So let's talk a bit about bootstrapping, because I think not not enough people consider it a viable option.
And bootstrapping means that you self-fund and scale the business from the revenues,
from the business and then accelerate pretty much by funding it through the ongoing concern of the business.
At some point, you can raise venture debt as you scale out,
but it means that at no point did you take institutional or external source of funding into the business,
which means that you probably own a large chunk of the company by the time that something significant happens from an exit perspective.
So these are a couple examples of companies, some of which you have heard, some of which you might not know that bootstrap completely.
I'll start with MicroStrategy, which the company that I worked with and accommodates.
Started by an MIT grad two years out of college where the fact that their credit cards maxed out conveniently,
they had a client that paid paid them significant money to go build a product.
And by the way, let them take the product and then go sell it afterwards. Very nice of the client.
So from the get go, they were actually profitable because the product costs had been zero.
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.
Did business intelligence analysing large databases for retailers and financial service companies?
Michael Saylor, CEO, didn't. Never took external funding from day one until the IPO and at the peak, a 30 billion market cap.
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.
The person who's lost the most money in a single day ever, including Bill Gates or anybody else,
is this guy called Michael Saylor, who lost 60% of 30 billion?
It was a rough morning. It's still there.
It's such a 2 billion market cap company. Michael's done fine.
It's I think 1000 something employees, some of its competitors have gone on and sold to Oracle and SAP and other companies.
But it's a great story of somebody that started from scratch and built a significant business, GoPro.
Some of you guys might have a little GoPro camera. Yes, we have one couple.
GoPro was self-funded with $250,000 from the founder.
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
a space that needs a lot of cash just to turn on the Chinese factory to make your products.
And he was smart enough to do it in a way that never he took that.
And he actually has some creative ways in which he actually first scaled out the product,
create this kind of unique culture around the from extreme sports that sport the naturally
supported athletes would wear on top of their helmets while doing crazy stunts.
Massive community that got built around GoPro and now you see people skiing left and right.
Actually, I saw a London biker there. They had it on on his bike for safety reasons, just attractive in case somebody hit him.
Great story about somebody that bootstrapped was a very, very hard industry to to to achieve scale without external funding.
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.
It's a horrible interface.
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.
So it's one of the first peer to peer marketplaces that actually had scale across the U.S. They started literally,
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.
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.
However, you played a game called Top 11. Now it's a game in which you create a football team and you manage virtually.
You buy players and you can trade Ronaldo and buy Romario.
And it's based in Serbia and it's probably one of the most unknown Start-ups success in Europe.
Branco, who a founder used to work at Microsoft in Denmark,
moved back to Serbia and started this company, and there are plenty of VCs trying to give him money.
And he said, No, it's fine. I'm doing all right. Scale up the business.
He's now the largest single employer in Serbia. His game is a top ten app of sports game across the world.
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.
And it's, I think, in the hundreds of employees now based on one game.
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.
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.
And actually, interesting that he just hired the head of gaming at Facebook to go run his studio in London.
So ironic that the Start-Up then comes out to and hires out the talent from from the big company.
Bronco is Bronco. Hopefully someday will be very, very, very wealthy.
And it will come down to the fact that he had a core focus and what he wanted to do for his users,
a core focus and type of culture and business that he wanted to build.
And he was a core focus on doing it without external shareholders dictated where he went and what he did.
And it's ironic that I'm saying this as a as a VC, but think about bootstrapping.
If you find the right business model as a viable way to scale a business and maintain control.
And there's enough stories behind this of other companies that have actually
done decently well as companies that just started and self-fund themselves.