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So let's talk a bit about bootstrapping, because I think not not enough people consider it a viable option.

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And bootstrapping means that you self-fund and scale the business from the revenues,

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from the business and then accelerate pretty much by funding it through the ongoing concern of the business.

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At some point, you can raise venture debt as you scale out,

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but it means that at no point did you take institutional or external source of funding into the business,

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which means that you probably own a large chunk of the company by the time that something significant happens from an exit perspective.

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So these are a couple examples of companies, some of which you have heard, some of which you might not know that bootstrap completely.

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I'll start with MicroStrategy, which the company that I worked with and accommodates.

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Started by an MIT grad two years out of college where the fact that their credit cards maxed out conveniently,

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they had a client that paid paid them significant money to go build a product.

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And by the way, let them take the product and then go sell it afterwards. Very nice of the client.

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So from the get go, they were actually profitable because the product costs had been zero.

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It had been paid for by his client. They had the IP and technology and now they went out and built a salesforce to go launch it.

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Did business intelligence analysing large databases for retailers and financial service companies?

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Michael Saylor, CEO, didn't. Never took external funding from day one until the IPO and at the peak, a 30 billion market cap.

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He owned 60% of that company. Which is why when we lost 70% market value in one day, it's still a Trivial Pursuit question.

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The person who's lost the most money in a single day ever, including Bill Gates or anybody else,

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is this guy called Michael Saylor, who lost 60% of 30 billion?

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It was a rough morning. It's still there.

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It's such a 2 billion market cap company. Michael's done fine.

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It's I think 1000 something employees, some of its competitors have gone on and sold to Oracle and SAP and other companies.

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But it's a great story of somebody that started from scratch and built a significant business, GoPro.

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Some of you guys might have a little GoPro camera. Yes, we have one couple.

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GoPro was self-funded with $250,000 from the founder.

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And he rode that through to IPO last year. He's worth a couple of billion dollars now in a very hard space where consumer electronics is

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a space that needs a lot of cash just to turn on the Chinese factory to make your products.

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And he was smart enough to do it in a way that never he took that.

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And he actually has some creative ways in which he actually first scaled out the product,

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create this kind of unique culture around the from extreme sports that sport the naturally

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supported athletes would wear on top of their helmets while doing crazy stunts.

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Massive community that got built around GoPro and now you see people skiing left and right.

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Actually, I saw a London biker there. They had it on on his bike for safety reasons, just attractive in case somebody hit him.

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Great story about somebody that bootstrapped was a very, very hard industry to to to achieve scale without external funding.

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Craigslist which was bought by eBay, which here I mean, Gumtree is effectively the eBay clone of Craigslist, but they bought Craigslist in the US.

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It's a horrible interface.

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It looks like it's 1999 Internet, but it's still the primary place in which people just sell and buy products between peer to peer.

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So it's one of the first peer to peer marketplaces that actually had scale across the U.S. They started literally,

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I think it was a couple that they started in San Francisco and went crazy and then eBay bought it for a significant amount of money.

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Zero external investment. Very nice, fun day for those people and nordea's, which I'm pretty sure none of you have ever heard about.

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However, you played a game called Top 11. Now it's a game in which you create a football team and you manage virtually.

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You buy players and you can trade Ronaldo and buy Romario.

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And it's based in Serbia and it's probably one of the most unknown Start-ups success in Europe.

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Branco, who a founder used to work at Microsoft in Denmark,

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moved back to Serbia and started this company, and there are plenty of VCs trying to give him money.

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And he said, No, it's fine. I'm doing all right. Scale up the business.

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He's now the largest single employer in Serbia. His game is a top ten app of sports game across the world.

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He makes it's a private company, but he makes a lot of money and it's completely owned by him and his co-founder.

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And it's, I think, in the hundreds of employees now based on one game.

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And I think at some point he had he had such a full court press from ABC saying, take my money, it'll help you scale out.

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It's what you need. You'll never succeed without it. And he stuck to his guns and said, No, I think I can build a business without without your money.

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And actually, interesting that he just hired the head of gaming at Facebook to go run his studio in London.

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So ironic that the Start-Up then comes out to and hires out the talent from from the big company.

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Bronco is Bronco. Hopefully someday will be very, very, very wealthy.

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And it will come down to the fact that he had a core focus and what he wanted to do for his users,

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a core focus and type of culture and business that he wanted to build.

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And he was a core focus on doing it without external shareholders dictated where he went and what he did.

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And it's ironic that I'm saying this as a as a VC, but think about bootstrapping.

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If you find the right business model as a viable way to scale a business and maintain control.

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And there's enough stories behind this of other companies that have actually

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done decently well as companies that just started and self-fund themselves.