Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company—and Revolutionized an Industry

8.3. Play #92: Use Internet Models to Reduce Start-Up Costs

Although the strategy we used to finance salesforce.com was somewhat unconventional in 1999, especially when VC money was flowing like Niagara Falls, it's becoming more and more plausible today for companies to start up without venture capital. Thanks to the falling cost of hardware, overseas coders, and on-demand services, start-ups need less capital to get off the ground.

Bootstrapping through Internet models is a viable way to build and run a company and an attractive and appropriate solution for a challenging financial climate. There are now an increasing number of start-ups that have built applications on PaaS offerings, run their services on external servers, and manage their ...