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Joel Spolsky On How To Bootstrap a Business
Meredith writes "This is a great interview with Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software. Joel talks about the negatives of taking money from venture capitalists, and how the entrepreneurs that don't take money become 'super entrepreneurs,' learning how to make something significant out of nothing. This is a very popular interview among tech entrepreneurs and provides really valuable information for startups."
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it depends on your situation. IF you have the time, money, skills and patience you could make it work with less compromises. Most of the time you get to a point where all you want is to finish as soon as possible and start getting some profit. For that to happen you need to make some compromises. Maybe you will end up with less profit as you add more "partners" but the load should be less and you wont go crazy or loose your hair trying to figure out how to get the money to finish
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
I am seriously confused. I learned the golden rule as a teenager: He who has the gold, makes the rules.
If your parents are paying for your food and shelter, you do what they say.
If you pay for your own food and shelter, you do whatever you want.
In business, if you get venture capital; the investors have equity in the business.
If your equity capital comes from your own pocket, you take all the risks and reap all the rewards.
In politics, public campaign financing lets all viable candidates compete on equal footing with no ulterior motives.
Without public campaign financing, candidates rely on "donations" (read: bribes), tell you they are interested in alternative energy, yet provide oil companies with record profits and state-sponsored corporate welfare.
In those famous words: "Show me the money!"
Why is it that so many people seem ignorant of this basic premise of how every "civilized" human society operates?
I'd be more impressed if this were from someone who started up a company that grew. This guy has a little software company with one product, and he's had a little company with one product for, what, ten years now?
For comparison, read The Autodesk File. Autodesk was started with $60K from the founders, never accepted any venture capital, and had revenue of $1.8 billion last year.
"The negatives just outweigh the positives, especially in this day and age where a lot of businesses can be started with a $500 server and a fast internet connection."
Coming to a broadband connection near you. Downloadable hardware. Now what?
Where is the text of the interview?
Randomly, this interview took place over two years ago. The originating page: http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/11/vv_show_20_joel_spolsky_of_fog.html
I'm really disliking this trend of posting interviews in a video format. Just because you can doesn't mean you should... come on folks.
:-\
Anyways, anyone know if this thing has a text version or transcript of some sort with it?
I touch computers in naughty places
For the record, you're allowed to have a *dominant* one, just like being right handed... I happen to be right nutted.
You'd better laugh; I'm going to lose a job interview some day over this post when they ask me what tech. sites I frequent!
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I debated for a good half a minute about whether to AC this. Surely it would be read by a lot more people if I posted under my normal /. account (which has at least a few fans, and my posts are generally modded up), but I think I would feel constrained in some ways about what I could say. Normally I am very open in my slashdot posts, but I'd like to talk about some of the transitions that our company is currently in, and I wouldn't be able to do that openly under my normal nick.
I'm the CEO of a tech startup (not in IT/IS, however), we've been a legal entity for about 2 years, and the entire project is 3-4 years old. I spent every penny I had to get started, and bootstrapped the rest of our seed money (around $1M) from family. There was a bunch more stuff here about how the project started, but I edited this and cut a lot of fluff out, because I dont think anyone needs to really read it to get the point. We build a few products, products that are technically superior to our competition, and at the same time cheaper.
When we had recently began to engineer the first product, I started to talk publicly on the Internet about what I was up to, and asked for feedback. People responded positively. Although some of the other companies out there are more hype and marketing related, and it was difficult to compete for attention when we had zero marketing budget, we were able to get good feedback from serious users. Some people I knew in the industry introduced me to executives at some of the more serious players that would eventually be corporate clients. Some of them dismissed us entirely, I think both because I don't look like a CEO, and because we aimed to do things that were very complicated, and to do them reasonably. One time in an introduction meeting, I actually had the CEO of one of the potential clients/partners spend about 85% of the meeting talking directly to our lead engineer (who is about twice my age) instead of to me, because I guess he didn't listen well when we were introduced, and had assumed I was the engineer and "the gray-haired guy" was actually the CEO, haha.
