software" (the term "open source" had not yet been applied to software). It was pretty unknown at that point so we had to explain it to people. In more than once case I sat in a conference room and was told by some exec that I (or we) was a fucking idiot while he (always he back then) handed me a P.O. or signed contract for $1MM. Needless to say I didn't care what they called as as long as they continued to pay. Having to invent a whole new business model going into a mature market is hard and we worked hard at it. Also I had to write the first blanket assignment, the GNU library license (dynamic linking was Gilmore's great idea though), the fork-and-steering committee model (google for my message about splitting of GCC into egcs -- forking was super super controversial back then and was assumed by most people to be doom)... yes, fun times.
willyg123 6y ago
His prior company, ConferenceBadge.com, was bootstrapped too [1]. If his prior company was venture backed, I would agree with you. This is a completely new business and target market so I don't think it can be considered an expansion either. [1] https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-a-bootstrapped-startup-a6cb8a17237e https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-a-bo...

plehoux 6y ago

> but if you are not drawing from a fixed pot (eg. your personal savings) Profits from another business, in and itself, are technically also from personal savings. But yeah, maybe our story doesn't subscribe to the purest form of bootstrapping.

achillesheels 6y ago
I would define bootstrapping more on par with autonomous scaling. The criterion pertains to the risk in capitalization. The more the risk is self-owned, the more the "quality" of the bootstrap :)
necovek 6y ago
The only distinction is that personal savings usually do not grow at the same rate, thus the different qualification of risk. Anyway, your story is enlightening and interesting regardless if it was "impurely" bootstrapped, so apologies if I made it seem as if that was the most important thing.

gumby 6y ago

> Your story is amazing, but there is this tendency to conflate bootstrapping with re-investing-your-own-earnings which you admit to doing (from your other businesses). I'd rather call that "expanding" your existing business or "pivoting" rather than bootstrapping. That seems like a crazy distinction. Pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps means not getting outside assistance. Growth through reinvesting your profits is entirely the deal. Otherwise what else on earth could it mean? We started Cygnus with 15K (about 30K in today's dollars; it was 5K from each founder) and didn't take outside money for seven years at which point we have about 150 employees and had never had an unprofitable month after month 3 (though the three of us had to skip paychecks some months during the first year, and I gave the company free rent for a few months -- but staff always got a paycheck). edit: It wasn't just the cash; we also had an old Sun-3 that Sun had somehow appeared -- still had a Sun property sticker -- plus we had the first production prototype of the "pizza box" sparcstation which had in fact been legitimately given away.

necovek 6y ago
Uhm, of course profits from the "bootstrapped" business does not count as external business profit: you had exactly the "fixed pot" I talked about, so your example is a great case in point. But the OP had profits from another business. Eg. imagine if Google decided to create a self-driving company with profits from their search/ad business. We wouldn't ever think of calling that self-driving company bootstrapped.
- gumby 6y ago
  I guess since it was the same team and the money was coming from the team's first bootstrapped business it all seemed like just adding another product to me. But yeah, it was written up more like it was simply subsidized by a group of investors who happened to be the founders.
renewiltord 6y ago
For anyone else reading, I actually found Cygnus Solutions' business model interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions Lived the dream there: making a lot of money maintaining open source. Good stuff :D
- gumby 6y ago
  In 1989 the term was "free software" (the term "open source" had not yet been applied to software). It was pretty unknown at that point so we had to explain it to people. In more than once case I sat in a conference room and was told by some exec that I (or we) was a fucking idiot while he (always he back then) handed me a P.O. or signed contract for $1MM. Needless to say I didn't care what they called as as long as they continued to pay. Having to invent a whole new business model going into a mature market is hard and we worked hard at it. Also I had to write the first blanket assignment, the GNU library license (dynamic linking was Gilmore's great idea though), the fork-and-steering committee model (google for my message about splitting of GCC into egcs -- forking was super super controversial back then and was assumed by most people to be doom)... yes, fun times.

willyg123 6y ago

His prior company, ConferenceBadge.com, was bootstrapped too [1]. If his prior company was venture backed, I would agree with you. This is a completely new business and target market so I don't think it can be considered an expansion either. [1] https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-a-bootstrapped-startup-a6cb8a17237e https://medium.com/conference-badge/the-epiphany-behind-a-bo...