Thursday, September 28, 2006 10:35 PM
Bill Bither
Another Bootstrapper
I was reading Paul Graham's blog today and was pointed to a fellow entrepreneur and bootstrapper, Mike Taber with his article Startups for the Rest of us. Mike outlines a few problems with looking to Y Combinator to fund a software startup. The main problems are competition, relocation requirement, and giving up 6% of your company for $6000. The program really seems great for students, but what about the "rest of us"?
To summarize what Mike said, those with a family, a career, or even kids, can't take advantage of Y Combinator to start a business, but it *is* possible without VC. It takes dedication, you need to be a decent developer, and you need a little money. I couldn't have said it better. Here's my take on Mike's points.
Dedication
I've said it before in my article, 5 Personality Traits of an Entrepreneur. Motivation, perseverance, and dedication is key to success.
You need to be a decent developer
This is a good point. I can say I was a pretty good developer, but not the best. A jack of all trades, master of none. I am self taught. My mechanical engineering background really helped formulate solutions to problems, establish requirements, and architect an application, but it didn't help in learning OOP, and design patterns. That I learned by reading and doing. Luckily I've hired smarter people than me to write the majority of the code.
You need a little bit of money
Yes, this is true. But I started with no money. In fact, a fair amount of debt. One motivation for starting my business was to get out of debt and in order to do that I had to dive even farther into debt. Luckily I had a lot of credit. That's probably one advantage I had being more established with a house, a wife, a kid, and a full time job. Multiple credit cards with very high limits!
The fact is, some ideas are worth VC and some aren't. I've just added Mike Taber to my blog roll, and he's only 40 minutes east of us in Worcester, MA. May our paths cross someday.
