No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted

Re:No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted by tim333 on Thursday June 02, 2016 @08:58PM (#11827574)

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.

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Re:No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted by rorykoehler on Thursday June 02, 2016 @11:32PM (#11828121)

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

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Re:No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted by Lordarminius on Friday June 03, 2016 @05:36AM (#11829227)

$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.

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Re:No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted by rorykoehler on Friday June 03, 2016 @12:42PM (#11831399)

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.

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Re:No Venture Capital Needed, or Wanted by Lordarminius on Friday June 03, 2016 @02:55PM (#11832394)

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

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