[jacquesm]

> It is ten times the median savings an american family has

The median American family is not trying to start a business.

Also: if you can't manage your own funds and save please don't start a company, it will most likely not work and create misery for yourself and others.

> Once again I am not diminishing his accomplishments. I started my own company with the same amount of money but never claimed to have "bootstrapped"it.

Well, that's a problem of definition more than anything else. If you want to use the term bootstrapping as starting with nothing that's fine by me but I do note that even the word assumes the presence of boots and straps.

The key question is if the money was yours or not. If it wasn't then you weren't bootstrapping.

> We on HN live in a bubble that amazes me.

No, you choose to use terms in ways that are different from the rest of us. That's not a bubble, that's a terms issue. This can make communication hard.

> I know first hand how much it costs to start a company and how hard it is to raise a 1M€ (I heard it is as hard as raising 10M$ in the valley, but never tried to raise in the US so take that with a grain of salt!).

That depends. There is a lot of 'stupid money' floating around.

Besides, raising money is explicitly not part of bootstrapping.

> I also know it is much, much harder to get your first 1M€ of revenue.

Yes, that's true.

> Like one of my business angel once told me "il nest de bon argent que celui du client": the only good kind of money is the customer's.

Yes, that's good advice, but it comes from an investor.

[karambahh]

Please bear with me, I am not trying to be a smart-ass like many seem to think, these are honest questions and I think that they also come from using a foreign language and coming from a different culture. I think you're right in calling that a problem of definition.

I agree with everything you said about money and investors management. I'd just add that "stupid money" probably isn't the good kind of money :-)

At least I know that I would have made a mistake accepting a large amount of that kind of money. Choosing a smaller amount coming from people I trusted more probably helped me a lot in my beginnings.

Now to my honest follow-up question: let's say a billionaire puts his 1B$ into a new venture, would you call that "boostrapping" as well?

[jacquesm]

> let's say a billionaire puts his 1B$ into a new venture, would you call that "boostrapping" as well?

Depending on how he got the billion and whether or not there is outside investment involved, possibly yes, but the term is usually used for small amounts of money (say < $100k or so). But that's a technicality.

But truth be told very few people are in that luxurious position and those that are will almost never risk all (or even a substantial part) of their private capital on an entirely new venture. So that's highly hypothetical and would take the better part of several decades before you'd be in a position to execute that phase of your bootstrap. Elon Musk comes close but even he routinely uses outside capital and so is not really bootstrapping (though I'm not aware of anybody else that is so willing to put most or all of his own money into new ventures).

Bootstrapping comes from the imagery of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

You come into the world naked, without substantial inherited money, you become employed somewhere, you save some money, maybe do some side jobs, one day you jump ship and go full time into your own business and your savings provide your runway. That's the textbook definition of a bootstrapped business.

It tends to produce small to mid-sized companies ($100K to $10M) in revenues and anywhere from one to 50 or so employees. It's the most sure-fire path to any kind of independence for skilled workers and has a totally different risk profile from a business that takes on outside investment. (Larger risks of failure, potentially larger returns)

[karambahh]

Agree that is entirely hypothetical and Elon Musk is an interesting example. I know he is sometimes risking a very large proportion of his private capital on his new ventures, but I would never have called that "bootstrapping".

(Once again, let me re-iterate that I have understood that "my" definition of boostrapping is not correct)

To me, a billionaire going all out on a new project is in a better financial, business & social position. "hey look, Elon Musk has launched a new thing, took his own billion to build it, must be awesome like his past ventures" compared to "hey, here is that John Doe we never heard of with his project he built in his home. To me, with financial capital comes social capital. When you invest all your money in a project, if it's 1B$ your social status "highly affluent guy with connections up to the white house and every Fortune 500 companies" does not change and is immensely useful. If it's your 5k€ your social capital is low and will get from "successful salaried software developer" to "the noodles-eating guy who didn't have a shower in 4 days". Guess which one is most likely to win deals?

[jacquesm]

If you don't get deals because you don't shower then that's a solved problem since Roman times and you should only blame yourself ;)

Other than that, yes, billionaires have some advantages that us ordinary mortals do not have. But to stick with Elon Musk, he wasn't born a billionaire (but he did go to a private school, but that's not unheard of in SA).

Once you're past $1M net worth or so the game gets easier, sometimes a lot easier. But $1M vs $1B doesn't make much of a difference if the business tanks and you've invested all of your capital in your own business.

And that's the main reason you don't see billionaires usually spending all their money on their own projects: they spread the risk around to avoid possibly losing it all.

[karambahh]

> If you don't get deals because you don't shower then that's a solved problem since Roman times and you should only blame yourself ;)

Absolutely!

> Once you're past $1M net worth or so the game gets easier, sometimes a lot easier.

I sometimes feel that difficulty of doing business is halved with very order of magnitude, being friends with business owners whose net worth are between 10k€ and 50M€. My 50M€ friend has access to things my 10k€ wouldn't even believe exists.

50M€ is "let me talk to the ministry chief of staff about this. I'll also talk to the CEO of a fortune 500 company about this mild inconvenience"

10k€ is queuing at the city building in the hope that maybe someone will do something about the closed road leading to your shop.

> But $1M vs $1B doesn't make much of a difference if the business tanks and you've invested all of your capital in your own business.

> And that's the main reason you don't see billionaires usually spending all their money on their own projects: they spread the risk around to avoid possibly losing it all.