The greatest reward of bootstrapping, for me, has been the ability to run the company I want to. For me, that means making tools for other techies, and making them accessable to techies. I'm not really a CEO, I'm a techie. I've probably made some less than optimal decisions as a CEO-- We could have priced our product at double what the competition sold their crippled ones for, and it would have made more net profit, but I didn't want to cater to just the most affluent segment. I didn't want to cripple my products just to slowly dole out a "new" version of the same old tech each year with less embedded crippling. I wanted to make a really robust, useful product, get it in the hands of guys like me, and use the profits to make it better and better.
So as you point out, Spolsky enjoys the same type of company I do-- I could make more money by changing our business model, but I wouldn't be as happy. I wanted to run an office where people didn't have to conform to some arbitrary dress code that had no bearing on their job performance, or leave their pets stuck at home alone all day. Life should be about enjoying yourself, and I feel very fortunate to be in an industry where I do enjoy myself, and no longer be in a position where I have an idiot CEO above me, who doesn't really HEAR what I'm saying, and with whom I have to wrestle to do my job properly. I try to listen to our engineers, designers, programmers, and *NOT* be the archetype of the idiot CEO that we've all had to deal with before. Our competitors.. most of the people in the industry know those CEOs by name. Most people in this industry probably couldn't tell you my name (although most of them know our products!). The downside (if you want to call it that) of being a niceguy techie CEO is that most people don't take you seriously as a CEO-- I don't inspire Jobs/Gates/Trump style excitement with the various fanboys of m
But you could borrow $5 million for your Web 2.0 site vap.0ur.war3.com change your name to Vicioso Gonzalez and then flee to Mexico.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Her pees come out of a different hole. :-P
It's a video without even the video. Why not just stream an MP3? Nothing to see here, move along.
My lawyers will be contacting you and /. with a DMCA Take Down request for disclosing the contents of my new start-up's business plan, as soon as they stop chasing the ambulance that just went past...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
That's easy to say if you had Microsoft stock options to cash in in the min 1990s
Great podcast! Did anyone else Digg this? http://digg.com/programming/Joel_Spolsky_on_How_to_Bootstrap_a_Business_With_No_Cash
I'm pretty proud that we've made it as far as we have, given the barrier to entry in our industry. Similar companies might have spent 10x as much cash and not gotten as far (but we had a solid idea, and a (less than voluntary
In politics, public campaign financing lets all viable candidates compete on equal footing with no ulterior motives.
BWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!
Seriously, mod this guy up as Funny.
Big hole in theory #1
"Who determines who is viable?"
Big Hole in theory #2:
In order for your notion to (pretend to) work you have to ban private money being used. All of it.
Those who have the gold (can make the laws) will decide who can be considered "viable" in your proposed system. It's bad enough now, it'd only get worse. At least now if the government or powers-that-be don't think you (or want you to be) viable you can still go prove them wrong by getting your own funding.
By banning private funding you just cut off millions of people's free speech. That's your nose lying on the floor as you laugh at your face.
There is one and only one solution to the "problem" of campaign contributions:
1: Reduce the demand.
Politics follows supply and demand laws like virtually everything else. If the legislators have less power there will be less demand for them. The more power a legislator can have the higher the price will be.
2:
Remove all limits that natural people have on contributions and ban *any* corporation or other government created/sanctioned entity from having any. Let PEOPLE decide.
3:
Realize that just because person A gives money to candidate A doesn't mean candidate A is bound in any way to follow what Person A wants. Most people/groups contribute to people that *already* are going to or are more likely to vote the way they want them to.
The vast amounts of money going to elections is a symptom, not the cause. Fix the cause (excessive power among legislators), everything else is a finger bandage on a sucking chest wound.
Your trite "Show me the money" is a scapegoat. It lets you believe you've done something when all you've done is exacerbate the problem and left the festering arrow in the wound.
WHY is the money going where it is? THAT is the important question. What do you ostensibly get for your money?
If Senators did not have the power to grant favors from government, people wanting favors would not try to pay Senators for favors. Yes, it is that simple. Nobody is going to pay me to build them a race car because I can't do that.
Some may consider this an extreme example but think about it. If there were no government taxes, who would be lobbying (i.e. spending money) for tax breaks? Nobody! If the government did not or could not "protect" subsets of people such as through "professional licensing", who would be lobbying for their group to be protected? Nobody!
The sad reality in today's politics is that the arguments have been tortured into "what bad things are we going to do this time?" not "why should we be doing those bad things?".
Until the debate/arguments get back to those basics, we are all screwed.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.