October 2010
Beginner
352 pages
6h 11m
English
Content preview from Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
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Chapter 55. Don't Forget about Bootstrapping
David Brown
David Brown is the president of ZOLL Medical Corporation. He is also one of the co-founders of TechStars, and has been a mentor since 2007.
When David Cohen and I started Pinpoint Technologies in 1993, I wish we had a program like TechStars. We had no mentors other than a former boss or two, we had no funding opportunities, and we didn't even know what an angel investor was. So we had to make it up as we went along and in many cases, reinvent the wheel.
One of the silver linings (at least with the benefit of my retrospectascope) is that without funding opportunities, we had to bootstrap our business. We had no money of our own, so we were forced to be extremely frugal. Armed with a few thousand dollars earned nights and weekends doing odd consulting work (including the glorious job of pulling cable and installing a network for a pest control company), we created a prototype and persuaded a prospective customer to lend us $100,000 in exchange for a free product and a repayment of the loan with interest. That product, without any additional investment, has now spawned a company with $40 million in annual sales and two hundred employees.
The value in bootstrapping wasn't so much that we retained 100 percent of the stock when we exited (although that was nice). More important to us was the ability to run the business as we saw fit, ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.