|
|
|
|
|
|
by delg
4312 days ago
|
|
|
These are some interesting insights, but I wonder: can "bootstrapped" businesses really tackle big problems? Part of the frustration with SV isn't just the kinds of "problems" they're "solving," but also that they're taking up all the oxygen (read: funding capital) that, if applied differently, could fix more meaningful problems. |
|
|
Eh, most of your "funded" cash is spent on labor. What does someone working for a funded startup cost? $200K/yr if you skimp on office space?
Figure that as a bootstrapped company, you spend 1/3rd of your time earning money to feed yourself (Without dependents, you can live pretty okay off of 1/3rd of a competent coder's salary, even in SV.) Note, it may be easier, say, if there are three of you to rent out one of you as a contractor full-time and use that money to pay everyone else, rather than all of you working for other people 1/3rd of the time. Getting part-time work that pays good is a significant marketing effort, while $90/hr corp to corp full-time work is easily obtainable through the body shops.
So to compete with a company funded with a half-million bucks, you and your partners need to be willing to put in almost four years of your time.
this is not unreasonable. I've done rather more than that. and there are many advantages; getting contracting work, in my experience, requires a hell of a lot less marketing effort than getting VC money.
Of course, the difficulty increases as your funded competitor gets more funding; if, say, your competition has tens of millions in funding, say, rather than just half a million? yeah, that's going to be rather more difficult.