Amazon was started in a bootstrapish way with about $200k from Bezos, his parent and loans. The code was written in C by Bezos and two other guys in his garage. Once they launched they had to raise money to scale though.

$200k is not bootstrapping. That's still a great amount for a seed round in most places in the world.

$200k CAN BE bootsrapping. Bootstrapping is running your business with personal funds and not receiving or accepting external money.

By this definition Bezos was not bootstrapped.

You're right. There should be a another terms for it though because 200k is 200k if you put it in yourself or took it from a VC. The last company I started we had €20 starting capital which we spent on a domain name and a server. Clearly there is a huge difference between those 2 cases as we had to be profitable from day 1.

I agree. Bootstrapping has come to connote "small sums" as opposed to self-funding.