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."

Comments

Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Confused

[shenanigans]

I agree. And as a lot of people are now finding out, if you go to the bank to pay for your house, then it's not really your house at all.

Everyone is ignorant until taught otherwise. That is why basic financial sense and responsibility should be taught in school, along with a great deal of other things that are missing. Unfortunately, western schools (it's the same here in Europe) are still geared towards creating industry workers in countries that hardly have any industrial production left.

Re:Read something from someone more successful

[jjohnson]

The reason you might want to imitate Spolsky is the nature of his success. He hasn't got a growth company, he's got a massively successful boutique ISV. They've got several products, none of which is particularly hot; but collectively, they sell more than enough, at a high enough price, for him to maintain an office in Manhattan that an architect redesigns every year. He also pays really high salaries and retains all the dot-com benefits so he can hire one or two rockstars (his term) a year, run an internship program, blog, and just generally be the IT celebrity that he wants to be. The company funds largely useless world tours for the launch of his software, which is just a business deductible junket for him. And I bet the code for all his products is *exactly* the way he likes it.

No one will ever use his name in the same sentence as Torvalds or Jobs or Gates. But he's got a pretty sweet lifestyle, and I bet most here would trade their left nut for it.

Transcript?

[djcapelis]

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? :-\