[smithbits]

It's true, but you'll be competing with bubble-based companies for talent. Why do I want to work for a reasonable, growing small business with it's customers and profits when I can get twice as much money in San Francisco working at some venture funded startup? And if any of those startups are in your market space they will be offering your customers products and services at below market rate in an attempt to grow revenue without worrying about profits. Now they can't do that forever, but can they do it for long enough to wipe out bootstrapping companies?

[sethg]

Kenan Systems, where I worked a decade ago, might provide a cautionary tale. Kenan Sahin built the company up into the 800-pound gorilla of telecom billing software without giving up any of his equity in it. Then he looked at how he wanted the company to expand, looked at the competitive environment, and decided that he needed more capital to avoid being leapfrogged. So he sold the entire company to Lucent, whose CEO was on an acquisition spree.

Unfortunately, Lucent was at its peak when it bought Kenan Systems and, briefly, everything started unraveling within a year of the acquisition. Lucent eventually sold the Kenan division to CSG, which later sold it to Comverse. A friend of mine, who had joined when it was still Kenan Systems, was laid off a few months back; her co-workers told her she was lucky to be laid off while the company could still afford to give her a decent severance package.

[wtracy]

In that case, you can interpret the message as, "You have two years to spend running under the radar and quietly accumulating capital."

If you accept the article's predictions, then at that point you can emerge and use that capital to snap up all the engineers jumping ship from the startups sinking with the bubble.